I love it.

Games are belief engines. Games are canvases for stories in motion. Games are a challenge and a learning activity. Games are ideas. Games are explorations both intellectual and meaningful. Games are positive. Games make life better. Games help you feel success when all around you is grey and confusing. Games are change. Games are illuminating. Games are insightful. Games are irreverent. Games are very old. Games are very new. Games are tests. Games are addictive. Games are pressure. Games are motivational, inspirational and educational. Games are fun. Games are exercise. Games are good for body and soul. Games are about you. Games are projections. Games are worlds which we superimpose on this world in order to escape or make sense of it. Games are dynamic, chaotic and delightful. Games are there to be mastered, used up and then forgotten. Games are participatory, cultural and shared. Games are demanding. Games are emotive. Games are sometimes indescribable and yet all too real. Games are made, but more than the sum of their made parts. Games are a constant source of the strange. Games are risky. Games are playful. Games are one of the key experiences that life is for. Games are brilliant. Games are an art form. Games are numinous. Games are thaumatic. Games belong to us.

Have a great weekend, and play some games.

Perhaps a way of think of games in terms of a larger set of interactive art is as artificial worlds. Like a biome in the Eden Project, each has artificial rules superimposed upon reality in an attempt to craft a place. Each is different, bounded by the systems that give them form, but full of possibility and indviduated experience.

You could call them ludomes, ludic (as in interactive play) biomes. Perhaps that makes us all ludomancers, which makes the URL of Daniel Benmergui's blog oddly apt, no?

What does meaning really mean? Generally it translates as resonant, illuminating, symbolic or significant. In some cases all of the above. A meaningful song might evoke the history of a revolution for the listener, so that even though she does not know the facts she feels a connection to it. The same is true of novels, movies and art. 

Games incorporate agency and so many of the events that happen within them are of a player's making. An action causes change in the game world, and can therefore be significant, but not necessarily resonant, symbolic or illuminating. The question for games is really whether they can incorporate other kinds of meaning too. 

I think they can. 

Meaning is sometimes shared, but subjective and hard to explicitly define. A nation's flag is often considered meaningful, but the meaning that it holds for one group may be very different to another. Minecraft art can be personally very meaningful for the community that created it, or it can end up being a case of 'death, terrible as prunes'.

While we often think of meaning and tearful emotions as one and the same, meaning is actually much broader than that. The weight of symbolism attached to the election of Barack Obama made many people cry, but not all meaningful experiences do this. The Mona Lisa never made me cry, nor Joyce's Ulysses or Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Damien Hirst's Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is not the sort of art work that brings forth gut-wrenching sobs, however it does make you think. 

Making people think is, I suspect, the key to games as art. Games are usually better at illumination than emotion. It is hard to push emotion at players because of the tendency of their play brains to reduce games to objects and levers, but games can be instructive and can play on symbols (particularly signifiers) for the purposes of commentary.

One example of a meaningful game for me was Credo, a little-known title from Chaosium. The game was about the formulation of the official doctrine of Catholicism in the council of Nicea. It involved a lot of horse-trading between players over the roots of catechism, resulting in some entertaining versions of what would then become the New Testament. For me it was meaningful as someone who grew up in Catholic Ireland with all of the foibles that that entailed. It satirically illuminated theology in a way that I had never considered, and the game would make me reflect on the things to which society gets attached.

Many other games have done likewise, using the inner workings of things and acting as a kind of commentary. The PC strategy game Fate of the World sets up a situation of resources and pollution in crisis, based on copious scientific data. But you draw your own conclusions. I even find something quite meaningful about the progress from bears to churches to temples and finally a treasure chest of money in Triple Town. It sort of says something, when I think about it.

As a part of exploring the world and believing in its numina, games communicate ideas and capture moods, even accidentally. When Insomniac used Manchester Cathedral as the setting for one of its Resistance: Fall of Man levels, it was probably not their intent to make a commentary. However it upset some people anyway, tapping into ideas they held as meaningful. Traveling through the sands of Journey and communicating with other players can be meaningful, as can the sense of story throughout. It is illuminating and symbolic, but never explained. Realising the extent of the Sims system and the dark purposes that it can be used for is certainly satire, but often quite meaningful too. 

So there's endless scope for making meaningful experiences happen with games, in a sense allowing it to be discovered or self-created. As game makers we're not necessarily authors, but sometimes the enablers of authorship. That places us in a unique position.

(Today's image is of the game Journey from thatgamecompany, a game which I found very meaningful)

Chris Bateman over at iHobo is mid-way through a curious series of posts talking about the value judgements of those who define games. I think (correct me if I'm wrong) this spun out of a debate started on this blog over 'what is a game' that erupted in the wake of Dear Esther. Specifically whether defining something as a game only reflects a critical bias on the part of the definer.

It's complicated, especially when viewed in such lights as the four lenses of game making. Clearly there are many ways that people who hold a belief about what games are, or should be, could conjure a definition of games to fit their own bias as a circular argument. However does that mean that all such attempts are doomed?

My own definition of game is quite specific and clause heavy:

A game is a simplified, fair, fascinating, empowering and enclosed world whose purpose is to provide structured play through moderated yet unscripted actions and learnable dynamics, with the goal of winning through victory or achievement.

You might consider this a value judgement, especially given the following paragraphs in the Glossary about creative constants, misappropriation of terms and so on. I'd counter that it is instead a judgement of other judgements, an acknowledgement of limitations of form. 

Inclusiveness is good for pub-level conversation but in a formal setting it becomes too vague. There are the debates over word meanings, the citing of behaviours of children, the meta-game projects that gain much praise at conferences. And yet what actually works as a game, is played as a game and provides both fun and traction as a game is smaller.

So while it's intellectually interesting to suppose how interaction might work, it just rarely seems to actually work. Games are not that unknowable when we stop trying to jam everything under one term, much as stories are not unknowable when we stop trying to pretend that everything is a story. I don't see why saying that must imply values, but for some people it does. 

Value judgement implies 'worthiness', that to define is to also rate, and I think that's pretty unfair. It is not my intent to engage in a discussion of worth, but rather of what works verus what doesn't. In many cases that may sound like it strays into opinions of quality (such as to do with storytelling) but it doesn't. I'm invariably arguing about form and mode, not whether I liked or disliked a game. Dear Esther is a case in point: I love it, and it is also not a game. Similarly, I don't think Dan Cook means to pooh-pooh the work of Jason Rohrer when he talks about games and skills, nor do I think Raph Koster is slyly finding fault with Stephane Bura's Storybricks project when he says 'narrative is not a game mechanic'.

The other question is whether avoiding defining games and labelling those who do as making value judgements is itself a value judgement. In his essays Chris argues that various definitions characterise 'systemic aesthetic' or 'conflict aesthetic' as predispositions to lens games all under one view. By this rationale I would argue that there is also an 'infinite aesthetic' or 'academic aesthetic', a predisposition to regard the functional possibilities of games as infinite for philosophical reasons, and to resist challenges to that position for professional reasons. It is much easier to tell a marketing story about games based on future infinities rather than sticky realities. 

Trying to unpick forms is about utility and applicability, not a critical doing-down. Games are part of a larger set of play, just as poems are part of a larger set of writing. I think the three main kinds of play are gameplay, toyplay and performance. One is about structure, one is about tool use and the third is about pretending. In child form each may look quite loose or simple, such as Snakes and Ladders or Let's Pretend. In adult form they become specific and layered, such as strategy games and screen acting. I also think they cross over: Most tabletop roleplaying games, for example, mix in elements of performance.

If that makes you feel judged, then ask yourself why? What is it about games that makes you fear them being definable? Is it the fear of the end of experimentation? Will sticking a pin in games immediately destroy many other forms of experimental play? Will winning the war of words permanently relegate games as lower forms of culture? Will finding a common language neuter many a conference topic? 

I personally believe that by owning games as they are we'll figure out how to expand the art form. I also believe that constantly wanting to avoid the question of 'what is a game', and calling everyone who engages with it biased, is an exercise in critical paralysis. Maybe that too is a value judgement. If so, it's one I'm perfectly happy to accept.