Continuing to play Desparados, the various functions of the game mirror my thoughts more frequently. Attempting to focus is matched by the grab symbol, concepts of good and evil are matched by shadow and light for line of sight indicators and so on. However, I have also discovered that as a language it is localized. The more spatially dissociated from the computer I am, the less likely it is that the imagery is present.

This is both a hope and a disappointment. Can the language of a game be grafted onto reality in a way that it passess into common communication or is the game''s centralized existence abject to this? Can "game as language" only function in that situation where game presence is as dispersed/polymorphous(?) as geography is (whereby the language gains utility)?

mtdew: you''re right to redefine the game would be beside the point of the game you created. I guess what I am trying to achieve is that game in which the nature of the game is what you think about (that movie with Michael Douglas comes to mind )... or is at least capable of being thought about. Imagine "art game" in the way that art cinema exists to hollywood. "Game Art" as you have created it, is the dawn of that. However, the impression I get from you is that the game is secondary to the vision and to reconstruct the vision destroys the basis of the game. This may be so.

I came across a fantastic quote that resonates a lot with what we have been discussing:

"An artists dream is to create a world where everything is just as they want it." - Hugh Heffner

Game design, in this light, is a fusion of philosophy, art, language and dreaming that is more than the simple "language" concept that I had been using, which is probably why it was suffering. However, the notion of "language" as an element of game design is still crucial to wresting interface design from the designer and giving that power to the player. I don''t see that happening in any hurry, but it is still a point of theoretical interest in the meantime.