My academic focus, circa 2011, was play theory. I studied the psychology and sociology of play: how does play affect individuals, and how does it influence societies and cultures? I studied the philosophy of play: why is play so famously difficult to precisely define? But my real focus—to use my favorite nerd word—was ontological: I wanted to know what play "is," so I could ask the even-trickier question of what it means to make something fundamentally more playful.

I have always thought of myself as a working artist: what interests me are results. I have a great respect for lofty, intellectual ideas about what things are and how they work, but at the end of the day, I like theory because it improves my practice. My academic pursuits were done solely in the name of better deconstructing the art which had inspired me, and I was very good at it—up until I encountered something whose construction was so sophisticated that I realized I had literally no idea of how to articulate what it was doing. (That "something" was a game: Ice Pick Lodge's Pathologic, still the most visionary game ever made 20 years after its creation.) I was very much not ready.

Slightly over a decade later, let me share some of what I've learned!

The tricky thing about discussing games-as-art is that games let you move a little dude around on a screen. No other art form gives you a little dude to move around on a screen. This poses difficult challenges for schools of theory that haven't ever had to contend with little dudes that get to move around.

In all seriousness, this is blatant horseshit. Games have been around longer than literally every artistic medium apart from poetry, theatre, and sculpture—all dying art forms, clearly. Sports have long been acknowledged to be one of the pinnacles of human achievement, a fact that bothers pasty nerds who hate that their racist uncles have actually found something cool to watch while drinking beer. And board games like chess and go are generally understood to produce forms of play that are themselves artistic achievements. (Marcel Duchamp, arguably the single most brilliant artist in the last 150 years or so, said that most works of art can't stand up to a well-played game of chess—and that it's impossible to play a good game of chess without creating an artistic masterpiece.)

But games confound contemporary aesthetic theorists, because there was an explosive proliferation of art and theory in the 20th century. And a huge part of that was the advent of film, easily the definitive artistic medium of the entire 1900s, along with advances in broadcasting that gave people the illusion of a truly connected global culture for the first time in human history. Now, we had the ability to look upon the whole of artistic experience, and slap a rating on the whole damn thing. We could do the thing with all media—music, theatre, television—that literature snobs had been doing with books this whole damn time: we could revisit it, frame by frame, note by note, and develop an experience of each piece as a whole. We were no longer confined to our initial experiences of something, or by a performer's interpretation of a work. Now we could insist that art was set in stone, "finished," and discuss it the way we discussed Homer's Odyssey, or that damn horny upstart James Joyce.

Except, that is, for games. Because the whole point of a game is that it is definitionally unfinished: it exists to be completed in the playing. There is no objective experience of a game, because play is inherently subjective. You can think of a single playing of a game as a single "interpretation," only don't do that, because critics all want their interpretations to be definitive in some way.

Stop playing those games, plebes! You're undermining my attempt to case them in plaster forever!

One of the major obstacles confronting games-as-art is that games have generally been seen as "popular" culture, and therefore unworthy of critical appreciation. We don't discuss the aesthetics of sports, because the people who watch sports and the people who say "aesthetics" are (wrongly) considered to be two completely different cultures from one another. It's the same issue that comics and film both faced in the twentieth century. So that part is nothing new.

What is new is that the advent of the computer enabled far more complicated games than had ever existed before, and far more games period. Jesper Juul likens the computer to the printing press, but where the printing press mass-distributes text, the computer mass-distributes process. And it can handle procedural complexity that goes far beyond the limits of human patience, which lets those games do things that games flat-out couldn't do across their millennia of existence.

Go players will study famous games that took place hundreds of years ago—games that remain astonishing, profound, and illuminating centuries later. That's possible, in part, because very few games like go exist. It means that civilization has had literally thousands of years to take in its subtleties; people have devoted countless lifetimes to progressing go, not just as a game, but as an art form.

Now, more games are invented in a year than people would be able to play once in a lifetime. And people approach games, not as mediums, but as consumable goods—experiences more akin to books or movies than to lifelong pursuits. There's nothing wrong with this, but it's a completely different mindset, and it's one that risks overlooking why games are traditionally a lifelong pursuit to begin with.

(Incidentally, there are games—or gamelike systems—in our lives that we do treat like lifelong investments. I'm referring to social media. But we're also very bad at analyzing social media as if it's the same kind of artistic medium that games are. That's partly due to that "popular culture" bias I mentioned earlier, but not entirely. We might return to that later.)

That thing Marcel Duchamp said, about every game of chess being a work of art, was quite revealing. In that mindset, chess itself isn't a work of art—it's a canvas. The act of playing, not the game itself, is the work of art. And the person playing the game isn't an audience member or critic—she's the artist herself.

It's worth pointing out that this is not a quality unique to the things we call games—especially if you step away from the twentieth century a little bit. It's understood in theatre that plays' scripts are essentially a framework for performances: Shakespeare's works famously offer ambiguous instructions for blocking and character motivation, meaning that different directors can craft entirely different dramatic experiences using the same texts. And in music composition, the conductor or performer is responsible for crafting new interpretations of a work—so much so that a monumental new performance of a Bach piece can considered meaningful for Bach, extending and enriching the original work.

But here, we at least have a way of separating the "initial" work from the "performed" work, and valuing each as a separate construct. That may be true of traditional games like chess or go, and of the most acclaimed grandmasters and professionals that play each of them. But unlike plays and compositions, games are meant to be open-ended. They aren't works of art so much as they're individual artistic mediums. And individual players might critique games in the same sense that artists might prefer one medium over another, pianists might prefer one composer, or directors might prefer a particular playwright. But critiquing games as if they're artistic experiences themselves makes about as much sense as ranking different forms of poetry, or arguing whether books are "better" than paintings.

In a lot of ways, this begins feeling very silly. But at the same time, we have no choice, because the fact of the matter is that we do consume games, we do have more games than ever, and we are going to wind up treating games like they're either cultural artifacts or consumable goods—and we already rate and rank those.

So the question isn't whether we'll wind up critiquing games this way. The only question is how we ought to do it, if we want our critiques to be interesting or worth a damn—or if we want to devise more interesting ways of making games.

Way back in the day, a bright Greek fella named Aristotle devised a basic theory of rhetoric—of aesthetics, really—that continues to be one of the cornerstones of how we understand art to this day.

Aristotle claimed that there are two basic forms of rhetoric: visual, which targets the senses and produces a purely emotional response, and verbal, which constructs a narrative out of symbols and creates an abstract logical response. One makes us think, and the other makes us feel. They can be combined in endless permutations—and "visual" rhetoric can be extended to include other kinds of sensuality, like music—but this is the primary division between how we experience the world, and therefore is the primary distinction between how we communicate with one other, and how we get our ideas across.

What kind of rhetoric are games, though? On some level, games deal with symbolic abstraction: every chess piece is literally a symbol to be manipulated, and the rules of a game are essentially a language so universal that they can be considered objective. (Johan Huizinga, whose Homo Ludens is the seminal work in understanding play philosophically and culturally, argued that human society emerges from play—and it's because a game's rules, when agreed on, create a bedrock of mutual understanding in which people truly and fully know what they are saying to each other.)

But the game of chess is not a rulebook explaining all the pieces. The game of chess is a game. And while that game is carried out through a symbolic language, the "rhetoric" of the game—the sequence of moves—only applies to the individual game being played. It doesn't describe how the construct of the game itself "speaks" to people.

Ian Bogost, in his 2007 book Persuasive Games, argued that this is because games need to be understood as a third fundamental form of rhetoric. He called this procedural rhetoric: the rhetoric of systems. In other words, this is the way that a system "communicates" to you while you're in the middle of it. It doesn't "speak" to you on an emotional or logical level: instead, you're influenced by it simply because, with every action you take, you are influenced by its rules about what you can and can't do, which gradually shapes your understanding of "the way things are." Rather than thinking and feeling, procedural rhetoric affects your acting. (And rather than calling it an emotional or logical form of rhetoric, you could call it an actual rhetoric—literally something which speaks to you as you act.)

Procedural rhetoric is a fascinating concept, because it's a kind of rhetoric that's usually invisible. In fact, most of the time, it affects us even as we think we're acting freely. If what Johan Huizinga said is true—if we develop our consciousness, our thoughts, by means of playing with the world, then we are literally molded by the world we're in. The systems that teach us what to do, what we can do, what will happen if we do those things... ultimately, these teach us our relationship to reality. We think we're discovering a kind of clarity—but our very idea of "clear" is shaped by the system we're trapped within.

Some of the greatest philosophical and political minds of the twentieth century were obsessed with the challenge of getting people to think of the sociopolitical systems they were ensnared by. How do you get someone to recognize the machinations of an industrial society that they only exist within a sliver of? How do you get someone to look past the small community they belong to and recognize that even that community only exists because of a dense labyrinth of processes and systems that, along with making that community possible, ensures that that community won't notice the foundations of support it rests upon?

How do you make people aware of propaganda, when the nature of propaganda is to go unnoticed? How do you foster media literacy, when most of the techniques used by media presume illiteracy? These are difficult questions to answer—and it turns out they're oddly similar to the question of, how do you argue that your favorite video game is objectively cooler and more interesting than your best friend's favorite video game? They all have to do with this notion of procedural rhetoric: the idea that interactive systems, by giving you certain freedoms, teach you how to make sense of the world. And it's not that they teach you directly—it's that they give you an environment to work within, and then you teach yourself.

Again, once you put a name to it, you find that this isn't strictly unique to "games" as a medium. Mystery writers, for instance, pride themselves in finding newer and trickier ways to mislead their audiences without leaving them feeling betrayed: the challenge is to simultaneously lead people to construct a theory that feels correct, then to upend that theory in a way that feels more satisfying than the version those people had come up with. If your twist ending feels illogical or worse or unfair, your audience will be mad at you, because you've either broken your own system—you've cheated—or you played your own game worse than they did. But if you can provide them with an answer that beats theirs, they'll be doubly delighted, because they played along.

On some level, they recognize that your true artistry was in constructing a game for them to play, but building it so diabolically that they were tricked into losing it. You weren't just acting as their opponent: you were tricking them into becoming their own nemesis. And their delight lies in recognizing their own limitation—and in seeing how skillfully you constructed their ignorance by convincing them it was a brilliant insight.

This parallels the techniques used by skilled chess players. At a higher level, when players are intelligent enough to predict the outcomes of moves well into the future, your goal isn't to make the smartest possible choice right now—it's to trick your opponent into wrongly envisioning the future. It's a perilous way to play, because your opponent is free to convince you that you've successfully suckered them, all while laying traps for you and anticipating the moment when they break out of the act they're putting on. In a sense, you and your opponent are each inventing games for one another, trying to get each other to believe that a certain kind of upcoming process will unfold—you're using the game of chess to invent this game of chess. You're no longer using chess as a medium to construct a work of art: you're using chess as a medium to construct a new medium.

This is one reason why serious critics of games are often drawn to puzzle games, going back to the original Myst (or to the frustrating masterpieces of the "interactive fiction" era). Solving a puzzle isn't just about solving this specific puzzle—it's about the technique you need to use to solve it. At their most brilliant, puzzle games devise layer after layer of perplexing technique, demanding you develop an ever-richer understanding of just what a puzzle consists of, refusing to yield to you until you've reached a genuine insight. (Jonathan Blow's The Witness is a famous example of this, though you'd be forgiven for skipping it since Jonathan blows. Besides, Stephen's Sausage Roll by the incomparable Increpare is a better and vastly less pretentious way to get really mad at an extremely ingenious game.)

Of course, game design has only begun to be formally studied in earnest, so we're at an exciting and muddled time where no singular school of thought has truly had a chance to place itself at the "center" of popular or critical culture. Every theorist's darling game type has a loud and angry detractor. For instance, some critics dislike narrative-driven games for essentially trying to be "good" on the same grounds that films are appreciated, and compare narrative action games to roller coasters: thrill rides where you can't ever really leave the ride in question. Some of those critics are fans of simulation games, in which you're explicitly trying to learn the ways that systems work—but Ice Pick Lodge's Nikolay Dybowski has criticized sims for giving a player a detached, abstract relationship to the world they're playing with, allowing them to make choices without directly reckoning with their consequences. Some critics are enthralled with open-world games; others think that open worlds have bred terrible and lazy approaches to game design. There are endless arguments about whether multiplayer games enable more meaningful types of play, or whether they inherently limit play, by restricting a game's design to things which you can expect multiple people to comprehend well enough to communicate over. (And let's not get started on MMOs.)

Regardless of the specific takes, I feel comfortable saying that procedural rhetoric is an incredibly useful concept, and that allows you to start having meaningful discussions about game design in the first place. With it, you can begin discussing games the way you'd discuss other kinds of art—including discussing the relationships between procedural, verbal, and visual rhetorics. You can also examine systems for their rhetoric, regardless of whether or not they were intended to be games. What's the difference between Snapchat's and Instagram's forms of rhetoric? What's the procedural rhetoric of a supermarket's membership program—or of its swapping the aisles that different kinds of product are on? You can understand branding, marketing, and business in terms of the procedural "language" that they speak. You can even understand politics—not politicians, but political systems and political methods—as a kind of game, and assess it according to how it generates different kinds of process, maneuvering its participants without them realizing they're being maneuvered.

But procedural rhetoric just establishes the terms of discussion. It lets you say that one game is different from another game in terms of how it gets its player to develop new theories of action—not just to act or to think, but to think about acting. You can assess these differences the way you'd assess different painting techniques, or different relationships between styles of music and their listeners. That's important, and even necessary. But you still haven't gotten to the thorny question of establishing significance: what makes a game better or more interesting or more worth playing and discussing? What is the qualitative difference between two games, and how do we even start to form theories about what those differences mean? And if every game is a medium that turns its player into an artist, how do we assess those players as artists? How do we evaluate whether the impact of a game on its players is, in fact, profound?

Maybe it's obvious, but a great deal of my study of play wound up being a study of education.

Johan Huizinga argued that play should be seen as a precursor to thought—that when we play, we learn how to think. James Paul Gee, a more contemporary theorist, went a step further and argued that play is thought: in other words, that thought can be understood as a kind of crystallized pattern of play, and that our "knowledge" is made up, not of "solid" ideas, but of stable cycles, an understanding that A leads to B. Formal logic and mathematical proofs are already constructed this way: demonstrate that a series of steps will always have the same result, and you have, not just insight, but a method—which means you can apply that method anywhere, and consistently get the same result. (The material sciences try to replicate this formal reliability, though reality does have a tendency to undermine things by being extremely fucking weird.)

Educational systems are designed, in a sense, to reliably output thinking students—to create a process by which people are moved from "unable to think" to "able." And the goal, in any healthy system, isn't just knowledge, but process—static knowledge matters less than the ability to dynamically learn.

A major buzzword in education is applicability: how broadly useful are a particular set of skills, and how generally can they be applied? Funnily enough, this is essentially the argument for dividing "popular culture" from "high culture:" the so-called "sophistication" of the so-called "refined" arts isn't just about whether the art itself holds value, but about whether the skills you need to appreciate those arts will broaden your ability to appreciate other things as well. (Harold Bloom, a famously snobby literary critic, once said something along the lines of: "No wonder Stephen King thinks that Harry Potter will encourage kids to read. All he can imagine is kids one day reading Stephen King." Leaving aside the fact that Stephen King is fantastic, the implication was: literature is vast and deep enough that we need to teach people how to explore it, rather than simply finding books that those people can technically read.)

To be clear, I think that the pop-vs-high culture distinction is extremely limiting; I think that people on both sides of the divide are incredibly prejudicial and ignorant. But it's true, I think, that pop culture's accessibility needs to be taken at more than face value. Partly, that's because if the goal is learning, if part of the purpose of culture is to open us to experiences, then too insular of a culture can be extremely limiting. (I made a joke about nerds hating sports earlier, but a common critique of sports culture is that it doesn't matter how deep or fascinating it is, if it's completely disconnected from every other cultural avenue on the planet.) And partly the reason I'm critical of taking pop culture's "accessibility" too seriously is because of procedural rhetoric itself: mass media operates as a propaganda machine that teaches people how to engage with pop culture, by making it virtually impossible to ignore. A lot of what makes pop culture accessible is simply that it's inescapable, which means that we absorb enough of it that its basic precepts make sense without our knowing how or why. You can't really disconnect the ease or difficulty of a given work of media from the culture that surrounds it—because any work of media is defined by the process of encountering it in the first place.

By thinking of systems as an aesthetic form unto themselves, a lot of popular and mass-media culture becomes definitionally more interesting, in that they generate systems. And when process is seen as an aesthetic dimension, the question of how something generates a system around itself also becomes fascinating: why, exactly, do some things create fandoms while others don't? Snobbery that refuses to engage with these questions isn't just demonstrating a cultural or classist bias: it's admitting its own educational limits, by revealing what it's incapable of exploring and learning. At the same time, the principle that culture's goal should be to make us more open to culture—that the point of learning is to become better at learning—is important, whether you see the ultimate goal of culture as pragmatic (education, politics, ethics, functioning socially) or aesthetic (experience as an end unto itself). Either way, there is an implicit goal of expanding human potential, whether that means making people smarter or pushing them to their limits or simply giving them something fun to do that helps them escape the pressures of the present and the anxieties of the future.

If all of this sounds a little clinical or pretentious or sociopathic to you... you're not entirely wrong! But there's a reason it sounds this way, and it's that this is what happens when you try to collapse every possible idea about what art and culture and education could mean into a very dense space. And that's a problem in and of itself, because it means there's a disconnect between the theory of this and the practice of it—a disconnect between education theorists and actual teachers and students, a disconnect between ideas about culture and the people who take part in it, and a disconnect between artistic critique and art itself.

I said early on that I try to find theory interesting because it helps me achieve practical results; however, the most interesting theory has a bad habit of being the hardest to translate into anything pragmatic. It's like the gap between learning and knowledge: pragmatic skills are known things, while theory tries to perceive the unknown. When it grapples with things that actually exist, it's either trying to look at those things in brand-new ways, or it's trying to use those things as platforms to vault off from, in the hopes of discovering something new.

Here is where we can ask a genuinely interesting and pragmatic question about games, and about art in general: is it teaching you something specific, or is it teaching you how to learn? Is a game introducing you to a series of techniques, then letting you demonstrate that you've learned them—in the same way that a 101-level class might? Is it giving you those techniques so that it can pose challenges to you, testing whether you can extrapolate insights or invent new methods? And is it possible for it go to beyond testing your ability to do that, and actively teach you how to think, or how to learn? Can it go even further than that, and help you find new ways to wonder, to hope, to imagine, to dream?

Because the downside of any pragmatic system is that it limits you to that pragmatic system. When all you have is a hammer, everything else looks like a nail; when your education consists of nothing but STEM, you wrongly see the world's problems as engineering glitches. This is, more generally, a challenge faced by games (which "teach" you nothing but themselves), culture (which "introduces" you to nothing but itself), and theory itself (which past a point is just theorizing about theory). Consciousness is defined by permeability: its ability to make connections between things which are not in fact connected. The thing which makes us susceptible to propaganda, the thing that makes procedural rhetoric so effective, is exactly the thing that makes human ingenuity possible in the first place.

Compared to this, systems and models are extremely prohibitive—they can only articulate something definite and limited. On top of that, we will never fully absorb ourselves within them, because our minds will always wander past them and through them, meaning that their best intentions for "constructing" something precise for us will always meet with defeat. On the one hand, they can only be precise; on the other hand, their precision will be wasted on us. Any meaningful attempt to create art, or to create "significant" play, seems to run into two contradictory forms of defeat.

But that ambiguity, that seeming contradiction between specificity and imprecision, is fundamental to the nature of play. Play at its most basic can be understood as the realm of chaos that exists within otherwise-rigid limits: the things that remain possible within a given restrictive process. The rules which shape play, the "rigid limits" in question, aren't the play itself: the play is the chaos. And the art of game design, the artistic nature of a game, has to do with shaping that chaos. The structure of a game's rules, the structure of a given system, isn't the structure of the actual play; system design is not itself procedural rhetoric. No: what matters is the potential for structure to emerge within that chaos. The shape of play evolves within a given system of rules—and the devilish trick of designing a game isn't to build a system, but to anticipate the systems that a player will devise, and to construct your system to anticipate and influence theirs.

In other words, art is inherently a chess game between artist and audience, game maker and player. The design of every game inevitably leads to its players inventing games. The challenge of educating somebody is that you can't directly and reliably impart knowledge to them: instead, you have to anticipate what they'll learn from, and how they'll learn from it. And this becomes doubly tricky when your goal is to teach somebody how to learn—because the more open-ended and broad-scoped the method of learning you want them to learn is, the more intricate a construct you'll need if you want them to construct that method of learning for themselves. In a manner of speaking, you can't teach somebody how to learn—they need to teach themselves. So if you want them to develop a sophisticated method of learning, you need to convince them, somehow, to invent that method all on their own.

When I said that play is famously difficult to define, it's that play itself has a way of eluding any attempt to define what it is. It's hard to define what a game is: is a sport just the act of playing a sport, or is it the act of training for a sport, or is it the experience of playing that sport with an audience watching, or is it the experience of watching a sport itself? Post-structuralist and deconstructionist philosophers have a reputation for being impossible to understand, what with their insistence that things are not actually the things they are, but really they were part of this ongoing 20th-century attempt to understand that this elusiveness, this ambiguity, is fundamental to understanding what play is—and that, on some level, everything is play, which is why our attempts to define and regulate our understanding of the world is precisely what leads to those definitions and regulations getting fucked with. Every rule you make changes every other rule; every definition you articulate modifies all your other definitions. The chaos of play isn't a lack of order, but a multiplicity of it. Just as expert chess players play by trapping each other in games, the challenge of inventing a game is to anticipate, well in advance, the way that creating a game will prompt your players to devise new ways of thwarting your intentions.

Marcel Duchamp, noted chess player and occasional artist, made a career out of finding ways to make art thwart art. Every time people came to an understanding of what art "is," Duchamp found a new ingenious way to undermine their understanding. He specialized in creating art whose very method of construction requires you to develop a new understanding of what art is just to make sense of what you're looking at: the art isn't a purely sensual experience, and it isn't just a tedious declaration of what art "ought" to be, it's a game—and the piece you physically experience is like the first piece of a puzzle whose shape, and whose other pieces, you don't have the first notion of. It's like the clue to a mystery you didn't know existed, a single thread that leads you to unravel something you hadn't realized was knotted up in the first place.

His final piece, Étant donnés, is a marvelous practical joke: a half-sculpture half-painting, aping something akin to an Impressionist landscape or Romantic nude... which you have to view through two eyeholes in a thick wall, meaning you can literally only see it from one single angle at a carefully-prescribed perspective. "Look at this my way," it brattily fumes. "Only this way! Only like this!" But, of course, simply by insisting on that perspective, it becomes a piece about that insistence, rather than about the perspective itself: its attempt to force you into following its rules is precisely what thwarts its own attempt. Yet Duchamp knew this, and by constructing a piece which could only be about its own thwarted efforts, he ensured that you would notice his true intent even as you thought you were defying it. Check and mate.

This intentional self-thwartedness, this seemingly-contradictory undermining that winds up giving Étant donnés its paradoxical stability, is fundamentally important to the idea that ludic aesthetics—comprehending fields of play stably enough to analyze and critique them—are possible in the first place. That idea that systems of play, systems of thought, are simultaneously too-limited and too-not-limited—that our minds will wander past them in part because they can't be comprehensive enough to circumscribe our thoughts—creates the ambiguous space in which the "real" play is constructed. Because, in our restlessness, we will invent systems that "complete" the thought of a system, filling in all its empty space, the incompleteness of a game invites us to complete it—and influences how we go about its completion.

It's in this sense that a game is not just a medium or a canvas: it's not just empty and blank, it's empty and blank in very specific ways. It can't teach us how to fill it, but it can think through the ways in which we might fill it, and make sense of those ways well before we've come up with them ourselves. And, if it devises itself carefully enough, it can relate those different potential methods of completion to one another in ways that mean we don't just discover the methods themselves, but invent theories about how those methods interconnect. Now we're not just artists—we're theorists. The game has taught us how to think about it, not by teaching us directly, but by crafting a space in which we can't help but accidentally teach ourselves.

There is a storied tradition of education being carried out by means of riddles: not puzzles, even, but questions whose answers are so elusive and open-ended that, in trying to reach them, we accidentally stumble across some insight that we weren't trying to reach for to begin with. Art, similarly, has a tendency to be elusive: to provide us with a strong feeling of meaning without giving us conclusiveness, so that we grapple with our experience long after our physical experience of the art has ended. Sometimes these experiences are described as "haunting," as if they're still very much with us, refusing to let us ignore them. You can't classify these experiences using Aristotle's original systems for visual and verbal rhetoric, but with procedural rhetoric you can suddenly articulate why these experiences are so important: long after the purported experience is over, you're still grappling with it, playing against it, as if you're reckoning with an unsolved mystery, or stuck in a chess game with someone who refuses to either beat you or let you win. The field of play is extended; the game continues for so long that you don't know what it would even mean to finish it, or what the game was in the first place. Rather than gradually reducing itself over time, it only seems to open itself more and more, until you can barely keep sight of it at all.

This is the experience that chess and go players describe as they begin to properly learn the game: what feels like a flat or limited experience abruptly broadens, gaining depth and dimension that starts to seem outright endless. The goal is not simply to win; on the contrary, the prospect of winning is more a lure than anything, one that asks them to continually re-evaluate and rediscover what it would mean to win in the first place, as the path to victory gets increasingly convoluted and difficult to comprehend. Brilliant clarity is only possible by means of profound obscurity. The further in you get, the more capable you are of comprehending the limits of your own vision.

Similarly, deeper systems of learning promote more and more awareness of your own ignorance—your own inability to learn. I've said that knowing something is less useful than knowing how to learn it. The extension of that idea is that knowing how to learn is less useful than knowing how to learn how to learn—how to discover new schools of knowledge. Ignorance isn't just made up of the opaque or complex things we see but don't understand: it's the invisible stuff that we don't realize it's possible to be ignorant of at all. These invisibilities, these undetected presumptions, are our most fundamental limit—and there is an equally-unseen hierarchy of these invisible things, because some of them are easier to learn to see than others, and the most-undetectable ones are the ones we can't even conceive of not-seeing in the first place. (Or the ones we are absolutely convinced can't exist undetectably, in a way that means we make an active effort to avoid looking for them.)

Ice Pick Lodge's "Profound Games Manifesto" cites another Aristotelian concept: that of catharsis, which they define as the sudden, shocking glimpse of something heretofore unknown. This is not an emotional catharsis, which is the sort we generally think of when we refer to something as cathartic. It's an intellectual one—an abrupt realization that the world is stranger than we realized, and that the parts we didn't see are a fundamentally important part of making sense of anything at all. This is the kind of catharsis that a mystery requires if it wants to thwart us without cheating us, or that a work of art needs if it wants to leave us feeling haunted. It's the kind of catharsis that educators need to offer, if their goal is to teach us how to teach ourselves. And it's hard to bring about, because its nature is defined by the same chaos that constitutes play: it's a definite indefiniteness, a certain uncertainty, in which we are bound to discover, not something which does exist, but something which could exist. It's that shift from does to could that shifts from putting the burden of knowledge on the artist to putting it on the audience, from the teacher to the student, from the game to the player. The trick is to provide enough hints that somebody won't feel satisfied without continuing onward, despite no indication that their experience is incomplete. You have to keep them playing, so to speak, without giving away the game.

And it's this notion of "not giving away the game" that begins to define the morality of a given system. Up until now, we've been talking about the potential and the effectiveness of a particular game: what kind of play it's capable of creating, and whether or not it successfully gets its players all the way there without spoiling itself along the way. Morality often concerns itself with intent—what was the desired outcome of an action?—but in ludic systems, where the goal is to make players act and the construct amounts to a deliberate provocation, this doubles back on itself, because the point of a game is to foster intent in its player. What do you make players do? What do you make players want to do? What, in the end, do you teach them they ought to do, as they teach themselves what works and what doesn't?

Procedural rhetoric produces, not a feeler or a thinker, but an actor. And the action of a player within a game is molded by the nature of the game itself. Therefore, you can say that every ludic system has an embedded morality to it. The moral structure that it imparts upon its player isn't even a theory, because a player might not realize why they're acting the way they are—it's a flat-out practice. We don't perceive ourselves as changing into a different kind of person, and in some ways we're not changing internally... but we behave differently, and we perceive the world in different ways, and, over time, we internalize that our worldview is correct, and that we were right to act the ways we did.

This is a strange word to use, but action is seductive. It's seductive because it doesn't feel thoughtful or emotional: it just feels clarifying, as if, by acting, we are making sense of the world. If it felt seductive, it would be far less seductive than it actually is. And it's much easier to see what I mean if you instead use the word addictive: we can easily get addicted to certain kinds of action, both because the actions themselves are easy to take and because we anticipate the feedback we'll receive when we take action. We imagine the pleasure an action would give us, and unconsciously act, to turn our imagined pleasure real. We imagine the taste of our food, so we acquire it. We imagine the emotional catharsis of screaming at a driver on the highway, so we scream. The action we take feels as clear and as obvious as still water: it is simply a medium, a means to a certain end.

James Paul Gee argued that knowledge is just crystallized play; in that sense, we perceive action as knowledge. If I know that action will make me feel a certain way, and I want to feel that way, I might act unconsciously, as if I'm already presuming that I will act, as if my action is already inevitable. The moment I anticipate the end result, I reflexively act. And my action isn't just muscle memory: in a sense, it's perception. Because something makes me feel a certain way and want a certain thing, because I act reflexively on those feelings and desires, the moment I perceive something is the moment I act upon it. Action therefore becomes a kind of collapsed consciousness: a way of eliminating my perception that I have a choice, or that an experience I have is open in some way, rather than a tunnel that only points in one direction.

Games both let us act and require us to act. And games decide what our actions mean, by offering us feedback, by creating the possibility that certain actions might lead to certain things. When I refer to "ludic aesthetics," the aesthetics of play itself, I'm referring to the way that play opens some possibilities while collapsing others. And if you want to understand procedural rhetoric in a nutshell, you could say that the most fundamental form of procedural rhetoric involves telling a player what a process is: what their options are, when they're expected to make a choice, and conversely when they don't have options and when they shouldn't consider choosing.

When a mystery successfully outplays its audience, it does so by cleverly misdirecting them: offering them misleading options, getting them focused on making deductions in the wrong places, while guiding them away from the places where real uncertainty exists, and where a meaningful piece of information might give away the game. And the trick to misdirection is that it's not enough simply not to show something: it's to show everything, without anybody cottoning on to what it means. That's where the satisfaction of the reveal comes in: "Aha! It was there all along, under our noses!" In a game where this is expected behavior, this sort of misdirection is delightful. But a system where that behavior is not anticipated or expected—which means that people aren't actively looking for it—is actively manipulating its participants, whether or not that manipulation is intentional propaganda.

Just as we think emotions when we think of catharsis, we typically think of propaganda in terms of thought and feeling rather than action. Propagandistic action isn't necessarily emotional and doesn't openly promote an idea: it simply teaches people to take certain actions under certain circumstances, to get them used to the idea that this action is an effective or appropriate one to take. Its goal isn't to enrage or to argue: it's to create a new kind of neutrality, a warped "clarity," a flawed understanding of the ways things work.

One of the simplest ways that this works, in practice, is by convincing us that certain things just aren't worth thinking about. Casinos don't want you to think about how much money you're spending in them. Social networks don't want you to think about how much time you're investing in them. Bigoted schools of thought don't want you to ask yourself whether your critics have a point. The world you live in doesn't want you to wonder how it came about, or what goes into keeping it going.

Thinking about a game is not the same thing as playing that game. And it's easy for a game to manufacture circumstances under which there's no time to think, just as it's easy for a film to move along so quickly and bombastically that you simply have no simple to stop and think about a single part of it. That need for reflection, that need to revisit our initial experience of a thing, is why critics value the ability to return to the same experience over and over again, to see how it changes once we anticipate it, once we know what's happening, once we're simply less grabbed by the experience. But that reflection is harder within ludic systems, where the nature of the experience demands your attention and insists that you move along with it, lest the entire experience change.

Games can try to counteract this by expanding their horizons, by offering more options, by removing your limits—but games, by their nature, will always be limited, and those options might offer obscurity rather than clarity. (Much in the same way that the easiest way to misdirect an audience is by throwing too much information at them, rather than by offering too little.) You can't brute-force your way around this problem, for the same reason that you can't brute-force your way through a well-designed puzzle: the method you use to craft your play is the play you're crafting. You define the game by how you play it. And when the game you're playing is game-making, your creative approach is what ultimately yields the game you're left with.

If the struggle you're reckoning with concerns too much action, action as a substitute for feeling or thought, the only possible alternative is inaction: creating pockets of non-movement, encouraging thought and feeling about something more than just what lies ahead, the next obstacle, the next conflict. Similarly, if misdirection is a matter of non-obviousness, then the key to making a person play with your game rather than just playing it is to resort to too-obviousness: make it clear what you're doing and why, even as you're doing it, so that your player begins to reckon with the construct that they're caught in. Much as Duchamp created a work of art whose method, whose intent, was so blatant that the intent and method themselves became a part of its experience, a game can make itself a part of play by making the nature of its own design so obvious that a player has no choice but to contend with it, maybe even reject it altogether.

This is the equivalent, in math, of making a student add a number repeatedly to itself, then revealing multiplication as the simpler method of that practice—and then exponents as a similar simplification of protracted multiplication. Once you understand a system, you can reduce it, the way the fans of genre fiction begin to notice a work's tropes, or chess players notice the basic shapes and patterns of each other's moves. These reductions are invented systems: we create them to ease our own cognitive burden. A game, however, can anticipate those inventions, and plan new obstacles, new courses of action, that only reveal themselves once its player has invented enough of a method to reach that next level. And it can inspire those inventions by making its intentions clear enough that players realize what they ought to be solving for.

Ludic artistry consists of making room for players to make games, while simultaneously requiring that they invent those games and anticipating those games well enough to react to them, once they've been made. If you don't require enough of your player, they won't invent; if their invention flat-out breaks your game, then they have beaten you and your game. And it's the nature of every game—that contradiction of both its limits and the unlimitedness of its player—that it will be beaten. So a game's ultimate aesthetic experience is defined by just how long it holds on before its beaten: how many things it expects its player to do, how many ways it lets its player do them, and how prepared it is to address all of those approaches, not by acknowledging victory or offering up defeat, but by revealing a new layer of the game.

Similarly, the pinnacle of procedural rhetoric is for it to reveal its own nature: to take what should be the invisible workings of systemic process and to make the player notice them, by making them realize how to notice them. Such a game might begin by exposing itself obviously, then obfuscating itself more and more cleverly, until by the end its creator is hiding the game they're constructing in the most diabolical ways they know how—enough that any player, by beating the game, reveals that they understand more than the original creator. (When the first person to reach the final level of Pac-Man had a chance to discuss the game with the person who made it, he realized that Pac-Man's creator understood the game far less clearly than he himself did: principles which he'd learned deeply enough to teach to others were a mystery to the man who'd birthed those principles in the first place.)

The paradox of play is that, by granting its player certain freedoms, it simultaneously denies freedom to its player: accepting the possibilities of the game also binds the player to them. Which leads to the other paradox: by denying a player obvious freedoms, a game challenges them to discover less obvious ones, inventing new ways they can be free. Repressive social orders make a big show of how empowered their citizens are for this very reason: people stop struggling to escape when you've convinced them that they're free. And the art of teaching someone, the art of helping them free themselves, is to offer them just enough of an obstacle that they trust their ability to overcome it.

For this reason, primitive games are often profound: go, one of the simplest games ever devised, is also one of the most staggeringly complex. And to say that the design of a game is basic is not to say that it's inelegant: limited mediums are often the easiest to devise brilliant evolutions within, because the obviousness of their constraints is what prompts innovation.

Conversely, the more conspicuous choice is offered, and the less obvious it is that those choices have consequences, the harder it can be to make those choices matter. It is much harder to craft a meaningful game within a complex medium than it is to craft one within a simpler medium, because the sheer abundance of possibilities makes it much harder to discover any challenges or limits.

But that itself becomes a game. Within any seemingly-free environment, the challenge is to discover limits: to figure out what seems undoable, and to work around it. Genuine creativity begins when certain things are no longer possible; if a game is defined by its constraints, then the art of making a game is the art of discovering meaningful constraint. For imagination to begin to take shape, shape itself needs to be acknowledged as meaningful.

Education and growth can be seen as the progression from ignorance to knowledge, from restriction to freedom—but from the perspective of the one learning and growing, you can also see them as the shift from someone's confidence in their own knowledge to their appreciation of their deep ignorance, their shift from only ever dreaming of freedom to realizing that, to be free, they have to discover limits they have yet to see. Similarly, a young artist seeks accomplishment—and a mature one, one who's tasted accomplishment, sets out to find what they are still unable to achieve.

A simple game challenges you to beat it, by showing you the obstacles in your path. A trickier game shows you your freedoms—and challenges you to work out what's missing. In the former, the game exists already; all that's left to do is follow along the path that ends it. In the latter, the most meaningful part of the game doesn't exist—and your goal is not to escape what's there, but to invent what isn't. As with advanced games of chess, you're not playing the game in front of you so much as you're using it as the medium in which you invent a new one. Your success will not be evaluated by the standards of the game you were given: it will be evaluated by the person you give your game to in turn. And you'll know you have succeeded when they respond to you with a game of their own—and when you find that game worth playing back.