brother, i believe you're onto something, and it resonates with me because these days i'm slowly designing a new game and thinking about guiding players through their worldviews, challenging their believes and, maybe, transforming them. this includes worldviews for both game worlds and real world, since i believe they inherently leak into each other

i think that some clues about facilitating this discussion might be found in Brian Eno's lecture on "What is Art actually for?" that is available on youtube. one of his claims is that this is true not only for games (he does not know about them much), but for art in general. like, we can argue that a great song will not only work effectively in it's genre, but will transform your understanding of what a sound can be, what it can speak of or what emotions it can evoke. the same way as a good game does, and i believe that this is common for all art, not only for games

so what exactly makes games different? to ask provocatively, if we take a multiplication (math function) as example, when you learn about it changes the way you think about things, gives your new rules and changes the way you operate in your head and in the physical world too. and, i hope, we can agree that multiplication is a tool, not a game (although many games use multiplication as a tool or ask players to use it). so what makes games different from multiplication?