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Each turn, Enchanted
Forest players must make tough decisions about what action to take. This is a good sign that meaningful play is taking place. Each choice a player makes in Enchanted Forest is bound up in the fluid flow of information, as direct knowledge and educated hunches are balanced with strategic navigation, challenging memorization, and risky guesswork. Economies of Information The other informational component of Enchanted Forest is the deck of cards that is uncovered as the game progresses. Because players know that each card in the deck corresponds to one of the treasures, the predictability of the identity of the next card being revealed changes as the game proceeds. At the beginning, there is a low chance that a particular card might turn up. But near the end of the game, when there are only two or three cards left in the deck, there is much less uncertainty about the possible outcome. That means that using a special action to reshuffle the information in the deck, as a way of making a particular card appear, is a more effective strategy later in the game. This strategic phenomenon occurs because the information contained on each card does not exist in isolation from the others. Instead, the information is part of a larger system: an economy of information that grants each card its relative value. Meaning in a game, or in any system, for that matter, emerges out of relational identity. To use a non-game example, the meaning of the word "bird" depends on the larger sentence and performative context of use. Its relationship to other words and meanings will determine whether "bird" references a feathered animal, the jazz musician Charlie Parker, a rudely flipped-up middle finger, or a slang term for "woman." In a game, the same holds true: the value of the information known to a player gains meaning within the larger system of the game. Furthermore, the systemic nature of information in a game and the way that it helps generate meaningful play has two facets: the actual make-up of the information structures in a system, and the apprehension of that information by players. We call a game's information structures objective information and the player's understanding of these structures perceived information. The interaction of these two aspects of game information determines the way that information operates within the system of a game.
In a trick-taking game such as Euchre, for example, if all of the trumps have already been played during a round, the once-private but now-public information regarding the location of the trumps becomes extremely important for making game decisions. The fact that any given card can be a trump or non-trump is a function of the objective information of the game. But the systemic fact that the trumps have all been played is only meaningful because of the player's ability to turn the objective information into perceived information and make decisions accordingly. Good Euchre players track not only the trump cards, but every card that is played in the game. This information determines the potential value of the cards you are holding in your own hand, as well as the cards you think other players will play next, directly informing your decision-making process. Euchre contains a tightly woven system of information, in which meaningful play emerges from the elegantly architected value of the card deck, as well as from players' shifting certainties, speculations, and ignorance about the cards left to be played. The game of Scrabble also contains objective informational structures that are gradually revealed to players as perceived information over the course of play. For example, knowledge about the ratio of the letters in the overall mix is part of how you play the game. If you desperately need to pick a Z tile to make a 7-letter word and get a big bonus, you need to decide whether to play a single letter, make a small score this turn, and hold out for that Z, or else abandon the large-word strategy altogether. Your judgment will involve not only the probability of drawing a Z (dependent on the objective informational economy of the pool of letters), but also on perceived informa-tion: whether or not you know that the single Z has already been played on the board. The fact that the ratios of letters are printed on the Scrabble game board, next to the grid where letters are placed, points to the way that the structure of Scrabble's informational system is central to the play of the game.When you create information in your game, its value for the players emerges from both its objective and perceived status: its structural position within a larger informational economy and the player's knowledge about that economy. Shaping these aspects of your game's design is a key component in creating meaningful play.
