Ah, yes, "Authorial intent is expressed through content", that is indeed a false constraint. It seems that not that many developers/game designers have started to realize that content is nothing if it doesn't resonate with the game's rules.
As DanC says: "Content created by the players is discounted". But I think he forgot to mention that the rules of the game are what shapes in any significant way the content created by the players.
Or in other words: If you want to make a point about peace, don't give guns to the player and let him/her go apeshit on everybody and then call them idiots for doing so.
 

It sounds to me like the author is just giving up on making single-player games "culturally meaningful."

Oh, well, it doesn't matter much to me, anyway. I have no interest in multiplayer games, but I play games for entertainment, rather than to be enlightened. OK, if I can have both, great. But I still read, so I can get "meaningful" in other ways.
 

Maybe I'm missing the point, but it seems like he's saying that playground games could be considered great art, because people will interact in them and possibly have meaningful emotional experiences, like that time when you were playing four-square and finally got a turn and then someone shoeshined you and you couldn't possibly catch it and everybody laughed at you.

(I've been told that foursquare is a 'girly' game, so probably nobody knows what the heck I just said.)

I don't think this makes sense.

Now yes, it's worth considering the role of multiplayer game experiences as art forms. But just giving people a chat room and letting them interact on their own with no authorial intent does not make it a work of art IMO.

One thing my husband and I have talked about is the current lack of the LARP/freeform experience in video games. That is, games in which the particpants are given roles to play and tools for interaction within an existing story, and THEN let loose to bounce off each other and see what happens.

The writers build the setting and design the characters in the hopes of promoting interesting and meaningful interactions, but it's up to the players how things go from there, and different runs of the same story can turn out very differently.

I think there's potential there for very different kinds of multiplayer games...