The lightness of a digraph is the minimum arc value, where the value of an arc is the maximum of the in-degrees of its terminal vertices. We determine upper bounds for the lightness of simple digraphs with minimum in-degree at least 1 (resp., graphs with minimum degree at least 2) and a given girth k, and without 4-cycles, which can be embedded in a surface S. (Graphs are considered as digraphs each arc having a parallel arc of opposite direction.) In case k ≥ 5, these bounds are tight for surfaces of nonnegative Euler characteristics. This generalizes results of He et al. [11] concerning the lightness of planar graphs. From these bounds we obtain directly new bounds for the game coloring number, and thus for the game chromatic number of (di)graphs with girth k and without 4-cycles embeddable in S. The game chromatic resp. game coloring number were introduced by Bodlaender [3] resp. Zhu [22] for graphs. We generalize these notions to arbitrary digraphs. We prove that the game coloring number of a directed simple forest is at most 3.