The reading and writing of video games

The second query that popped up during my presentation was whether you could categories  video games as being either read or written by players. This is a pretty good query which I've looked at somewhat through my research, but for the most part it requires a bunch of methodologies in order to operate in a significant way. Or rather to be properly understood.

Thinking about this I can see some problems that can arise from this dichotomy of reading and writing, it sort of presupposes that you can't do both at the same time (or rather it's hard to think of doing both). But I'l raise these queries later after we've worked out what this theory can do.

First thing's first though, what does one mean by players reading and writing video games?

Reading can be taken as the player following on from what the game (or developer) expects them to do, running around, building things, shooting things, jumping, etc. More or less following the cues of the game. First person shooters and adventure games generally follow this method of audience interaction.

Writing can be taken as the player making their own meaning from the game, jumping when they shouldn't jump, shooting where they shouldn't, building what should not technically be built. It should be noted that I'm presenting writing as an adversarial counter point to what the game/developers encourage. The point to be made here is that these specific actions aren't necessary to occur for the game. They are actions that the player does of their own volition. A good example of this would be Super Mario Maker or The Sims - especially in consideration of how players have subverted the cues given in the game.

This is somewhat a relevant to the notion of active and passive interactions from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's work (he's not just all about Flow theory). These active interactions are an ongoing process  that produces mental or physical exertion (or a combination of the two) to form an activity. Whereas passive is usually just a mental activity which can be thought of as traditional mediums (books, movies, tv shows).

The implementation of this theory would be to display that way that games can tell, or how games can provide the means for story. Though how both is encountered in games is a bit more mysterious.
This makes it so that games are either telling or providing the means for story - not a collaboration of both, which can be seen in a variety of video games. The story in Halo is based on the exploits of Master Chief (blowing up the Halo ring), but it also provides the means for the player to construct some of those exploits (defeating 5 elites with no ammo).

This means that games are telling and providing the means at the same time for story creation. And so the way that we discuss games should reflect this dual nature (but also be happy to mix them). So a distinct binary might not be the way to go, but at this early stage starts the discussion about what types of stories can come out of video games.