I think so. I mean, to me, game means play. Play means curiosity, hypothesis forming, thinking about who you’re going to be in this place if you have choices about what your character is, or how you’re going to act if you have certain actions at your disposal and when. You’re forming the hypothesis and then you’re acting on that hypothesis and you’re formulating an understanding of the rules of the universe. Um, John has given a couple of really great talks about this. That curiosity, that component of interacting with a system and understanding how it works, taking it apart, putting it back together, that’s what game is to me. That’s what play is. And it’s how we learn. It’s how we express to one another new concepts and new ideas. And I think it’s what makes games so compelling as a medium because you can use that to your advantage as a communicator, as a designer to - to really inspire your audience to think differently about the world. When I, um, when I first played Katamari Damacy, uh, I was so intrigued by this very core simple philosophy that when you’re small you want to get bigger, but then when you’re big you want to get small. Like, being small in that game is so magical because like paper clips and, you know, I don’t know, what do you want to call them, uh, I’m going to start over again. Being small in that game is amazing because little things like paper clips, and push pins are huge and you can explore them from the space of being really tiny. And then when you get big and you roll up a building or Godzilla, you feel so powerful, but it’s not quite as magical as being small. And I think when you look at the game and the philosophy of the game, it’s about that transition from being a child to being an adult. That is communicated perfectly in that game. And I don’t think it could be communicated the same way in another medium.
