[CydeWeys]

I'm not saying that every alien species would have the same concept of a game, but you really think it's "ridiculous" that any other alien species might have a similar concept of a game? Adversarial games are not even that far removed from the normal competition that is part of natural selection that yields intelligence in the first place.

You're making a lot of assumptions about things that you claim are impossible or would never happen, without explaining how you're coming to those assumptions. And the "communicate with a piece of rock" bit is just flat-out bad argumentation, as rocks aren't intelligent and thus cannot communicate by definition.

[zeebeecee]

Well so far we do not know, so again this is just speculation. Your guess might be as good as mine. There does not seem to be any serious scientific results in this direction, other than nonsense like the Drake equation.

I think the variety among the possibilities for other intelligent species (if any) would far outweigh the number of them. Hence it might be probable that there would exist two similar ones, but it would be very improbable that any of them would be similar to humans.

The point about "communicating" with a piece of rock was exactly that we cannot communicate them. Even if we would run into an alien species (which seems unlikely), it seems very improbable that any meaningful communication could happen.