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It's vital that we determine how games make meaning.—Warren Spector, RE:PLAY
Introducing the Play of Meaning
Game play takes place within a representational universe, filled with depictions of objects, interactions, and ideas out of which a player makes meaning. In Rock-Paper-Scissors a fist means "rock," an outstretched hand means "paper," and two fingers spread in a V-shape means "scissors." In the game of Mafia, an assassin's hand gesture that points to another player represents "kill!" and the act of keeping one's eyes closed "at night" marks a player as "villager." In a first-person shooter, the gun barrel emerging out of the bottom of the screen represents not only "a big-ass gun," but also denotes "you," the player. To play a game is to rely on and interact with representations the game generates. This intersection between representation, meaning, and play raises a series of important game design questions. How does a player experience the representation of a game? What is the relationship between a game representation and the "real world?" What modes of representation can games provide? These questions are the focus of this schema: Games as the Play of Meaning.
We first touched on the way that games act as representational systems in Design, where we introduced a number of basic semiotic concepts. In this chapter, we elaborate on these ideas in order to gain a more detailed understanding of the way that games represent. The concepts we present here may seem slightly abstract, and this schema is certainly one of the more theoretical in this book. But the ideas initiated here find fruition in the more pragmatic schemas to follow, Games as Narrative Play and Games as the Play of Simulation.
