It is perhaps worth it to expand on "meaning and commitment." Commitment refers to the ability to follow through. It's the ability to rawdog a movie, to say you're going to meet with someone at place X and time Y and do it, to set a goal for yourself and work towards it, essentially to do in a functional and reliable way, to not be a flaky human being, both to yourself and to others.

Games can make someone commit. Usually they do it because they're fun in one way or another, but also because they require activation energy. If you're scrolling, you're rarely ever doing it due to saying "I'll scroll for 1 hour," right? It's just a passive activity that happens because it requires no activation cost whatsoever, it's the easiest thing to do and it has been optimized into keeping you trapped. If a game has become such a passive activity for you, which happens after you've been playing the same game for hundreds of hours, then it fills this same spot. But for the games an indie developer makes, this is hardly ever the case, therefore our games require initial commitment. A player has to actively choose to buy it and then learn to play it and enjoy it before that activation energy is not required anymore.

And then there's long term commitment. Here there are arguments you could make on which forms of it are more or less moral. I will not get into this argument. I like to imagine game development in relation to its most supreme future, the Shaper role. In the future, one can easily imagine shapers in the higher echelons of power, individuals who are tasked with shaping the behavior of the masses so that they are guided towards better and less self-destructive behaviors. Such individuals will likely use many of the techniques being developed primarily in games now to achieve their aims, as those techniques carry across domains. And so, just like games helped, in an indirect way, the birth of AI, they might help, in yet another indirect way, the shaping of our future glorious society that is yet to come. I shall pass no judgement on such techniques as they stand.

Suffice to say, most games get the commitment portion of the equation right. There's higher selection pressure compared to short-form content and thus the games that do manage to steal people away by definition are doing a better job there.

Now for meaning. There's passive and active meaning. The former refers to the same meaning you can get from movies or books. The idea I'm now driven by, of mixing stories and games in novel ways aims at increasing passive meaning, as most of the solutions game developers have tried do not do a good job at it. There are kinds of passive meanings that games are good at that generally have to do with aesthetics, mood, tone, atmosphere, etc., if only due to an oversupply of visual artists in the industry. But largely I think passive meaning tends to be lacking.

Active meaning refers to the actions you take when playing the game. This is "play." It is what makes games distinct from other media and what they're most adept at. When I say that incrementals do not get meaning right, I mean both in the passive and active sense. In the passive sense it's obvious, but in the active one it may be less clear. Consider, what are you actually doing when playing a skill tree incremental? You're doing the main action, which is generally clicking for some resource, but it doesn't matter, because you know that you'll just improve your resource gathering speed soon enough. In the skill tree itself, it also hardly matters what you choose, because these games are balanced such that you reach natural cutoff points that constrain your options (it's how the developers ensure the experience is "good"). So in the end, in an incremental, active meaning is low because your actions don't matter.

Compare this to a battle royale. In such a game you're completely on your own and you have to survive. You have to know when to be assertive, when not to, when to follow a plan, when to break it, when to not have a plan at all, you have to know the layout, where to approach from, when to approach, when not to, and then all the mechanical skills to actually fight, and all this against other human beings who are as smart or skilled as you. This type of game is filled with meaningful actions. You are learning to become a better human being by playing such a game because it is asking you to act correctly in a self-directed manner.

Most multiplayer games are also filled with meaningful actions, as acting in a team is also pro-social skill development. Although, for multiplayer games, it is usually better for this play to be with friends/known people rather than strangers. This is where co-op games are better (i.e. playing Risk of Rain with friends) and where the matchmaking function that most of these games provide actively makes them less meaningful. You're engaging in more meaningful actions by having to actively join a server hosted by someone, and then joining that same server over and over and playing with a known community, than you are by playing with randoms all the time.

In any case, you can easily judge games based on the level of meaning in their actions. A game like SNKRX for instance, the earliest criticism I got of it before it was released was "where's the gameplay?" It's a valid criticism, the game almost plays itself. What this criticism was getting at was exactly this, where are the meaningful actions? And in those early versions they were indeed not all there. But later they came, as the ability to pick different units and have different builds came online more strongly. So even in a game like SNKRX, you're still making plenty of choices and having to learn the specifics of the system to make the right choices.

You can run this analysis pretty easily for any kind of game. Do you have meaningful actions in the VS-likes? Well, yea, but... It's definitely a lower level of it, and now the choose 1 out of 3 framing has been played and hollowed out completely so it's a lot less meaningful, right? What about the more traditional roguelites, Isaac and so on? Yea, there's a lot there, Isaac has a lot of resource trades on top of the extreme build diversity, even if the combat itself is kind of simple and mindless. What about games like Path of Exile? Lots of meaningful actions there at least regarding your builds, and for the players looking for more challenging action there's also more to learn regarding enemy patterns and so on, especially in Path of Exile 2 (apparently, I have not played it yet). I could go on, right, RTSs are pretty meaningful, the map games too, puzzle games, etc. Lots of genres get this right, some do not. So the natural criticism of i.e. VS-likes and incrementals that seems intuitive to many indie developers is actually that they fall really low on this meaningful action spectrum, I think.

So, that's what I meant by meaning and commitment earlier. Short-form content is very low meaning and very low commitment because your action is just scrolling, and the actual content you're consuming is hardly ever particularly good... Well, actually, it's often good in many ways, but it gets repetitive/ouroboros-like quite quickly due to how autistically the algo hyperfixates on it, so it reaches a point of negative value rapidly. But yea, it's just very low, and so the strategy should be to move away from that rather than towards it. This move away has to be an active choice because by default the Steam algorithm will serve what customers want, and what customers want will approach short-form content left unchecked, as the rise of VS-likes and incrementals shows.