The "Universe" of the game space

When were talking in class about the ways in which the gamespace can be viewed as a universe my understanding of the importance of understanding the peritextuality of works within gamespace and even within traditional textual spaces was re-invented. It's a strange sensation; one moment I believed that I had a decent understanding of the importance of the peritextual space and the ways in which it is useful to further ones understanding of the text itself, and the next I was blown away, thinking about all the possibilities that thinking about the gamespace as a universe offers.

Particularly intriguing to me was the idea that we can think about the instances of player (or reader) interaction with the text as being "vectors", each one of which can be used to define that specific players understanding of the text. That is to say that the vectors of interaction will inherently define the "meaning" of the game or for that player. Perhaps even more significant to the model is the idea that once you view it in the light of a universe of interaction, you can then begin to categorize the whole process in a systematic way. The elements of the system, whether they be the players interaction with the storyline, the graphics or even the music can be categorized and developed into these different vectors of meaning.

Once we are able to define what meaning is to one player, then we can also inherently claim to understand (to a point) what meaning is not. This idea opens up a whole new area for sub-thought, namely the idea that the undiscovered meanings of the universe of the game space can and do exist. In this way perhaps we can begin to define the "undefinable" in much of a Sausserian way. Saussere believed that when we develop methods of signs, we were basically defining things by what they were not. We can look at a tree and know that it is not a dog because the many signifiers (words) that society uses to evoke the image of a dog are attributable only to that meaning.

In the same way, perhaps we are able to investigate the gamespace by what it is not, using negative signification to develop theoretical ideas about what hasn't been discovered in the gamespace as a result of what has.