 To earn the beast's trust, you decide to free it from its shackles. One can only hope this communicates that you are friendly, willing to work together to escape your predicament. After awkwardly acquainting yourselves of one another, you realize that you can prompt the beast to do certain actions, but it is only sporadically forthcoming. This will be a test of patience and frustration, laborious gestural incantation, but most of all, it will be one of affection. In The Last Guardian, meaning exists at multiple resolutions, amplifying the core themes of isolation and love. The game tasks you with escaping the confines of a forbidden land, by working together with this majestic beast. Traversal, solving puzzles, combat, the very conventions of games, requires each of your skills to overcome. At the interface level, you input commands to move your avatar, exercising direct control, but by using a button to signal your intent to the game, you can prompt the creature to move, attack, and respond to your commands. His AI is sporadic, with intent, to make him feel more real, but on the rare occasion he listens to you, you feel like you are communing with a real creature. These interface interactions are then built into a game about solving puzzles, creating a meaningful context for the mechanics at your disposal. Confronted with an insurmountable gap, send the beast across and use him as a means of traversal, establishing the increasing trust you and he share. This comes to a head using a sequence of different mechanics. There are certain objects he is deathly afraid of, forcing you to clear a path. That is, of course, until you build a bond with this beast, and he leaps to your rescue despite his prior petrification of these obscure ornaments. It is love conveyed through interactivity. Many of you will be familiar with the expression, Meaningful Mechanic, which is the idea of using mechanics to communicate ideas and themes. This idea was given voice to more formally in Ian Boghass' book Persuasive Games, where he argues that games can persuade people about ideas, themes, and perspectives by using their procedures, their rules. He builds this theory by surveying the history of rhetoric, persuasive speech, and borrowing ideas from Janet Murray's book Hamlet on the Holodeck to coin the term procedural. A simple example of this can be seen in Journey, a game that improves your abilities to leap in the presence of others to reinforce its themes of unity and togetherness. A more politically charged example can be observed in September 12th, a game that was devised to argue against interventionist foreign policy. You are tasked with killing terrorists in some nondescript Middle Eastern country, but collateral damage is unavoidable as you attempt to kill insurgents, and killing people only leads to the creation of more resistance. This idea has become entrenched in game design, as the primary means by which games communicate meaning. A designer either intentionally encodes or creates a system that generates meaning, and it's up to the player to complete this meaning by interfacing with the system. People latched onto this idea quickly, it both legitimized games as having a central mechanism of communication, and vindicated games as a viable art form. Many others have made arguments of a similar kind, for the power of communicating meaning through interactivity. Brenda Romero, the designer of Train, also proclaimed that the mechanics are the message, we communicate using rules. Others, like Mary Flanagan, think we can devise rules in ways that can affect social change, creating continuity between games and prior art movements. In any case, the idea of procedural rhetoric is very popular amongst designers, probably owing to how it validates the designer's intentions as the true meaning of a game. It locates the crux of a game's meaning in how the designer is intended for it to be played, emphasizing their agency. However, the ironic thing about meaningful mechanics as a theory of play, is that it seems to omit the act of play from meaning. This criticism of procedural rhetoric was given voice to in Miguel Cicart's essay, Against Procedurality. He says, Proceduralism disregards players as entities that have creative or performative properties. Cicart outlines some central problems with the idea of procedural rhetoric. It removes play as central to the meaning in games. It suggests players' behavior is predictable. It validates the author as the most important, and most perversely, why bother playing if play's meaning is predetermined? It seems to undermine interactivity. Play is supposed to be expressive, creative, transformative, but if the meaning is predetermined, how can this be? The mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics framework gives us a way to see things slightly differently. Meaning can be generated by mechanics, but it can also exist in the dynamics, or exist in its aesthetics, that is, why different kinds of people play. In his book, The Ethics of Computer Games, Cicart introduces the idea of the ludic hermeneutic circle, which suggests that players don't just passively receive information, but can actively construct it. He also brings up September 12th, but he argues that it is meaningful because players can read the systems and then analyze it in light of further information. Essentially, it is how the player interfaces with it that brings meaning to it. From a procedural perspective, that no Russian mission in Modern Warfare 2 was horrific. It sanctioned mindless killing of innocents, but with Cicart's critique, most players spoke about how disgusting the scene was, and many tried to avoid killing civilians. How we play a game is important, and in his talk Dynamics, Clint Hawking echoes these ideas by saying that the meaning of a game is in its dynamics, in how we play. For example, two people played his game Far Cry 2 completely differently. One played it like an anarchic sandbox, but another played it cautiously, so their creation of meaning was completely different. Meaning here is conceptualized in the context of play, like how Sid Meier said games were a series of interesting decisions, a dynamic space for player input. Lots of games allow very different play styles for players to express themselves, and players will craft different forms of meaning based on this. Warren Spector agreed with this idea, and further asserted that games are a collaborative art form. It isn't about designers encoding an explicit meaning. Players need to choose, play, and interpret. When people play Deus Ex, they choose to play stealthily or aggressively, they choose the ending they want for the game, they choose how to interpret this. When players play at Detroit become human and choose different paths, who is creating the meaning exactly? Will Wright extends this argument into the systemic realm, and in his game SimCity, players don't just choose play styles, they choose their own objectives. When we get to games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, designers' intentionality seems to have given way to player-directed meaning. Designers are still designing the possibility space. They allow players the luxury of self-directed meaning. We may think systems like SimCity are player-directed, but it values a pro-democratic state with moderate forms of taxation. The system has values, it exists internally. Maybe instead of viewing it as either or, we can view games as existing on a continuum. Some games have more player-directed meaning, some have more designer-directed meaning, and some have emergent meaning that neither can control. Meaning in games seems to be distributed. If we look at a game like The Witness, Jonathan Blow had something specific to say. He intended its meaning in the design of the puzzles, and so it may seem best to first appreciate the game in terms of its designer-directed meaning. However, in a puzzle game like Infinifactory though, a game by Zachtronics, there are many ways a player can finish these problems, and so the meaning is much more player-directed. It's a spectrum across which responsibility for meaning varies. We can switch between procedural interpretation, player-directed meaning, and emergent processes, and the meaning exists somewhere in the interplay of these forces. Meaning is not just dichotomized along the player-author axis, it can also be modulated by the fictional context of a game. Clint Hawking argues that the normal dynamic meanings of chess, strategy, dynamic puzzle solving, and logic can be altered if we shift the fictional context. He presents the example of what if the Tetris Board was a container being filled with people to be exterminated in a concentration camp. People would surely start playing differently, sabotaging themselves. Conversely, the Tetris effect creates a fictional context that speaks to humanity's creative evolution. The metafictional context of a game is what happens outside the magic circle, which can also change the meaning of a game. In Spec Offs the Line, it's the fact that all military shooters tend to celebrate violence and jingoism that makes its reflexive narrative about the horrors of violence impactful. When we look at multiplayer games, the meaning is less rules and context and more a dynamic narrative between competing philosophies. Hawking illustrates this using the book, The Masters of Goh, which outlines how one game of Goh came to represent the ideals of tradition versus progress. In essence, how we play in a multiplayer game comes to represent a philosophy, a dynamic narrative about ideals. When Federer plays Nadal, it's the artist versus the warrior, competing ideologies that seem at odds until you realize that they are yin and yang, two parts of a dynamic process that values both grittiness and elegance. Metafictional context still alters the meaning at this level as well though. When the Pakistani player Arslan Ash came out of nowhere to defeat all dominant Korean players in Tekken, it told a story of rags to riches and transformative multiculturalism. The reason it did this though was because of the context of Pakistan not being known in esports, of Korea being dominant for years, and the struggle Arslan Ash went through to win. It's the meaning outside of play that endows a good narrative energy. A prayer on stage after his victory was greeted with applause, uniting everyone behind a story that speaks to the transformative meaning of play. We still don't have a consensus on our game's communicate meaning, but maybe this is inevitable. In his book, The Ambiguity of Play, Brian Sutton Smith argues that the meaning of play shifts based on the culture it exists in. Maybe in this debate we can find the seeds of a true meaning for play, one that recognizes its inherent plurality, its manifest ambiguity. Meaning can come from the designer, meaning can come from the player, meaning can emerge from the system, and maybe meaning can be all these things at the same time, interpreted differently based on the rhetoric of play and played with by all. Games are a collaborative art form, and so maybe responsibility for the creation of meaning is just that.