I think of game design as a dialogue, you know. I think of it as a dialogue between the designer and the - and the player. The designer is making this artifact that they you know, give to the player, right, and the great thing about it that's different from, for instance, a painting that you then allow viewers to-to look at is you've made this artifact that, by its very nature is something that can talk back to the player, right, that can react to how they engage with the work or the thing that you made. I think that means that there's a very broad definition of what kind of dialogue that can be, right, like I - I believe that when you're playing Halo multiplayer, you're in a dialogue with the creators of the rules of that game, right, like they've tuned the weapons and the jumping, and-and-and the actual rules of scoring and all that kind of stuff; and how you put inputs into that and see how the game reacts, and push and pull on-on that kind of stuff is as much a dialogue with the player as you know, playing Tetris is a dialogue about the rules of this-this-this thing, right, that you're putting your hands on; and that you're not just observing, but that - that you are having this kind of push and pull with. And it's this back and forth, I feel like, between you know, the-the presence of the-the person who designed the thing that you're interacting with, and yourself interacting with it, and then potentially playing differently because of the feedback that you get. So it's - you know, it's very broad, but I think it's - I think it's - I think it's the kind of definition that fits all of the different kinds of things that games can currently be because so many games can be so much different from each other, it's hard to have a very narrow definition of like this is the relationship between the designer and the game and the player. I think what's - what's - what's beautiful about game design is that every design is a different interpretation of what that relationship means.
