{"id":1306,"date":"2017-07-18T11:41:44","date_gmt":"2017-07-18T18:41:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/?p=1306"},"modified":"2017-07-18T11:41:44","modified_gmt":"2017-07-18T18:41:44","slug":"theme-is-not-meaning-gdc-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/theme-is-not-meaning-gdc-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Theme is Not Meaning (GDC 2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I gave a talk at GDC 2010 on the interaction of theme and mechanics in games, specifically arguing that a game&#8217;s mechanics take priority over its theme when determining the game&#8217;s meaning. (The talk was based heavily on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/?p=237\">these<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/?p=240\">columns<\/a> written for\u00a0<em>Game Developer<\/em> magazine.) Unfortunately, the talk was not filmed, and because I always wanted to get it online,\u00a0I went ahead and reconstructed it from the original audio and slides. If you give it a watch, let me know what you think!<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"584\" height=\"329\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PHFSuDCBFWw?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I gave a talk at GDC 2010 on the interaction of theme and mechanics in games, specifically arguing that a game&#8217;s mechanics take priority over its theme when determining the game&#8217;s meaning. (The talk was based heavily on these columns &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/theme-is-not-meaning-gdc-2010\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1308,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/ticket-to-ride.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3EGlq-l4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1307,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1306\/revisions\/1307"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designer-notes.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}