One last note about the importance of game design fundamentals. There is a widespread impulse among those who study games to want to leapfrog over the basics, immediately break all of the rules, violate the magic circle, turn players into designers, and radically reinvent the phenomenon of games. This is not an inherently bad instinct for game designers or game scholars to possess. As the games studied in this schema demonstrate, blurring the magic circle to question the fundamental properties of games can lead to new kinds of play experiences. However, radical innovation and the design of meaningful play can only be accomplished by paying attention to the fundamental design principles that apply to all games. Even when you dissect or design breakthrough games that bend, break, and transform traditional gaming structures, the fundamentals of game design remain. For every A.I., Seasons of Darkness, or Suspicion, there are hundreds or thousands of unsuccessful game designs: online/real-world scavenger hunts that never found an audience, LARPs that fizzled out before they got off the ground, and game experiments that were just no fun at all to play.
Games as Cultural Environments takes us to the edge of the void: it lets us consider a game that undermines its own existence by creating the means for its erasure. It is ironic perhaps that the abstraction and complexity of this phenomenon was best deciphered by a return to the game design fundamentals, to the core language of meaningful play, to the concepts that constitute the Rules of Play.