 It started with tennis, and then we went to space. We shot at invaders, jumped over obstacles, explored mysterious worlds, and along the way we died. We challenge ourselves to overcome hardship, but we also tell stories in new universes, immersing ourselves in an alternate reality. Video games started with software engineers and computer technicians, pushing technology to new frontiers. But now we have artists, storytellers, and dreamers who have transformed our medium into the art form of the coming century. As Johan Huozinga argued in a seminal book, Homo Ludens, we are the species that plays, and we live and die by our creed. Play has a storied tradition that extends to the origin of civilization, and has served a variety of purposes. In ancient Egypt, Senate functioned as a harbinger for what death would bring. In ancient China, Ghost served as an admission test into high society, and chess has traveled across many a civilization. Now jumping into the digital world has suspended the laws of reality, and play can live on unencumbered. What we do when time affords us to luxury is play, either alone or with others, but the question that naturally follows is why. Why do we feel compelled to play and act out stories? Why are we fixated by interactivity from cradle to grave? This is the ongoing question of the aesthetic of play. In his GDC talk, Like Games Be Games, Eric Zimmerman proclaimed that aesthetic refers to doing something for its own sake. The question that follows then is what is the aesthetic of play? What about play is beautiful in itself? He claims that this is an important question to address because the upcoming century will be a ludic one, where games take center stage in the arts and sciences. In a practical sense, games facilitate systemic thinking by getting us to view abstractions, but they also engender creativity by getting us to play, important tools for the 21st century. However, if play is to be valued in and of itself, why must it be instrumental in this way? Zimmerman gives us some interesting things to consider about the aesthetic of play, whatever it ends up being. One, there is no one single truth to why we play, or how to design, play is inherently pluralistic. Also, he claims that we as designers should never instrumentalize players. To create meaningful games, we need to craft experiences that fulfill people's core compulsion to play. A very popular framework built to address why we play is the Mechanics Aesthetics Dynamics Framework. It claims that there are a core set of drives that motivate players to play, and these express themselves in a variety of domains called the Aesthetics of Play. These include sensation, fantasy, narrative, challenge, fellowship, discovery, expression and submission. What this tool allows designers to do is reframe how to design a game by focusing on the desires they can fulfill in players. For example, Journey was conceived of to meet the needs for fellowship, cooperating with another in an isolated world, and narrative. It is an interactive analogy to the hero's journey, and some mechanics and dynamics were crafted to fulfill these aims, including having our abilities improve when close to other people and having an emotional arc reinforced by interactivity. On the other aesthetic dimensions, Res captivates our sensory urges, Dark Souls challenges us to be better, Zelda Breath of the Wild sets us free to explore and discover at our leisure, and Systemic Games allow us to express ourselves in a variety of ways. Cell games invoke some of these drives in different measure, and games that do a better job at meeting these needs excel in their niche. There are also many more academic frameworks we can conceptualize aesthetic under, including Aaron Hoffman's Emotional Model for Games, which recognizes different emotional drives, Self Determination Theory, which suggests we play to fulfill our needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, or the Big Five Personality Model, which recognizes different temperaments for play. More recently, Nick Yi's work on motivational drives in games has surveyed thousands of people, and he has come up with a list of 12 core motivations that drive us to play. In any case, we get the idea that the aesthetic of play is pluralistic, it can be many things at once, and fulfills needs we have as a biological and cultural organism. Another book that invokes the word aesthetic is Brian Upton's The Aesthetic of Play. In it, Upton asks us to think of the aesthetic question in the context of the experiences games create in the minds of players, whether through gameplay, story, or a mix of the two. He argues that interacting with games is about moving through a set of constraints, but he also argues that there is continuity between games and other art forms, as these constraints are ultimately instrumental in creating meaning. The aesthetic of play can be a decision tree that is generated, as you are enthralled in a game of chess, or it can be the narrative possibilities afforded to you as you watch and interact with the story. Games that are true to this aesthetic have choice, consequence, predictability and uncertainty, making them engaging to play intrinsically, and this can be both seen in the intricacies of goal and the narrative possibility space of dwarf fortress. What's fascinating here is that Upton argues that narrative and mechanics can and ought to be conceptualized as intertwined in the creation of the aesthetic of play. This challenges many assumptions we have had in the past about whether play or story is primary in games, seen in the illusory divide between naratologists and ludologists. However, there are still many who debate how it is games create and express meaning. In many talks he has given on the subject of meaning in games, Jonathan Blow argues that he does not see the distinction between mechanics and aesthetics, they are one and the same to him. This overlaps with claims by people like Brenda Romero, who famously argued that the mechanics are the message. Their games, braid and train, use mechanics to communicate meaning, whether it be themes like regret, change and redemption, using the mechanics of time manipulation and braid, or complicity and guilt and train, where you are made to realize that you are a soldier enacting Hitler's final solution. Others like Clint Hawking, argue that the meaning of a game is in its dynamics, in how we play a game, and so the meaning is crafted by the player themselves, not intrinsic to any system. In some sense, we see here a breakdown between mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics, they are all intertwined and mutually reinforcing. The mechanics host the dynamics which map onto the aesthetics, and these can be viewed as discrete or different aspects of the same thing. However, what we also see is a divide in how the word aesthetic is being used. On the one hand, it is being used to designate why we play, and on the other, it is used to articulate how play can express meaning. In an academic sense, we are still disputing the many motivations we have for play, and on the subject of meaning, Ian Bogas' procedural rhetoric took precedence for a while, but now people like Miguel Succar dispute the idea that meaning is intrinsic to any system, and instead says it is beholden to player interaction and interpretation. The question we posed at the outset, though, is why play itself is intrinsically meaningful. To bridge this divide, perhaps we need to go a little deeper, and examine the foundations of both play and art. In his seminal book, The Ambiguity of Play, Brian Sutton Smith argues that play cannot be reduced to a single thing, as it has expressed itself in many ways throughout history. What this means is that the meaning of play itself is socially and historically contingent, precluding any universal aesthetic, as ideologies have been used to explain, justify, and privilege certain forms of play. Smith identifies seven rhetoric that inform what play means to our culture. These include play as progress, fate, power, identity, imaginary, self, and frivolity. Play as progress can be seen in how we conceptualize play as a necessary step in our growth. In his book, Free to Learn, Peter Gray argues that play is an instrumental part of a child's development, and evidence ranging from how animals and humans deprived of play end up stunted to how children always replicate adult activities reinforce this idea. This is our culture's most pervasive rhetoric. Some cultures emphasize the power aspects of play, like the Spartans, which instills a sense that we can command the world to our will, or dominate others. Other cultures emphasize uncertainty and fatalistic thinking, seen in the many cultures that have luck play a role in their games. We also use play to craft our identities, expand our anxieties, reinforce cultural roles, as well as it being a tool of subversion and dissent, best exemplified by the tricksters of mythological fame. What this all means, if true, is that the way we are conceptualizing an aesthetic for play is informed by how our culture views play, which is why we pose the question of aesthetic in light of what is its purpose and what does it mean. We also seem compelled to have to justify play by saying it has utility. However, there are other scholars who insist on reconciling these disparate elements of play under one encompassing rhetoric. Thomas Henricks reconciles many of the strands Smith outlines under one unified purpose, self-realization, which is about being aware of ourselves as conscious agents in a social context. In his book, The Grasshopper, Bernard Sooths uses the Grasshopper of Aesop's famed fable to argue for how play is what we would do in Utopia, as if all extraneous tasks were complete, all that would be left is our impulse for play. So play may be pluralistic, but it is also unified in its ability to help us realize ourselves. This challenges the instrumentalization of play and allows us to get a sense of how play can be beautiful in itself. Aesthetics is a field of philosophy concerned with what is beautiful. In many senses, it started with Plato and Aristotle and from the beginning, we see a debate spring up about the utility of art. Plato viewed art as distortionary and debased, distracting us from the world of ideal forms, whereas Aristotle thought art was cathartic, allowing us to confront our anxieties in a safe context and use it for social good. The 18th century brought theorists like David Hume and Emmanuel Kant, who thought aesthetic appreciation could be conceptualized intrinsically and not instrumentally. Kant, for example, thought we could exercise what he called disinterested reflection, appreciating works of art as intrinsically beautiful by removing our personal preferences. By separating our personal preferences from the evaluation of beauty, we can peer into universal subjectively and ultimately use art to see what is good in us. With Kant, we get the ideas of formalism, truth, and virtue being tied to aesthetics and with Hegel, who appeared in the 19th century, we get the idea that art can be transformative, historically contingent, and medium specific. Hegel viewed art as a constructive enterprise, one where artists could remake the world in an ideal image and visualize a new future for humanity. He also thought every age had a particular art form that spoke to its anxieties and hopes in specific ways. This means aesthetics needs to be understood as unique for every medium. What we see here is that aesthetics or the understanding of beauty varies by culture and time, much like play itself, but this doesn't mean we can glean some insights from both. Aesthetic appreciation can be distance contemplation or it can be instrumental. It can speak to our common humanity or it can be used to transform the world. The idea I want to dwell on here though is medium specificity. If Eric Zimmerman is right that games are the art form of the 21st century, that means that there is something unique to play that can help us peer into ourselves and transform the world around us. Granted, I am using a specific view of both aesthetic and play to frame this question. However, what if the divide between play and aesthetics is less pronounced than we think? In his GDC talk, The Secret Art History of Games, John Sharp argues that games have historically been viewed through the lens of art and in some cases, as an art in itself. In ancient Japan, Go was used as a strategic device to sharpen minds for battle, but in ancient China, Go was viewed as one of the four great arts alongside painting, calligraphy, and musical performance. This idea of play being an artistic performance carries through to the modern era, with artists like Marcel Duchamp viewing the play in chess as a form of art. This conceptualization of art was expressed best by the expressionist painter, Vasily Kandinsky, who famously said, the artist is the hand that plays. We can look at art historically, classifying it under movements like the Renaissance modern or contemporary branches. We can classify it by its purpose, whether it be social bonding, disinterested pleasure, cathartic release, or communication, or we can use any number of theories. However, the takeaway Sharp gives us is that much like art itself, as cultures change, so too do their games. Play can carry its own aesthetic. There is an aesthetic to play on the condition that the culture it exists under recognizes it as such. Play and art share a common lineage, and although they aren't the same thing, they can inform how each other is construed. Many scholars have proposed theories for what games are as an aesthetic form. Jasper Yule calls games the art of failure. They make an aesthetic out of challenge and overcoming it, like an interactive version of a tragic play. Others argue that games are the aesthetic form of efficiency. Repurposing John Dewey's art as experience gives us a way to make an aesthetic out of a game's interactivity, and how art is not distance contemplation, but active participation. However, one theory in particular caught my attention. In his GDC talk, Hearts and Minds, Frank Lentz argues that games are the aesthetic form of thinking and doing. They allow us to peer into our own thoughts and see how they function. If music is mediated by listening and visual art with visual perception, games are mediated and performed with our thoughts. He makes this argument by showing us how instrumental games have been in the creation of scientific theories, whether probability theory or game theory, and hence are amenable to fields of intellectual inquiry. According to Lentz, games make thought visible to itself and allow us to exercise metacognition, being aware of the fact that we are thinking beings. The meanings that this generates are all patterns of thought, representations of cognition itself. Go expresses order versus chaos, local versus global, and strategic fortitude and insight. It makes manifest the structure of our mind as we engage with a system. Clint Hawking expands this idea even further and argues that Go can also dynamically express ideals and philosophies between players, as was expressed in the book, The Masters of Go. By aestheticizing thought, by enabling distance contemplation of ourselves, games are the art form of our capacity to think. Lentz proclaims, we are the artists who think about thinking, and hence, insofar as the 21st century is the century of ideas, games become the art form of choice to express our ideals. In some sense, you could argue that games are the aesthetic of science. They create an art out of our ability to acquire knowledge. They render beautiful that which is instrumental. They aestheticize instrumentality. Games are the bridge between the arts and the sciences, creating an aesthetic out of the process of thought itself. What comes out of this, though, is a question of the nature of truth, beauty, and play. For that, we need to turn to someone who values all these things in games, Jonathan Blow. Blow claims that games, as a medium, ought to be peering into what is true in the universe, and in many talks he has given on the subject, he explains how. Blow claims that rules and systems, what games essentially are, can represent truths like the Mandelbrosa by leveraging emergence. They also allow us to peer into reality by simulating truths as any simulation does. However, he also expresses different truths that they can explore. Games like Rod Humble's The Marriage explores the subjective truth of one man and his relationship, and games are equipped more so than any other medium to get us to empathize with the plight of others. Games also consist of coherent truths, that is, truths that are true within a system, and Blow appreciates games that are true to themselves and don't violate their own rules. Blow seems to be advocating for a pluralistic conception of truth that incorporates correspondent, coherent, constructed, subjective, and pragmatic truths, all of which can be explored using games. Once again, we see how games as an art form allows us to interrogate plurality, much like with aesthetics and play. In his game, The Witness, Jonathan Blow created a fiction out of this intrinsic capacity of games, where he highlights and deconstructs how there are many pathways to truth. What's fascinating about The Witness is that it is putting thought and play into practice, allowing us to interrogate truth and beauty using interactivity itself. We explore art and science through play. Frank Lance starts his GDC talk by letting Richard Feynman speak to how science is a process of discovery. It is about uncovering the mysteries of the universe. He then goes on to show how poetry can aestheticize this process. Games are at the intersection of the sciences and the arts because they create an aesthetic structure to view this process, generating what E.O. Wilson called conciliance between the sciences and humanities. This pushes us to the question of the uneasy relationship between truth and beauty. The Keats poem reads, truth is beauty, beauty truth, but surely this is idealistic. As Blow made clear, art can peer into truth by unveiling the very process by which truth is uncovered. As philosophers like Arthur Danto have theorized, art eventually starts to interrogate itself. And what it uncovers is that what makes art art is how we as consumers interpret, analyze and bring meaning to it. Witnessing ourselves in thought allows us to transcend our own capacity for instrumentalization, making us more attuned to both reason and emotions. If games are the art form that allows us to think about thinking, it is better situated than any other medium to reveal this process. Games provide disinterested contemplation in the Kantian sense for capacity for instrumentalization as Aristotle did when he tried to justify art to transform the world around us as Hegel proclaimed art can. Also, given play and art are intertwined and both play and art are pluralistic, we are examining ourselves as we wrestle with our own thoughts. And what we see is that there is no singular pathway that art, play or truth can take. Games provide a window into this process by making an art form out of our minds at play as it searches for truth and beauty. This means that the aesthetic of play is forever changing. It refuses rigid classification, just like play itself.