My interpretation is that he's basically calling out all of society as a kind of consumerism.
The > 40 folks spend most of their time crafting the illusion of a pursuit of meaning ("Hey, why don't you try my product or my religion or my self-help book or my investment plan or why don't you sit down and listen to what I have to say?") The < 40 folks spend most of their time experimenting with or purchasing or rejecting all the ideas/products that the > 40 folks create.
The author calls them "meaning games" because he asserts that meaning is not universal truth but more of a cultural trend. So it's a game because you never actually achieve meaning. You just play the game and constantly think you're about to achieve meaning. That creates a kind of enthalpy that perpetuates society.
I think the reference to consumerism leads ones understanding astray. It's is not particularly more apropos to consumerism then any other context of meaning. Religion, self image, ambition, love life, are all equally relevant here.
Your last paragraph captures it best, and his assertion does not seem to have any obvious contradictions in reality.
Books, religion, university research, fashion trends and charities. Wars, lynch mobs, cartoons, traditions, village fetes, school plays, professional plays, business strategies and restaurant reviews. Newspapers, television stations, YCombinator, football teams and new political parties. Anything to which a multitude of younger, stupider people can claim allegiance for which to be nice or mean to their peers.
This. Chris Hedges has a whole book about this called War Is A Force that Gives Us Meaning.
It's shouldn't be that difficult to understand, considering we spend all day every day interacting with these institutions, so it's disappointing to see so many otherwise intelligent people here who don't seem to grok what he's talking about.
I see it as an reference to Wittgenstein's analogy of language games. [1] That was a concept designed to show that words do not intrinsically have meaning or refer to the world, as many philosophers claimed. Rather, language gets meaning in the context of the actions of its usage with others, much like the rules and actions in a game. The interpretation for a meaning game would be that life does not have intrinsic meaning, but we create or find constructs between ourselves and other people from which we can derive a contextual meaning. These meaning games then give us a purpose we can involve ourselves in. By constructing these games for others, say a parent creating a game of success in schooling for their child, we can give them contextual meaning and purpose.
