In play there is something ‘at play’ which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action. All play means something.

In the opening chapters of their now well-established game studies textbook, Rules of Play, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman take this wonderful nugget of theory from Johann Huizinga as a launching pad for a discussion of the relationship between meaning and play. Salen and Zimmerman argue that meaningful play is play that signifies, play that imparts meaning onto what might otherwise be mundane. A bishop in a game of chess means nothing until it is placed upon a checkered board, 8x8, black and white, along with a whole bunch of meaning-making terms like “checkmate,” and “castle.” This capacity for games to impart meaning onto what otherwise might be meaningless is a testament to the generative quality of all games.

Every game lets players take actions, and assigns outcomes to those actions.

Chess, and every other game, is therefore a semiotic network. Playing a game is a semiotic action, in which, like language, the participants are negotiating a complex web of possible meanings, arbitrarily assigned, so as to reach a common understanding. Herein lies a rather provocative thought: playing a game is an act of interpretation.

At the center of the interpretive act lies an urge to find meaning in whatever text is currently at hand. When you read a novel, you perform a whole litany of semiotic acts, first interpreting the literal printed letters on the page and reconstructing their semantic meanings from what you know about the English language. Then, you work to understand turns of phrase, metaphors, or any other of the English language’s many figures of speech, peeling back yet another layer of meaning. And even after these two difficult tasks you must contextualize what you’ve discovered against the rest of the narrative, participating in acts of interpretation regarding the prose style itself, the nature of the novel’s characterizations and settings, etc. You might want to compare your novel against other works by the same author to see if any thematic trends emerge that might help you make better guesses at the meaning of the book in hand. Or, you might have the OED on hand just to check some interesting etymology. In any event, when you interpret a work like a novel, you are in a constant state of investigation, working to construct out of the tools that are provided some kind of explanation of the text you’ve just read.

Play is like this. Salen and Zimmerman tell us that

Design is the process by which a designer creates a context to be encountered by a participant, from which meaning emerges.

Like paragraphs and chapters, the rules of a game create the semiotic context into which players become agents of meaning — interpreters. Though I know some who study games are uncomfortable with the notion that games are a kind of text, it is this crucial similarity between the interpretive act and the ludic one that keeps drawing me back to this idea. The game mediates meaning, whether it is meaning between two players, a player and a computer, or two whole, separate cultures. In any of these cases, the game is a garden within which semiotic experimentation constantly produces exciting new fruit.

Of course, a game is not exactly like a text. Perhaps the ruleset might be, but as Salen and Zimmerman are right to point out, there is more to a game than the rules — there is also the human experience of them (PLAY) and the cultural context in which the game lives (CULTURE). And as I mentioned before, the intriguing connection here is that play might itself be an interpretive act, not that a game ought to itself undergo a kind of textual analysis. However, there is nevertheless something undeniably textual about a game. It, like a novel or a poem, suspends time for us, inducing players into a liminal space of fictional experimentation. It forces players into the position of meaning makers, looking to the rules, the culture, and each other for their fun. Meaning emerges out of the game once players have activated its semiotic machinery.

This is why Johann Huizinga tells us that all play means something. To play is to turn the gears of a tightly wound semiotic mechanism. We look to games because they produce in us the pleasure of a god. We speak, and because of the rules, there is light. All play means something because all play is about meaning.