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Games Within Games
We began this chapter with a tightly focused, formal definition of narrative. One by one we took note of the narrative elements of games, pulling farther and farther back until we have all but exited the game itself. There is no doubt that game replays and recams are part of the total game experience, but they dance at the border of the magic circle, somehow just outside the core game play while still very much participating in the meanings of the game. There is certainly nothing wrong with looking at such border phenomena, or in examining aspects of games that are both inside and outside the game itself. Our RULES schemas focused on the inner workings of game systems, but as we move through the schemas on PLAY, we will increasingly find ourselves peering outside the magic circle, whether it is to look at the relationships between represented game-reality and the "real world" or to examine the social metagames that occur outside the play of individual games. Of course, by the time we reach our CULTURE schemas, we will have pushed through the border of the magic circle entirely, focusing more on context rather than on the structures and play internal to a game. The next schema, Games as the Play of Simulation, will straddle the border of the magic circle. Building on the previous two chapters, we look at the way games represent through simulated depiction, a mode of representation that grows from the status of games as dynamic systems. Analyzing the mechanisms of simulation in one sense means dissecting the internal representational machinery of games. At the same time, it also entails a much wider focus that looks at the relationship between games and the real-world phenomena they reference, a relationship fraught with the double-meanings of metacommunication and play.
If you are reading this book in order to tell better stories with your games, don't stop at the end of this chapter. The schemas that precede and follow this one, Games as the Play of Meaning and Games as the Play of Simulation, make up a special triad: three chapters that focus on games as systems of representation. Together they provide a series of structures for generating strong story experiences. And of course, they are also three ways of understanding the design of meaningful play.
