What Games Mean: Understanding Games as Art relates games to established artforms through painting movements, auteur theory, music albums, and documentary. Each chapter discusses the history of the art movement in question and then reads games through those lenses. By defamiliarizing games by thinking about them with atypical genre and form, What Games Mean helps create a common language between tabletop and video games and other kinds of art.
This book is about enjoying games in different dimensions as well as offering strategies for game makers to think about their own work and process. Professionals and students can look at games from different perspectives and gain new approaches to how they work.
All this is done considering the roles and responsibilities of artists. These ethical questions are considered in relation to 20th-century art and how it relates to advertisement and propaganda, labor movements and workers' rights in games industries, and how game makers can best interact with their audiences.