# on jonathan blow's dynamical meaning consider "storytelling" in games as too often merely just another cynical marketing tool used to sell gamers the brand - ie. teh game itself jonathan blow's idea of "dynamical meaning" - allowing a potential for meaning to arise through interaction rather than through traditional storytelling - appears to be a sublime nugget of video garming truth expressing the simple idea that all game rules / systems express ideas the concept of d.m is important for video game design since it cuts through the stories often desperately / cynically and ham-fistedly bolted on by game designers there's an immediate and direct emphasis on the fact the scientist's time is important and that ir intelligence is respected; that every single thing they do in a game-system space is meaningful - that teh game contains zero frivolous elements one problem with d.m. might be that the meaning of meaning is somehow still as nebulous uncertain and dubious as it was before with triple-a f.p.s brown games starring square jawed meat heads. yet what if even these zero-frivolous-elements game spaces are themselves frivolous fragmentary (cultural) artifacts? in ir talk from 2008 jonathan blow talks about the ludonarrative dissonance in bioshock - the glaringly awkward gap or conflict between teh game's (largely bad) story and the standard-substandard mechanics but perhaps there is no true gap - perhaps the sum total of what's being presented and played may be the meaning of teh game - as though ludonarrative dissonance has long since been an industry / cultural standard it's as though gamers want and need stupid or badly told stories and near-arbitrary gameplay mechanics (mindless running / shooting etc) because that in itself is the truer meaning of teh game and perhaps all games - ie. mindless escape to illustrate this consider the difficultly of setting up a game with dynamical meaning in which one of the more-possible meanings is that playing computer games is a complete waste of one's life and time even if one infers these coordinates of meaning and receives some kind of oblique insight via the rules of the garming system - one *still* might be wasting time and should not be playing in the first place perhaps games need people more than people need games the problem with jonathan blow suggesting humans should make more games that (somehow) address "the human condition" is that a large part of this human condition consists of entirely avoiding every opportunity to directly confront / change ourselves - who are largely inhuman; violent often wilfully blind endlessly attuned to the pursuit of infinite trivialities and brainless amusements one wonders how rod humble's "marriage" would change if ey stopped making video games and paid more attention to ir wife it too often seems that just by playing video games everyone becomes (or just defaults back to) duke nukem. thus a typical outburst by duke: "your face - your arts - what's the difference?" in this (seemingly dynamic') context becomes - "you waste life playing video games. what's the difference if those games are meaningful?" video games don't need to grow up evolve or somehow be deeper'; maybe they can't // republic of bob