I Have No Words & I Must Design

Thoughts on 
"I Have No Words & i must design"

Costikyan says:- 

'A game is an interactive structure of endogenous meaning that requires players to struggle towards goals'

At the start Costikyan discusses the concept of gameplay and how it had become a ubiquitous term when in reality it means nothing. This is because by itself the term “gameplay” is irrelevant without context for example, if I was to say that battlefield 3 had good gameplay without background knowledge of it being a FPS what would you define gameplay as, only be narrowing the context does it give the term meaning as with a FPS you would expect realistic gun control, precise movements however you wouldn’t expect easy unit control like you would with most RTS.

Later in the article Costikyan discusses how a game needs to be interactive and the differences between puzzles and games. Crawford describes puzzles as static entities, and is just a logic structure which requires solving. He compares this to the text-adventure "game" Zork.
While not defining simply as a puzzle, Costikyan thinks Crawford's idea is a basis to improve upon puzzles are static with a logic structure; games need interaction.

Endogenous is defined as substances that originate from within a body. When you apply this to games, we discuss the idea of games creating their own meaning. This sounds obvious when you think about it, but the point is most people often don't. Costikyan cites monopoly money and a weapon in an online RPG, and it can really apply to anything that would have no value to anyone outside of the game, including goals and enjoyment. For example in simcity until you add your own goals and meanings it is just a toy only when you give it a goal such as I want to destroy the city with natural disasters.