Considering games as culture entails moving beyond the borders of the magic circle to consider how games interact with contexts that lie outside the actual rules and play of the game itself.
Unlike formal or experiential schemas, culture-based contextual schemas are not directly tied to the internal, intrinsic qualities of games. There are any number of ways that games can be regarded as culture.
All games reflect culture, reproducing aspects of their cultural contexts. Some games also transform culture, acting on their cultural contexts to affect genuine change.
A game transforming its cultural context is a cultural instance of transformative play. In this case, the cultural "free play" of the game is altering the more rigid cultural contexts in which the game is taking place.
There are many definitions of culture. Most of them directly or indirectly involve what people think, what they do, and the material products they produce. For our purposes, culture is what exists outside the magic circle, the context within which game play occurs.
In addition to understanding that games can represent and that games are representations, we can frame games as cultural representations, reflecting the meanings of the contexts where they are produced and played.
Understanding the meanings that make up the context in which your game is played is critical to designing meaningful play.
When we consider a game as a cultural representation, we are considering the game as a cultural text. This means making an interpretative reading of a game, similar to analyses performed in cultural anthropology or cultural studies.
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