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Two Kinds of Meaningful Play
We define meaningful play in two separate but related ways. The first sense of meaningful play refers to the way game actions result in game outcomes to create meaning. Framing the concept in this way, we offer the following definition: Meaningful play in a game emerges from the relationship between player action and system outcome; it is the process by which a player takes action within the designed system of a game and the system responds to the action. The meaning of an action in a game resides in the relationship between action and outcome.
Think about an informal game of "Gross-Out" played during an elementary school recess. One by one, players tell a gross-out story, each tale more disgusting than the last. When a story is finished the group spontaneously and collectively responds, confirming or denying the player's position as master of the playground, until an even grosser story is told. If we look at Gross-Out from the perspective of meaningful play we see that a player takes an action by telling a story. The meaning of the action, as a move in a game, is more than the narrative content of the story. It is also more than the theatrics used to tell the story. The outcome of the storytelling action depends on the other players and their own voting actions. Meaningful play emerges from the collective action of players telling and rating stories. The meaning of the story, in the sense of meaningful play, is not just that Hampton told a whopper about his big sister eating a live beetle-it is that Hampton's story has beaten the others and he is now the undisputed Gross-Out king. This way of understanding meaningful play refers to the way all games generate meaning through play. Every game lets players take actions, and assigns outcomes to those actions. We therefore call this definition of meaningful play descriptive, because it describes what happens in every game. This is our first understanding of meaningful play. At the same time, some games create more meaningful play than other games: the design of some games generates truly meaningful experiences for players, whereas other, less successful game designs result in experiences that somehow fall short. Even if meaningful play is a goal that we strive to achieve in our games, sometimes we don't quite get it right. So, in addition to our descriptive understanding of meaningful play, which describes what happens in all games, we need something that will help us be more selective in determining when meaningful play occurs. This is the second sense of meaningful play. Instead of being a description of the way games operate, it refers to the goal of successful game design. This sense of meaningful play is evaluative: it helps us critically evaluate the relationships between actions and outcomes, and decide whether they are meaningful enough within the designed system of the game: Meaningful play occurs when the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game. Creating meaningful play is the goal of successful game design.
The word "meaningful" in this sense is less about the semiotic construction of meaning (how meaning is made) and more about the emotional and psychological experience of inhabiting a well-designed system of play. In order to understand why some play in games is more meaningful than others, we need to understand the key terms in the definition: discernable and integrated.
Discernable
Discernable means that the result of the game action is communicated to the player in a perceivable way. In the following excerpt from Game Design: Theory and Practice, Richard Rouse III points out the importance of displaying discernable information to the player within the context of the game world. His example looks explicitly at computer games where there is an obvious need to condense massive amounts of data into a representative form that can be clearly communicated to the player. However, the idea of discernable outcomes applies to all games, digital or otherwise. Rouse writes,
Consider a strategy game in which the player has a number of units scattered all over a large map. The map is so large that only a small portion of it can fit on the screen at once. If a group of the player's units happen to be off-screen and are attacked but the player is not made aware of it by the game, the player will become irritated. Consider an RPG where each member of the player's party needs to be fed regularly, but the game does not provide any clear way of communicating how hungry his characters are. Then, if one of the party members suddenly keels over from starvation, the player will become frustrated, and rightly so. Why should the player have to guess at such game-critical information?[2]
If you shoot an asteroid while playing a computer game and the asteroid does not change in any way, you are not going to know if you actually hit it or not. If you do not receive feedback that indicates you are on the right track, the action you took will have very little meaning. On the other hand, if you shoot an asteroid and you hear the sound of impact, or the asteroid shudders violently, or it explodes (or all three!) then the game has effectively communicated the outcome of your action. Similarly, if you move a board game piece on the board but you have absolutely no idea whether your move was good or bad or if it brought you closer to or farther away from winning-in short, if you don't know the meaning of your action-then the result of your action was not discernable. Each of these examples makes clear that when the relationship between an action and the result of that action is not discernable, meaningful play is difficult or impossible to achieve. Discernability in a game lets the players know what happened when they took an action. Without discernability, the player might as well be randomly pressing buttons or throwing down cards. With discernability, a game possesses the building blocks of meaningful play.
Integrated
Another component of meaningful play requires that the relationship between action and outcome is integrated into the larger context of the game. This means that an action a player takes not only has immediate significance in the game, but also affects the play experience at a later point in the game. Chess is a deep and meaningful game because the delicate opening moves directly result in the complex trajectories of the middle game-and the middle game grows into the spare and powerful encounters of the end game. Any action taken at one moment will affect possible actions at later moments. Imagine a multi-event athletic game, such as the Decathlon. At the start of the game, the players run a footrace. What if the rules of the game dictated that winning the footrace had nothing to do with the larger game? Imagine what would happen: the players would walk the race as slowly as possible, trying to conserve energy for the other, more meaningful events. Why should they do anything else? Although one of them will win the footrace, it will have no bearing on the larger game. On the other hand, if the players receive points depending on how well they rank and these points become part of a cumulative score, then the actions and the outcomes of the footrace are well integrated into the game as a whole. Whereas discernability of game events tells players what happened (I hit the monster),integration lets players know how it will affect the rest of the game (If I keep on hitting the monster I will kill it. If I kill enough monsters, I'll gain a level.). Every action a player takes is woven into the larger fabric of the overall game experience: this is how the play of a game becomes truly meaningful.
Meaningful play can be realized in a number of ways, depending on the design of a particular game. There is no single formula that works in every case. In the example of the asteroid shooting game, immediate and visceral feedback was needed to make the action discernable. But it might also be the case that in a story-based game, the results of an action taken near the beginning of the game are only understood fully at the very end, when the implications are played out in a very unexpected and dramatic way. Both instances require different approaches to designing meaningful play.
Meaningful play engages several aspects of a game simultaneously, giving rise to layers of meaning that accumulate and shape player experience. Meaningful play can occur on the formal, mathematically strategic level of a single move in Chess. It can occur on a social level, as two players use the game as a forum for meaningful communication. And it can occur on larger stages of culture as well, where championship Chess matches can be used as occasions for Cold War political propaganda, or in contemporary philosophical debates about the relative powers of the human mind and artificial intelligence. The next three chapters elaborate on the many ways that game designers construct spaces of meaningful play for players. Among the many topics we might select, we cover three core concepts that form several of the fundamental building blocks of game design: design, systems, and interactivity.
[2]Richard Rouse III, Game Design: Theory and Practice (Plano, TX: Wordware Publishing, 2001), p. 141.
