To all intents and purposes, the whole big ruined mess left after the fall of home universe is the games universe vastly expanded with the residue of all of the prior creations. And with the game twisted beyond belief by the introduction of the penalty universe materials and agreements. This is what we referred to as the games universe later on the track. It is the first of the big compulsively agreed- upon universes where we were no longer in full control of the creation of reality.
In spite of all this, you were still a god; But a badly abberated one. You were still immune to force and knew it, but your mockups could be hurt and you were now subject to counter-emotion to some degree because you could really loose something. In the home universe era, this wasn't true. You could always mock something up again and your home universe knew no law but your own.
The body types, styles of mockups, etc. were quite varied in this period. The penalty universes used 64 different body types of which only one was truly human. Older styles such as people manifesting as clouds or whatever were also in use. There was no pattern or organization to the universe similar to the way our galaxy is structured. It was just a hodge-podge of planets, flat-earths, pictures hanging in the sky, or whatever and it all just sort of drifted around. Individuals claimed areas and marked them off by filling the areas with faint light of various colors so that space itself appeared to be a sort of patchwork quilt. The old proponents of the one dimensional creation system also often filled their space with music of some sort or another. These were not sound vibrations but simply a musical telepathic wave that permeated their areas.
The games leaned towards the intellectual side since we were not yet very concerned with force and motion. These included things that could be thought of as godlike equivalents of chess and cards and various strategy games. They also included the old valence game and various other games of one-upmanship where the opponents tried to psych each other out in various ways. Elaborate mockups were often built as prizes, or sometimes a period of service was wagered. There is not as much motion as you might expect because much of the motion was still non-linear (objects in motion might jump the way a knight only touches certain squares in chess without passing through the intermediate points).
The Games Universe goes on for a very long time. Some characters are so bad that you want them out of the game but you have no way of doing this. Everyone thinks this, but of course nobody agrees on who should be thrown out.
Finally a solution is proposed. A lower universe could be built and the undesirables sentenced to it. But a mechanism was needed to fix the convicts up so that they couldn't just pop back up and cause more trouble.
So the remnants of all of the penalty universes were strung together. Remembering the hate and urge to destroy that occurred during the fall of home universe, this is used at the end of each positive goal to attach a negative goal to it. I.E.. the positive (but degrading) penalty universe goals such as the goal to eat were paired with their opposites such as the goal to starve. The negative goal swings the victim around to the next positive goal and makes him go round and round through these penalty goals. This is called the treadmill. With the attachment of the negative goals it became a self perpetuating cycle that is supposed to set the bad guys up to do each other in forever. This is a very popular idea. It is probably the first time after the collapse of home universe that everybody agreed on something.
Needless to say, everyone builds this thing intending it for use on the bad guys rather than themselves, and of course everyone eventually gets tossed in. The treadmill leads the person down into what we came to call the Motion or Motions Universe.