A Game is a Daydream

1. A game is not a movie. A game is not a book. A game is not a painting. A game is not music.
2. A game conveys meaning through action or purposeful inaction.
3. A choice can be made or observed, but not both.
4. Observation allows for reflection, but action does not.
5. A player is motivated and constrained by a game's systems, and cannot make choices independent of those systems.
6. A game does not tell a story. A player tells themselves a story through action and purposeful inaction within a game.
7. A game is an imagined space in which a story is created through play.
8. A game is performance wherein the player performs for themselves.
9. A game is a daydream.

I was inspired by Robert Yang's A Game is a Knife manifesto to write my own for Manifesto Jam 2026. This is a messy, hastily assembled collection of some of the things I've been thinking about with respect to game design lately. It is not a complete work, as I continue to mull over these ideas, but it is the start of a thought.