As Wittgenstein and Huizinga observed, games are language and language is games. Thus, there's chess, a game of chess, and a chess set, and this is both a game design problem and a language problem, at the same time.

There is the RPG, the rules of the RPG, and the play of the RPG. And indeed the rules document, the "delivery system" that inserts the RPG into the player. In essence the RPG is the medicine, the text is the needle.

One of the interesting parts of computer games is that the delivery system is almost always built INTO the game itself. One learns always through play. This is seldom the case outside the digital. Extremely rare in RPGs.

But that said, reading the RPG text is IN AND OF ITSELF a kind of playing the RPG. We loop around on ourselves and find that the needle is a kind of medicine, being delivered by an external needle to itself.

And every time we try to separate needle from medicine we run into the language problem; all game is expressed as language, but all language is a game. It really is games all the way down.

People: what's being a game designer like?

Me: (shows them this thread)