I like that last comment about education. I love learning, but I hate school. I could fill pages talking about it, so I won't.

I'm a little confused as to what would qualify as giving something purpose. Most games are goal oriented so "purpose" is vague to me. I don't disagree with points that were made, I'm just not sure what giving someone something important to do is. For example, alot of people love Animal Crossing. :)

draigon: I'm pretty sure that that problem is the exact reason why it's so difficult to make a good game, and why it "cannot be done by men out of touch with their instinctive values."

The people who write these articles should look beyond FPS's and action/platformers - they'll find all the "meaning" they could ever need.

Most RPGs, for example, are explicitly structured as "quest" adventures where one faces a series of related and increasingly difficult challenges in order to fight evil and save someone or something.

(Indeed, most of them quite deliberately invoke Tolkein's own mythos in their settings and characterizations.)

One of the best computer RPGS ever, ULTIMA 4, became famous for a mechanism in the game wherein one's conduct towards others determined the chances of success. For example, you were rewarded for showing mercy to defeated foes; putting them to the sword incurred punishment from the game.

It seems like another world now, but I am Old School enough (Apple II generation) to remember when computer and video game creation was mostly in the hands of literate people very much in touch with traditions of noble adventure, self-sacrifice and courage found in heroic literature. It goes without saying that this has become pretty much a foreign language to today's kill-happy, MTV-hypnotized creators.

I don't blame girls and women for being turned off by it all, because unless one's idea of "quality" is high frame rates, cutting-edge 3D environment engines and proper button-spacing on the controller, there's not all that much to like about most video and computer games.

Most of them ARE pointless. It didn't used to be that way, and it doesn't have to be now. But it is, alas.

There seems to be "big meaning" and "small meaning" - saving the world, vs. saving some kind of relationship, for example (could be a relationship with another Sim, or with your town in Animal Crossing). Like in the movies, blending big and small meaning seems to be very effective - see also Myst, many of the Final Fantasy games, etc.

another way game developers can create meaning is by making in-game actions have real consequences; many bad games out there now force you to fail, reload, and do the same thing over again. while we're getting away from that tedious model, we're still far from experiencing a gameworld in which your actions leave lasting impressions and sway the course of the game.

Hilariously, the reason I *didn't* like the Sims is that it was full of the tedious, ultimately empty, aquisition of material goods. I thought that games like Half Life or even Quake had more meaning than that. I don't know what that says about me. Or the games.

The other thing I wonder is how games like cards (especially solitaire), minesweeper, the many puzzle and word games and trivial pursuit fit into the meaningless/meaningful matrix that's been proposed here.

Are there kinds of meaningfulness? And maybe different kinds of meaningfulness appeal to different audiences? I don't know.

I don't see how single-player games can have this grand sense of importance and real consequences when you're the sole audience of an experience you can manipulate however you want (reload, cheat codes, etc). Even if you're playing some God-sim where you're controlling the fate of universe and can destroy the world on a whim, it's ultimately just a harmless fantasy. However, games can have a strong sense of compelling drama that pulls the player in through such methods as incorporating the "Hero's Journey" (a classic archtypical method used in countless epic books and movies, such as LotR, Star Wars, and as mentioned previously, most RPGs like the Ultima series).

But I don't think you can truly feel like you're accomplishing anything significant when playing a game unless it involves other people. A great paper about this is Jonathan Baron's Glory and Shame: Powerful Psychology
in Multiplayer Online Games (alternate mirror for those without Gamasutra IDs).

And on a completely unrelated side note, I went to the same high school as Paul Graham, Gateway Senior High. Small world, eh?

There are single-player games that deliver on meaningfulness (write large and small, as Mike said): I mentioned Myst and The Sims above (btw: the materialism thing is sort of a red herring; stick with the game very long and you realize the crushing weight of all the "stuff" you've bought). Others have mentioned the Final Fantasy games or Animal Crossing and even, reaching way back, Ultima 4 (considered by many to be the pinnacle of that series).

Another game I'd put in this category is Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. Yeah, it's a shooter. But it didn't play, or make me feel like any other shooter I've played. It had a lot more meaning to me, somehow, than the ho-hum of the tons of RPGs and RTSs people have gushed about, or killing various boss monsters in Diablo (though Diablo and especially D2 were very effectively scary, another topic). And don't get me wrong, I love RPGs and RTSs; shooters less so most of the time -- except for this one.

But even so, these games are the rare exception, and they're still mostly catering to the same demographic.

MMP games, which have the potential to really broaden the gaming audience, are ironically even worse. Here the "treadmill" gameplay quickly leeches the life out of the game, and the "heroic" aspects turn out to be a psychological bait-and-switch of waiting in line to kill the next auto-spawn of the alledgedly dramatic Big Bad Monster with less drama than waiting in line at the grocery store.

One interesting exception to this is A Tale in the Desert. According to Andy Tepper, the lead designer, they have received dozens of phone calls and emails saying "this is the first game my girlfriend will play!" It's a game without combat, but not without conflict. And while it appears the game is about crafting, I suspect what Andy's doing is really making a game about constructing relationships, knowledge, and a society -- oh and breeding way-cool roses along the way. Sure maybe there are no +8 Axes of Kranium Kleaving in evidence, but so what? My bet is that this sort of game will retain a lot more of those who try it than do other MMP games.

Quote from "The Observer", Sunday December 9, 2001

"'At 17, if you don't think Lord of The Rings is the greatest contribution to literature there's something wrong with your head,' says Discworld author Terry Pratchett [..]. 'If you still think that at 50, there's definitely something wrong with your head.'

[..] The geographical detail, and the inclusion of maps, adds to the sense - so often grasped for and so rarely achieved - of entering a world of the author's own making, with its own internal logic and structure. One reason Tolkien pulled this off so comprehensively is because he'd been creating Middle Earth for at least 20 years before he wrote Lord of the Rings."

Meaning is highly subjective. What is perceived as meaningful depends on your personal and cultural context. It follows that a work of art can't be meaningful on its own; it can only have meaning in relation to people who perceive it.
Of course, there are techniques to help that along; I could now link "meaning" to about every other aspect used to analyze games; but I won't.

Suffice it to say that for those people playing shooters, these games have meaning, else they'd be boring. And if you think about Tetris, it's not obvious what the "meaning" is, but it's a good game.

Oh, one last remark: Fighting "evil" often means fighting from cutscene to cutscene; meaning in interactive media isn't the same as in literature, and more open-ended games (like the whole Sim series) often mean more because the player's actions have a greater effect on the outcome. No other player built a SimCity just like mine!

mendel

Giving the player something to do isn't a panacea. You can tell the player "Oh! Warrior JoeBob213, you are our only hope! Out of everyone in the world, you are the one person who can defeat the evil wizard and his nefarious scheme!" But if you don't convince the player of the 'realness' and the true implications of their role, then it becomes nothing more than a mission. There are moments of greatness in the Final Fantasy series when you meet ordinary townsfolk who don't know who you are and they confide in you how the story's strife is affecting their little digital lives. By creating an immersive world in which there are real emotional implications for achieving the game's goals, you then grab the gamer and make them care.

It's not just about story either. Craft is just as important to creating this feeling of 'there-ness'. It's hard to suspend your disbelief when the UI is obtrusive, the game crashes, your character clips through walls and the enemy AI is not as bright as your pet hamster.

Whether saving the world, killing terrorists or running one digital person's life, the task will only be as important to the player as it is to the developer. You can tell when some developers have produced a game that is a labor of love and you can tell when they just didn't care. The most frustrating thing for me is when it looks like they really did care, but their publisher forced them to publish it early. Everyone in the development of a game has to believe 100% in the importance of the tasks given the player before they should bother asking the player to believe in it.

I have to say I'm in favor of seeing more small meaning in games. Maybe it's just me, but the whole hero myth thing always seems so... mythical. "Save The Universe From Evil" is such an impossibly lofty motivation that it ends up feeling just as meaningless as "Destroy All Monsters." Or perhaps I'm just not ambitious enough.

And I'm not sure what Tetris "means" either, but preventing chaos from creeping up to the top of the screen seems to be enough motivation for most people, and you can map that to your own value system however you'd like. That's what's so nice about abstract games. In the absence of any intrinsic meaning, the player is free to assign whatever meaning she wants to the game, with little threat of any cognitive dissonance brought on by pesky things like plot and dialogue.

Anyway, I'm still waiting for the "Pride and Prejudice" dating sim to be released, so we can play a game that we can all plant an emotional stake in -- is Elizabeth going to hook up with Darcy or what?!

i agree that it's intyeresting when games explore other senses of "meaning", not just the "save the universe" heroic myth (power fantasy, some owuld call it). Animal Crossing really worked for me because i immediately got attached to collecting all the bugs, or one complete set of furniture, or getting the rare fish - making some impact in the world. it's a single-player game, but it's somewhat tradeable (i thought of it before as a non-simultaneous multi-player game). the player leaves her mark in the world for other players to see; she can mail presents to other towns; she can design flags and clothing. it's my very own play-house fantasy.

okay, i promise i won't obsess about AC anymore.

Man after all this gushing about AC I'm going to have to buy a Game Cube just to find out what the fuss is about (and maybe for Metroid and Zelda).

Which reminds me of a guy I know telling me that I should get a Game Cube just so that I could play Zelda. "When it was over," he said, "I got all emotional." Now that's meaning.

The more I think about it the more I think that the basic plot of most games (from Space Invaders on up) have actually swung *too far* in the direction of "they gave him something important to do". SAVE THE WORLD. STOP THE ULTIMATE EVIL. SAVE THE UNIVERSE. SAVE THE EXISTENCE OF TIME ITSELF. These ultimately ring hollow because we all know that at the nd of the day, we can turn the thing off and go make a sandwhich or whatever.

The ones that ring most true are the more personal stories. The story of Frodo isn't just that they gave him something important to do. It's that he accepted doing something important a great personal cost. In Sim City, it's *your* city. And so on.

Also, I don't know quite how this ties in to the discussion but it feels to me like it does (at any rate I've been wanting to post it to this site for awhile and now seems like a good time). Do any of you get the SWG newsletter? They have a feature in it that highlights select forum threads. One of the threads in the latest issue was about players requesting features for the HAIRDRESSERS in the game. I didn't even know you could be a hairdresser in SWG. Apparently, they're quite popular. Very cool

This thread does seem to indicate that "big meaning" in games - stopping the ultimate evil - means less to most people than smaller, more personal meanings. Part of why the Lord of the Rings impacts people the way it does is that it blends the two so skillfully.

Yeesh... I feel like I've been stalking Snowmit lately. o_O

Anyway, I would say that importance and meaningfulness always eventually boils down to how personal the task at hand is. Quite simply, if the player does not feel that he or she is involved in any substantial way, then what stake does the player truly have in whether or not he or she succeeds? If there is no personal motivation, then the player is only playing either to see what's next or because he or she enjoys the gameplay. In any case, it's best to have that personal conviction.

So how does one encourage the player to develop a personal connection with the game? It's my opinion that the best method is allowing the player to personalize the game. When I say this I'm talking about anything from choosing their character's visual appearance to the way they solve a quest or achieve an objective to the very world around them. It's all about giving the player control. When a person feels that they have control over something, they come to identify it as their own, and what could be more important to a person than something that is of their own creation?

Games like The Sims and Animal Crossing are perfect examples of this. The gameplay isn't particularly engaging in either; you're just doing simple chores most of the time. Players find the things they're doing important because their village or household is almost entirely a reflection of their playing. The player has essentially created a little virtual world.

I agree with previous posts in that the whole "Save the Universe" the thing has been done so many times that it *doesn't* have a lot of meaning anymore. We *expect* that from games now. The challenge of saving the world alone isn't enough incentive to make me persevere with a game. Give the characters "something important to do", certainly, but make it something that *feels* important to the player.

I'll admit to being a Pokemon addict. I've got copy of the Ruby version in my GBA right now with 170 hours of play time clocked up. I play this game more than any other in my collection because it does feel meaningful to me. I get a real sense of acheivement when the little guys level up, or evolve or win me Gym Badge. I really care about my Pokemon. They're not just there to battle for me; they all have individual characteristics, carefully thought out nicknames and I guess I've inferred personalities for them. I've invested a lot of time in my Pokemon because training them feels like "something important to do".

A game that I feel successfully blends "big meaning" with meaning on a more personal level is The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. I like it just that *little* bit more than Ocarina of Time because I got more personally involved with the story - or rather the multitude of small stories nested within the main narrative. Living the same three days over and over means that one becomes intimately acquainted with all the goings on in Clock Town and the surrounding area. Helping the inhabitants of Termina sort out their personal problems is just as important as stopping the moon from crashing into the earth. When I finished Majora's Mask, I felt a sense of acheivement not just because I'd saved the world from destruction, but also because I felt that I'd made a real difference in people's lives. The inhabitants of Termina were happier because I'd been there.

The Wind Waker continues this blend of "big" and "small" meaning. When Link sets off to save the world, he's initially just going out to rescue his sister. This aspect of the game mattered to me because I became really attached to Link. The way he's animated imbues the little guy with such personality that it's impossible not fall in love with him and, in turn, the game. I found that this game also had more meaning for me as a player due to the diversions from the overall world-saving quest. There's a certain sense of acheivement to be gained from collecting all the treasure charts, or getting a really good picture of a pig.

Survival horror games have meaning for me because the goal is just that - survival. My first experience with the genre was the Resident Evil remake on Gamecube. The game initially appealed to me because zombies are cool and it's fun to blow their heads off with a shotgun, but it kept me playing because I really wanted Chris/Jill to get out of there alive. I've played the game through maybe half a dozen times now and it's still an exciting experience. I know the layout of the mansion off by heart and the zombies don't look so scary anymore but the game still keeps me on the edge of my seat. It still has meaning for me because I still really don't want the characters to be eaten by hideous undead freaks.

With regards to the previous comments by Mike Sellers about A Tale in the Desert's focus on "relationships" to promote significance and meaning in the gameworld, I would say we use a variety of non-traditional ways to draw the player into the game instead of the standard addictive "leveling treadmill."

For example, marriage in most online games has absolutely no point at all. It's just a roleplayed event and perhaps a slight cosmetic change to your character if you're lucky. In ATITD however, marriage is a binding social commitment with serious ramifications that you should only take if you really trust your partner (similar to RL). If you marry someone in ATITD, all your possessions and property become interchangable through joint ownership. You can even log in as your spouse's character. And since there's no concept of divorce in ancient Egypt, very few players marry in our game unless they known each other in real life (and most of the time they are husband/wife or boyfriend/girlfriend).

I think the primary lure of ATITD is the social networks and potential influence you can have on the community through gameworld interactions. Small guilds were purposely made to be very easy to establish and one can join an unlimited number of them, which promotes a diverse collection of player organizations and interest groups. Plus the monthly Demi-Pharaoh elections and constant voting/proposing of new laws makes players feel like active members of a progressive society where they have the potential to rise to great positions of power.

Anyway, my point is that more online games should implement systems in where players can leave lasting impressions upon the gameworld. In our version of Egypt, players plant strains of plants named after their original breeders and cut gems named after their crafter's. Too often, in large MMPOGs players feel like a tiny insignificant speck with no real influence on anything. I suppose it's all a power dynamic between players and developers, in which we'll have to give more creative control over to players in the future as they demand it.

There seems to be a lot of confusion with this "meanings" topic.

Meaning does not belong to books or movies, it belongs to symbols and all symbols are meaningful.

When ppl say that a movie or a games is meaningful what they really mean is that they found something more important in it than the mere game.

Games consist of three elements: technical, artistic and gameplay elements. Gameplay consist of other elemental forces known as -focuses- focuses are what the player "do", examples are "shooting bad guys", "reading the plot", "looking
at the pretty graphics" or "Customizing you house"

All of them have meaning. But only if you give it to them.

The meaning of FPS, Sidescroller-shooters, plataformers, puzzles, sportgames, racing games, fighting games, and simulators is hidden within an important focus known as "master the system". The master example is Chess. Chess portrais a complex system that is complex, beautiful and thus meaningful... for those who like chess. Been a good at chess is the most trasentental archivment for them.

I think most ppl here doesn't understand FPS players so i most speak for them.

Have you ever seen a story about someone who gets into a different body? Sure you have, they are all over the place, kids in adult bodys, girls in male bodys, princes in frog bodys, and viceversa. Do you rememmeber the drama of how akward it is? Not controlling your body well, walking funny if not at all, the uncomfortable it is, the clumsy they feel.

FPS players did rememmber it well, they did live that situation themselfs, a fps character is hard to control, newbs are clumsy and they feel/know it, mastering their new digital body is a hard work. But when they do, the feeling of archivment is that of a monk finding his true self! It is tracendental and is viceraly beautiful for them!

But all focuses are beautiful, you just need the right sensibility. Artist contemplate in awe at pretty graphics, writers at the plot, and antropologists at mariage in ATITD and hackers at good programing. If you find the art meaninful
there is a little artist inside, if you lice the social factors of ATITD, have no doubt there is a hidden antropologist/humanist hiddin in your heart.

I like all sorts of games and I understand that every focus of gameplay can be meaningful if Im sensible enough. Just open you mind

I can't even start apollogizing for my spelling errors, English is not my language.

On the "big meaning" vs "Small meaning". How good is it to save your little sister if the world is doomed by evil? What good is it to save the world if there isn't a single soul that you care for? Don't discuss abour big vs small, the belong to each other.

thankyou all.

i want a gf 14yr old

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