“The Game Itself? : Towards a Hermeneutics of Computer Games” now available as open access and as video

Our paper “The Game Itself? : Towards a Hermeneutics of Computer Games” is now available as open access publication via the DOI https://doi.org/10.1145/3402942.3402978. The video of the talk can be watched here:

Espen Aarseth and I presented it in September 2020 at the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ’20). Our submission received a mention as an exceptional paper. The conference was exceptionally well organized and achieved to create a sense of community among the participants despite being an online-only conference. The organizers were highly responsive and supportive in all questions. I enjoyed this experience a lot.

Abstract

In this paper, we reassess the notion and current state of ludohermeneutics in game studies, and propose a more solid foundation for how to conduct hermeneutic game analysis. We argue that there can be no ludo-hermeneutics as such, and that every game interpretation rests in a particular game ontology, whether implicit or explicit. The quality of this ontology, then, determines a vital aspect of the quality of the analysis.

Full bibliographical reference

Aarseth, Espen, and Sebastian Möring (2020): “The Game Itself? : Towards a Hermeneutics of Computer Games,” in International Conference on the
Foundations of Digital Games (FDG ’20), September 15–18, 2020, Bugibba, Malta. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3402942.3402978.