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Biologists as well as philosophers have suggested that the universe, and the living forms it contains, are based on chance, but not on accident. To put it another way, forces of chance and of antichance coexist in a complementary relationship. The random element is called entropy, the agent of chaos, which tends to mix up the unmixed, to destroy meaning. The nonrandom element is information, which exploits the uncertainty inherent in the entropy principle to generate new structures, to inform the world in novel ways.—Jeremy Campbell, Grammatical Man
Introducing "Information"
Many of the terms and concepts tackled in this book are challenging to discuss, not just because they represent complex ideas, but also because they are used in many different contexts in many different ways. The term "information" is a particularly feisty one to pin down. We live in the information age. We receive safety information in our airplane seat pockets. We get degrees in information science. We read statistical information about sports and the weather in the newspaper. We send and receive information over telephone lines and Internet cables. We suffer from information overload. Although it is not our goal to arrive at an ultimate definition for the term "information," within the following two schemas we look closely at two different ways of understanding information, as it relates formally to games. Games as Information Theory Systems is the first of two "information" schemas. In it, we frame games within the context of information theory, a close cousin of systems theory. Information theory studies the movement of information in a system—in our case, game systems. How does information flow within a game? How are choices made meaningful through the input and output of information? How do redundancy and uncertainty affect meaningful play from a formal perspective? What are the qualities of a game as a communication system? Each of these inquiries raises yet more questions about the nature of information in games, questions that we will explore over the course of this schema and the next one.
