# on jonathan blow's dynamical meaning consider "storytelling" in garmes as too often merely just another cynical marketing tool used to sell garmers the brand - ie. teh garme 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 garme rules / systems express ideas the concept of d.m is important for video garme design since it cuts through the 'stories' often desperately / cynically and ham-fistedly bolted on by garme designers there's an immediate and direct emphasis on the fact the player's time is important and that ir intelligence is respected; that every single thing they do in a garme-system space is 'meaningful' - that teh garme 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 garmes' starring square jawed meat heads. yet what if even these zero-frivolous-elements garme 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 garme'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 garme - as though ludonarrative dissonance has long since been an industry / cultural standard it's as though garmers want and need 'stupid' or 'badly told' stories and near-arbitrary garmeplay mechanics (mindless running / shooting etc) because that in itself is the truer meaning of teh garme and perhaps all garmes - ie. mindless escape to illustrate this consider the difficultly of setting up a garme with dynamical meaning in which one of the more-possible meanings is that playing computer garmes 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 garmes need people more than people need garmes the problem with jonathan blow suggesting humans should make more garmes 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 garmes and paid more attention to 'ir' wife it too often seems that just by playing video garmes 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 garmes. what's the difference if those garmes are 'meaningful'?" video garmes don't need to 'grow up' 'evolve' or somehow be 'deeper'; maybe they can't // republic of bob