“So much of videogame studies has been marked by a single question: ‘What is a game?’

“For a while now, our community has understood that “mark” as a curse or a blight—a scourge of formalism that drew, or perhaps still draws, our attention away from more important matters of meaning, reception, and use.”

Today I’d like to return to this question, “What is a game?” in the hopes of reminding us what it really is: not a strategic, rhetorical, or political question, at least not primarily so. Rather, it is an ontological question. It is a matter of metaphysics, not a matter of field-building. Perhaps it’s time we treated it as such.” – excerpt

#GameStudies101 selection:

Work Cited:
Bogost, Ian. “Videogames are a Mess: My DiGRA 2009 Keynote, on Videogames and Ontology.” Ian Bogost. Bogost.com. 3 Sep 2009. Web. 29 Sep 2015.