  "This paper introduces a new task and a new dataset", "we improve the state
of the art in X by Y" -- it is rare to find a current natural language
processing paper (or AI paper more generally) that does not contain such
statements. What is mostly left implicit, however, is the assumption that this
necessarily constitutes progress, and what it constitutes progress towards.
Here, we make more precise the normally impressionistically used notions of
language task and language game and ask how a research programme built on these
might make progress towards the goal of modelling general language competence.
