I want to start small with a definition that we could hold ourselves with one hand. Then we’ll slowly open it, finger by finger, until it expands bigger than the games it describes.
The opinionated definition: a game is a container of rules. The rules define what happens inside of the container. The participants stepping into the container becomes a “player,” then they do something, and the container reacts something back as a <response/consequence/result>. That is the whole entity: an input, a response, and a person (or people) in the middle who absorbs both of them, and acts upon them again, repeating and looping for a few hundred times results in neurons activating more neurons – an experience. The container may hold almost anything: ideas, text, pictures, arguments & statements, even people; but none of them matters until that person-in-the-middle pushes on the container, which it pushes back. If that container doesn’t push back, then it’s not a game. It is a container.
Whist, for an opinionated instance, is close to an empty container. You get 4 people into the container, and in it lies 52 cards, then you read the container: follow suit, the highest card takes the trick. There’s not much art, no story, no message, the name “Whist” literally means “to be silent,”1 and it has been played for roughly three centuries.2 I played it this semester and lost every hand, and the realization came to me that losing was legible – I was dealt low cards and followed suit as required, which then my partner’s ace fell to an incoming trump. The rules of the container was there in every step we play, and more than often it flips me off – yet it was a response that taught me something about the shape of the hand that I’d been dealt with. The container, at its very least, owes me, a player, a response that I can read. The container named “Whist” conveniently delivers that response with nothing but a deck of cards, and every that follows is what happens when designers start to fill the container with more things.
Death Stranding (kept you waiting, huh) fills its container with an opinionated one idea (could be more than one) and lets the rules take over to deliver such idea. You, as the player, hauls cargo across a post-apocalyptic America, where every ladder, rope, bridge, and roads you construct has a chance of appearing in other players’ worlds, and theirs in yours. You’ve never met them, and they you. I remember my first traversal through the BT-infested territory on a tricycle, which I’m lucky to have passed for the first time and had built a charging station at the end of it because the vehicle ran out of charge. Coming back later, I found out that someone had “liked” my charging station. Yes, the game plastered the word “connection” everywhere in the texts and dialogues, yet I’d never felt so connected, not through words, but through an action. An action that the container responded to by giving me other players’ inputs as evidence that proved I was not alone in this desolate yet beautiful world, and that internalization in my head led me to learn the argument from Kojima. Professor Fernandez-Vara’s lecture on narrative in games said storytelling in games is more than dialogue and cutscenes3 – and this is what it means in actual practice: the way the world answers you is the meaning.
Disco Elysium fills its container with a heavily opinionated opposite – in it, a city of ruins without a clear thesis. Was it ever there? You may or may not find out when you walk around in Martinaise, Revachol – small area of disputed territory among Civil Militia Precincts littered with revolutionary bullet holes and with it, the records of their collapse – after you wake up in a hotel room you wrecked in a blackout, in Whirling-in-Rags. The game answers your every action with your own fractured thoughts or fragments of personality of thoughts which’ll constantly argue about it. My so-ever crude, very horrific interpretation, which, to you, the reader, may destroy your experience of the game, is that it is a game about standing in the wreck of something that was once great – then choosing between haunting it continuously or walking forwards and letting that past go. Someone else’s interpretation may be that it’s a satire of liberalism, capitalism, or a love letter to failed communism, or just downright the best-written detective game ever made in history. All of those interpretations are available because the container responds to players richly enough to support all of them. Between the two games – Death Stranding and Disco Elysium – sits a simple principle, which is a designer does not insert meaning into a player; they tune the container so that its responses, when accumulated in quantity which eventually results in qualitative emergence, adds up to a meaning that the player may build for themselves.
In here – the real world where we stand right within – the container stops being passive. Professor Zimmerman’s lecture defines play as “free movement within a more rigid system,”4 and the keyword being “free.” That meant that players do things the rules did not anticipate the slightest, and if the container is honest enough, it responds to those too. The Yes Men swapped voice boxes of Barbie and G.I. Joe Dolls and returned them to the store shelves – in this case, the society is the container and it responded with news coverage. In games, this is emergent play, and it is no bug. In fact, Counter-Strike was built by two players inside the container of Half-Life’s multiplayer (Minh Lee and Jess Cliffe).5 Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds was a mod of a mod: Brendan Greene’s battle royale ruleset on top of DayZ, which itself was bolted on to ARMA 2. In each case the players pushes on a container, the container responds, and the response could be so interesting and intriguing enough that it becomes a new container. Designers own the first draft of a game, but they don’t own what evolves from it.
Professor Fuchs summarized game evolution as “sex, death, and mistakes”6 – and in my interpretation, recombination, selection, mutation. The lineage that I’ve played in this semester shows its miniature – Whist mutated into Spades by adding bidding and a fixed trump; Spades then mutated into The Crew: Mission Deep Sea by changing a rule that described what a “trick” is for, and that one change flips a game I find helpless into one I find absorbing and immersive. They were the same deal, maybe even the same suits in less cards, but they give me different responses.
However – it is required for us to acknowledge that we do not live in a perfect world – not every mutation survives selection. The “failures” – is what the social media likes to call them, and sure they are failures in certain contexts, but they’re ones that didn’t pass the selection and shouldn’t be labeled with it, as it would be overgeneralizing. These games are the most informative part of the record. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing is a racing game whose container forgot to answer. Walls don’t collide, cliffs don’t slow, and reversing has no speed limit – which I gladly drove backwards off the edge of the world into the slate gray of nothingness. Liz Ryerson’s lecture said that these games are called “kusoge”7 and argued that they’re snapshots of the game industry at a certain moment in an era, which is way much more than what ads were selling. I’d extend upon that and say that “no response” from a container is still technically a “response”, if the results are interesting enough, that is. It can tell you what a studio in the millenia cannot afford, test, nor understand what a racing game should be. Social media calls it “bad”, uses it as fodder, and throws it away, yet the play is where history is.
E.M. Forster wrote that a work of art is the one object in the universe with its own internal order.8 Games have the same internal order. Yet, a painting, however “ordered”, does not know you’re standing in the presence of it. You can stand half an hour in front of it and spit on it (which I don’t encourage actually doing, that would be vandalism), and it responds identically, which is nothing. A film is already finished before you arrive at the theaters, even before you know of it. They’re media work by being complete, and games work by being incomplete until the person-in-the-middle appears.
Gabe Newell puts it better than I can, while describing Half-Life:9 “If I go up to a wall and shoot it, it feels like the wall is ignoring me. I’m getting a narcissistic injury when the world is ignoring me.” So, in response, developers put bullet decals on the walls. You shoot it and it acknowledges your existence. That’s the smallest unit of the medium, and everything in this manifesto scales up from its basis.
So, this is what I believe: Games aren’t stories with buttons, paintings you can walk through, nor they’re toys with rules stuck on it with duct tape. They’re containers built to respond. Judge a game by whether its responses are legible, whether they accumulate into something, whether they survive a player pushing where no one’s ever expected. Make games that responds back, then step away – because the players will answer you, and if you’d built it well, their answer would be the next game.
Works Cited
- Whist Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/whist. Accessed 16 Oct. 2026.
- Courtney. “English Whist and English Whist Players : Courtney, William Prideaux, 1845-1913 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1 Jan. 1894, archive.org/details/englishwhistand00courgoog.
- Le, Minh, and Jess Cliffe. The Official Counter-Strike Web Site, Web Archive, 2000, web.archive.org/web/20001201214200/counter-strike.net/.
- Forster, E.M. (Edward Morgan), et al. “Art for Art’s Sake, by E.M. (Edward Morgan) Forster.” Harper’s Magazine, 19 Oct. 2012, harpers.org:2083/archive/1949/08/art-for-arts-sake/.
- Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary, Valve, 2024, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbZ3HzvFEto.
Footnotes
- Merriam-Webster, “Whist Definition & Meaning.” ↩
- Courtney, English Whist and English Whist Players. ↩
- Professor Fernandez-Vara, lecture on narrative in games, Intro to Games 101. No separate source was listed in the original Works Cited. ↩
- Professor Zimmerman, lecture on play as “free movement within a more rigid system,” Intro to Games 101. No separate source was listed in the original Works Cited. ↩
- Le and Cliffe, The Official Counter-Strike Web Site. ↩
- Professor Fuchs, lecture on game evolution as “sex, death, and mistakes,” Intro to Games 101. No separate source was listed in the original Works Cited. ↩
- Liz Ryerson, lecture on “kusoge,” Intro to Games 101. No separate source was listed in the original Works Cited. ↩
- Forster, “Art for Art’s Sake,” pp. 31. ↩
- Newell, in Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary. ↩