The Concept of Game - Game Design Theory - page 8

be alive and not make some decisions. For instance, you could decide to
hold your breath on every third push-up, or inhale on each push-up. Or
you could decide to think about a certain montage from the film Rocky ,
or instead try to clear your mind. These are all examples of the kinds of
decisions that can be made during contests, and pure puzzles involve
similar types of decisions. They are markedly different from the deci-
sions players make during games, however, in that they are not directly
relevant to your interaction with the system—in other words, they are
not endogenously meaningful. I'll go more into detail about what this
means later in Chapter 1 , but for now it suffices to say that decisions in
games have effects inside the system—a butterfly effect that affects the
whole web for the rest of the match.

Thinking about Games
In the next section I'll get into what I mean by a meaningful decision. But
before I do, I need to go into a little detail on the difference between the
abstract and the literal in games (and other systems). The word mean-
ing can itself have a lot of different connotations, but I define it in a very
specific way.
Some may think that a decision is meaningful if its implications
cause the user to think about some deep, insightful, or personal issue
not directly related to the game itself. These types of meaning are what
I'd call thematic meanings, and they don't reflect at all the way that I'm
using the word . In order to explain this distinction, I'll have to talk about
some differences between the abstract and the thematic.
If you were to replace the artwork in Super Mario Brothers with
nothing but colored squares, you would turn the game into one that is
more abstract. Games that are abstract use representative art or mecha-
nisms ( Figure 5 ) . It's easier to tell when a game's artwork is abstract than

Jump (Literal) Jump (Abstract)

Figure 5 . Literal versus abstract game art.