ABSTRACT

Games are a new art form, one whose full expressive capabilities are still in the process of being discovered. Semiotics is the study of meaning-making. It explores how objects and marks can be imbued with symbolic weight and used to transmit ideas between human beings. The ludic sign is an alternate formulation of this principle. Ludic semiosis uses parsimony to achieve communication without speaker and listener possessing a shared sign. Rather than being shared between speaker and listener, it's embodied, transient, and contingent. The speaker finds a pattern that will generate the desired constraints in their model of the listener. Meaning emerges from the operation of parsimonious convergence within the system of constraints in the mind of the listener. Meaning emerges from such play, but in a very nondeterministic way. Games are made meaningful when the player's strategic constraints linger after the experience has ended.