During play the player is interpreting what is happening in the game and how the game is supposed to be played. She is also experiencing the game as meaningful in various ways to her as a playing subject, relative to the plans, outcomes and options for action offered within the game.

This meaning-making can be studied from several perspectives. On the one hand, there are a number of issues that relate to the fact that the player arrive at a correct understanding understand the play situation, the gaming system and the behavior of other players. The player possesses knowledge and justified beliefs based on the evidence that system provides, both as emerging constellations of meaning and through rules for how to convey semantic contents in depiction, utterances and behavior. In this case, a number of game theoretical issues can be raised with regard to how a player manages to correctly identify the game and the gaming states, and in particular what the player knows when she knows the how to play by thegame rules and possesses the correct interpretation of the gaming system.

Another aspect is found in the issues that can be raised about how the game and its world becomes meaningful to the player in a more general sense. This is an issue that is traditionally studied through phenomenology, and one much discussed theme is how the player by her interaction performs a bodily interpretation, and carries a specifically embodied understanding of her own engagement and the happenings in the game. This is of course especially important with regard to the type of games that rely on motor-based and immediate feedback with the gaming system, but something also holds true for relating to the narrative and to the fictional world.

The player that is acting on dynamic images and virtual environments can be said to have a special form of consciousness that constitutes an awareness of the nature of the representational medium along with the reality status of the represented events.

Furthermore, it is possible to hold that the meaning of the game is understood as an experiential structuring of the imposed goals for the game, which constitute voluntarily imposed projects in analogy with, but also different from, the kind of lifeworld anchored meaning-making that finds place in ordinary life.