Understanding Meaningfulness in Videogames

This thesis explores "meaningfulness" in videogames. Academics, journalists, and others who write about games often discuss the concept of meaning yet seldom define it clearly. I am focusing on a variation of this topic: what it means for a gaming experience to be meaningful--literally: full of meaning. Meaningfulness, as I define it, refers to the quality a videogame has when one considers it socially, culturally, or personally important. I attempt to answer the question: How do games become meaningful for players. I begin by stripping it down to the core ideas that interest me the most: narrative and emotion. Representing the debate over these terms helps illuminate the larger debate over meaningfulness. To accomplish this I examine different communities and their rhetoric. There are several major interpretive communities of games: academics, practitioners, journalists and consumers. The different ways these communities define narrative and emotion can be understood by examining their rhetoric. This reveals patterns that show the diversity of how meaningfulness is defined. The different ways players construct meaningfulness through rhetoric can be mapped. Doing so illustrates patterns and trends in logic that may not be apparent on the surface, and reveals certain clusters of people who are united by shared rhetoric. This methodology provides a framework to understand the forces shaping opinions over what meaningfulness is and is not in videogames. Identifying this framework and exploring its usefulness is the major project of this thesis. Thesis Supervisor: Henry Jenkins Thesis Committee Members: Katie Salen, Doug Church, and Kurt Squire © 2004 Matthew Weise. All rights reserved