Beyond the game

This is it, the final blog exercise for this semester! I'll try to keep it short...

Think back to the very start of the semester, when we talked about the concept of meaningful play, which occurs when "the relationships between actions and outcomes in a game are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game" (from Salen and Zimmerman, Rules of Play). When the game is an alternate reality game such as The Beast, where the game does not have any explicitly declared actions and outcomes, and in some cases does not even acknowledge its own existence, is it possible for there to be meaningful play? Does this type of "game" require us to rethink our definition of games?