I’ve been asked to create a multimedia presentation that answers the question: what is your meme?  I’ve already stated that my focus is on games, but that designation becomes limited fairly quickly.  There are several media that come together to make an electronic game.  A game played on paper requires fewer.  A cultural or learning game requires only visual language and an implicit understanding of the rules.  What I’m really after in my studies and creative output is an understanding of why people play games in general, why certain people play certain games in particular, and how to create games that question those things and bring this sort of understanding of games to the cultural fore.  Rather than a knee-jerk reaction from violence in games, let’s make a game that attempts to understand violence and the role that videogames have in the overall culture of violence.  Of the many angles from which we experience violence, videogames surely play a small role but are big news.

If distilled from my interests, my meme really has to do with the feedback between critical and cultural reception of games as rhetoric and the creation of intentionally rhetorical (through the rules of their systems) games.  These rules are not only effective on paper; the social and environmental conditions, interface, and the mindset of players all influence the way that the message is received.  I’m not sure how to distill this into a meme.