This book posits a novel framework for sense-making and meaning-making in the play of video games. Extending a modern, process-oriented, audience-inclusive philosophy of artistic meaning generation, this book grapples with the question of how to personally and critically examine video games as artistic artifacts that do not have set, predetermined, standardized forms until live play is enacted. The resulting artistic product, live gameplay, expresses both the game’s developers and its players. This book argues that players hold three separate, concurrent perspectives during play: the embodied avatar within the simulated space, the role-playing participant in the narrative fantasy, and the external strategist manipulating the game’s software affordances. The exciting dynamics that arise from live gameplay are the result of the tensions and harmonies between these three parallel layers of play. Video games are systems with designed behaviors capable of a great diversity of instantiated
