I’ve been reading through Rules of Play lately and have been thinking about the concept of meaningful play.
An overview of meaningful play
The concept states that the amount of meaning play has is the value of the relationship between the action and outcome. So if an interaction has value to you, it is meaningful. And in order for it to have value, you have to both understand it (discernable) and make sense of it in its context (integrated).
If that’s the case, then meaning is quantitative. The qualitative aspect of meaning would refer to its type: whether it’s positive, negative, or maybe even more specific types like funny, dramatic, thrilling, etc. For the more math-inclined, the amount of meaning refers to the length of a vector, and the positive nature of it refers to its direction. 
A positive, meaningless game?
Therefore, that begs the question: Can you have a meaningless game that results in a positive outcome? It seems like in order for you to have a positive outcome, you’d have to have meaning. So if a game was meaningless, the positive outcome would have to come from somewhere other than the game itself.
Still, without actual meaning in the game itself, it doesn’t seem like there would be much meaning left to get. Maybe a game would send a message just by its very existence. Therefore, a group of meaningless games might result in a noticable positive outcome. Does the very existence of a game have meaning?
To find out, I would conduct the following experiment: create a series of games that are meaningless to play, but when presented as a group, have a positive outcome. If successful, each game would result in a positive outcome that is a fraction of the total positive outcome of the group, while still remaining meaningless itself.
