Meaningful Games

I am often asked what I mean when I use the term meaningful with regards to games. Most people consider games a distraction or a chance to turn their brains off at the end of the day.

The word game has a negative connotation. Adults have hobbies and pastimes and play sports. Kids are supposed to play games.

Here are three specific examples of how adults can derive meaning from games.

Meaningful Rules

Games are inherently rules-based systems.  Meaning can be derived from the rules within a system.

Rod Humble is currently the Vice President of The Sims Studio at Electronic Arts.  In 2007, he developed a game called The Marriage.  There is also an excellent interview with Humble over at Arthouse Games.

Instead of trying to distill the meaning of The Marriage myself, I’ll quote from the creator’s statement from the game:

I wanted something that was not easily represent able by other media. I wanted to use game rules to explain something invisible but real.

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The game was created to be played, to be enjoyed by each person exploring the rules and how it related to their own life.

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The game is my expression of how a marriage feels. The blue and pink squares represent the masculine and feminine of a marriage. They have differing rules which must be balanced to keep the marriage going.

The circles represent outside elements entering the marriage. This can be anything. Work, family, ideas, each marriage is unique and the players response should be individual.

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The game mechanics are designed such that the game is fragile. Its easy to break. This is deliberate as marriages are fragile and they feel fragile, I wanted to get this across.

I encourage you to play the game and read the entire creator’s statement.

Meaningful Theme

A game can also have a broad idea that it tries to convey.  Since games are interactive systems, the audience is an active participant of the unfolding of this broad idea.

Passage is a memento mori game by Jason Rohrer.  The game is supposed to remind you of your own mortality.

Once again, I’ll quote from the creator’s statement:

 I turn 30 tomorrow. A close friend from our neighborhood died last month. Yep, I’ve been thinking about life and death a lot lately. This game is an expression of my recent thoughts and feelings.

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Of course, it’s a game, not a painting or a film, so the choices that you make as the player are crucial. There’s no “right” way to play Passage, just as there’s no right way to interpret it.

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So what can you do with your life? In Passage, one possibility is to search for and open treasure chests. Of course, not every pursuit leads to a reward—most of them are empty. Over time, though, you can can learn which pursuits are likely to be rewarding.

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Passage represents life’s challenges with a maze. 

I first played this game when I was sitting in my cubicle in the middle of crunch time.  The game takes about 5 minutes to complete.  Depending on the choices that you make in the game, there may be a catastrophic event at about the 4 minute mark.

This event was a huge punch in the gut.  I just sat there in my cubicle and stared at the screen for the last minute of the game.

In that moment, it did really make me question the types of games that I wanted to work on.

Meaningful Narrative

The meaning in games can also be derived from the narrative.  A classic storytelling pattern is The Hero’s Journey or more formally called monomyth.  Joseph Cambell wrote a book called The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

This fundamental storytelling structure is found in many places.  Greek mythology, Biblical stories, classic fables, and Hollywood films all use this classic storytelling structure.

In the game development world, a very good example of the use of The Hero’s Journey is the game God of War.  The game starts with the main character Kratos committing suicide by jumping off a cliff.  The rest of the narrative in the story deals with the events leading up to Kratos’ suicide attempt.

There are many epic moments where Kratos becomes more and more insane and loses himself.  He becomes unbelievably consumed by his quest and does some very irrational things.

The Hero’s Journey will always be meaningful across many different mediums because it speaks to something fundamental within us.

Rules of Play

For further information about meaningful games, the best text that I have come across is Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman.