At gameLab, we make games. Digital games are among the most robust vectors of pop culture today. Online communities with tens of thousands of simultaneous players, non-standard computer hardware interfaces, realtime graphics rendering, interactive narratives, artificial life, artificial intelligence, complex systems—are nowhere being explored as energetically as in games. On the other hand, digital games are culturally retarded.

Our mission at gameLab is to explore and expand this undiscovered medium and invent new forms of culture. This mission requires two complementary critical practices: understanding how games work as designed objects and also understanding how they operate within culture at large.

A game is a stylized context where players follow rules in order to experience the game. To play a game of chess, for example, is to limit your behaviors to follow the rules of chess. While rules are an essential component to games, rules by themselves are not fun. They are fixed, rigid, closed, and unambiguous. A paradoxical quality of games is that by following rules, play results. And play is the opposite of rules. Play is improvisational, creative, uncertain, and pleasurable. Like the “free play” of a gear or an automobile steering wheel, play is only possible because of fixed structures. In the example of an automobile, these fixed structures are the wheels, axle, drive shaft, steering wheel, and other utilitarian mechanisms. But at the same time, the “play” of the steering wheel is exactly the place where those structures fail to operate properly. Play exists because of fixed structures of rules, but at the same time play exists despite those structures, emerging in and among the gaps and interstices.

Our challenge at gameLab is to integrate these ideas about rules, play, and games into our work. We rely on a collaborative, interdisciplinary work process focused on iterative design, which means our design decisions are based on our play experience of the game as it is being developed.

At the same time, it is crucial that we understand how our game development is a cultural practice—a pop cultural practice, but a cultural practice just the same. We think of our games as interventions in the culture of digital gaming. They intervene by finding new audiences for games, appropriating visual and audio aesthetics from outside the gaming world, constructing narrative and cultural content that isn’t normally found in the gaming world, and (especially) by inventing new forms of gameplay.

It’s a struggle for us to experiment in a commercial medium like games. At present, the game industry resembles the Hollywood film industry: all center and no margins, without any kind of contexts for the production and reception of independent cinema. By integrating a critical understand of our form with a cultural understanding of our field, our goal is to become the “independent filmmakers” of gaming and change the medium for the better.

Will digital gaming become a more robust cultural form like film or music? Or will it never outgrow its roots in young male adolescent power fantasies. We don’t know for sure. But it’s why we’re making games.