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Meaning and Play
meaningful play, the core concept of our approach. This concept is so critical to the rest of this chapter that we are going to repeat ourselves: the goal of successful game design is the creation of meaningful play.
Meaningful play is that concept which can address all of the "unanswerable" questions raised by Huizinga. It is also a concept that raises questions of its own, challenging assumptions we might have about the role of design in shaping play. One of the difficulties in identifying meaningful play in games is the near-infinite variety of forms that play can take. Here are some examples:
the intellectual dueling of two players in a well-met game of Chess
the improvisational, team-based balletics of Basketball
the dynamic shifting of individual and communal identi ties in the online role-playing game EverQuest
the lifestyle-invading game Assassin, played on a college campus
What do all of these examples have in common? Each situates play within the context of a game. Play doesn't just come from the game itself, but from the way that players interact with the game in order to play it. In other words, the board, the pieces, and even the rules of Chess can't alone constitute meaningful play. Meaningful play emerges from the interaction between players and the system of the game, as well as from the context in which the game is played. Understanding this interaction helps us to see just what is going on when a game is played. One way of framing what players do when they play a game is to say that they are making choices. They are deciding how to move their pieces, how to move their bodies, what cards to play, what options to select, what strategies to take, how to interact with other players. They even have to make the choice whether or not to play! When a player makes a choice within a game, the action that results from the choice has an outcome. In Chess, if a player moves a piece on the board, this action affects the relationships of all of the other pieces: one piece might be captured, or a king might suddenly find itself in check. In Assassin, if a player stealthily stalks her target and manages to shoot him with a dart gun, the overall game changes as a result of this action: a hit is scored, the victim is out for the rest of the game, and he must give his target name to the player that just shot him. In EverQuest, if you engage with and kill a monster, the stats and equipment of your character can change; the larger game-world is affected as well, even if it simply means that for the moment there is one less monster. Playing a game means making choices and taking actions. All of this activity occurs within a game-system designed to support meaningful kinds of choice-making. Every action taken results in a change affecting the overall system of the game. Another way of stating this point is that an action a player takes in a game results in the creation of new meanings within the system. For example, after you move a piece in Chess, the newly established relationships between Chess pieces gives rise to a new set of meanings-meanings created by the play-er's action.
