Alessandra Micalizzi (SAE Institute Milano), Fabrizio Festa (Conservatorio di Matera), & Claudio Pomo (Politecnico di Bari)
1. Beyond Play: Reframing the Ontological Status of Videogames
This special issue originates from a shared theoretical and epistemological concern: the need to reassess the ontological status of videogames within contemporary media and cultural studies. While game studies has long consolidated itself as a distinct field—drawing from narratology, ludology, platform studies, cultural studies, and design research—the rapid transformation of digital ecologies urges us to interrogate once again what videogames are, what they do, and what kinds of realities they enact.
Historically, videogames have been framed alternately as technological artifacts, interactive media, entertainment commodities, or aesthetic objects. Foundational contributions such as Aarseth’s (1997) notion of the cybertext emphasized their ergodic dimension, foregrounding the non-trivial effort required of players. Bogost (2007; 2011) articulated their expressive and procedural capacities, positioning games as systems capable of modeling and persuading through rule-based representation. Calleja (2011) further expanded the discourse by moving from “immersion” to “incorporation,” highlighting the embodied, situated entanglement of players and game worlds. Yet, despite these advances, a residual instrumental understanding often persists: videogames are still frequently reduced to tools—of entertainment, of education, of simulation, of gamification.
The premise of Beyond Play is that such reduction is no longer analytically sufficient.
Rather than approaching videogames as mere interactive media, this issue proposes to consider them as expressive languages, creative and artistic practices, and above all as socio-cultural and relational environments in which actions acquire transformative potential. In line with Huizinga’s (1938) conception of play as a foundational cultural form and Turner’s (1982; 1995) interpretation of ritualized performance as a space of liminality and communitas, videogames can be understood as contemporary arenas where symbolic orders are rehearsed, contested, and reconfigured. They are not only representations of worlds but infrastructures in which worlds are enacted.
Recent scholarship further supports this shift. Ensslin (2018) emphasizes the vernacular and semiotic texture of videogames, foregrounding their function as structured languages of meaning-making. Nørgård and Tosca (2020) explore the affective attachments that bind players to digital worlds, moving beyond competition-centered paradigms toward relational and emotional engagements. Taylor’s (2018) analysis of live streaming cultures demonstrates how videogames operate as performative environments where spectatorship, labor, and community formation converge. Together, these perspectives reinforce the idea that games are not merely played—they are inhabited, performed, circulated, and negotiated across multiple platforms and publics.
From this expanded perspective, games operate simultaneously on multiple levels:
- as aesthetic dispositifs, where visual regimes (from photorealism to pixel art), soundscapes, and procedural architectures articulate specific modes of perception and affect;
- as design systems, structured through mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics (Hunicke et al., 2004), capable of encoding values, ethical dilemmas, and epistemic models within rule-based interaction;
- as networked socio-technical assemblages, embedded within algorithmic and platform cultures (Galloway, 2006; Castells, 1996; 2001), where economies of participation, fan labour, and data circulation reshape the conditions of play (Consalvo, 2007; Taylor, 2018).
To question the ontological status of videogames, therefore, means recognizing them not simply as artifacts but as relational systems—dynamic constellations of code, bodies, affects, institutions, infrastructures, and communities. Their ontology is not fixed but processual: it emerges through interaction, circulation, interpretation, and governance. In this sense, videogames may be understood as sites of what Collins (2004) calls “interaction ritual chains,” where repeated, codified exchanges generate shared meanings and emotional energies; or, following Hall’s (1980) encoding/decoding model, as terrains of negotiated readings and contested interpretations.
Contemporary theoretical developments in posthuman and new materialist thought further deepen this understanding. Bogost’s (2020) object-oriented reflections on digital entities invite us to consider games not only as representational systems but as assemblages in which non-human actors—algorithms, procedural systems, avatars—participate in shaping experience. Similarly, drawing on relational and nomadic subjectivity (Braidotti, 2000), videogames can be conceived as laboratories of subjectivation, where identity, embodiment, and agency are continuously reconfigured through interaction. The boundaries between player and character, designer and user, human and computational agent become porous and negotiated.
It is precisely this expanded and multi-layered ontology that informs the rationale of this special issue.
Beyond Play seeks to map and critically assess the current state of videogame research by bringing into dialogue three interconnected perspectives:
- The artistic and expressive dimension, which considers videogames as aesthetic languages and experimental forms capable of articulating new modes of storytelling, visuality, and affect.
- The design-oriented dimension, which examines the procedural, systemic, and infrastructural logic of games, foregrounding the ways mechanics encode cultural, ethical, and political assumptions.
- The socio-cultural dimension, which situates games within broader ecologies of participation, platformization, community formation, gender politics, and identity negotiation.
These perspectives are not treated as discrete analytical domains but as mutually constitutive. The artistic cannot be disentangled from the procedural; the procedural is embedded within socio-economic infrastructures; and the socio-cultural is always mediated by design choices and aesthetic strategies. Games thus become sites of worldmaking—to borrow a concept that resonates with both cultural studies and contemporary media theory—where imaginaries are constructed, contested, and shared.
This publication emerges within the framework of P+ARTS, a project roject, funded by the PNRR (National Recovery and Resilience Plan) – Mission 4 – Component 1: “Enhancement of educational services: from nursery schools to universities” – Investment 3.4: “Advanced university teaching and skills”, Sub-investment T5: “Strategic partnerships/initiatives to innovate the international dimension of the AFAM system (Higher Education in Art, Music and Dance)”, funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU; project code INTAFAM00037, CUP: G43C24000640006.
The project is dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, and social innovation. Within this context, videogames represent a paradigmatic field of inquiry: they embody the convergence of creative industries, digital design, participatory cultures, and platform economies, while functioning as experimental environments for pedagogy, civic imagination, and collective transformation. The special issue therefore reflects not only a scholarly endeavor but also an institutional commitment to understanding digital creativity as a driver of cultural and social change.
To move “beyond play” does not mean to abandon playfulness, nor to deny the ludic core of videogames. Rather, it means acknowledging that play itself is structured, situated, and politically charged. It generates economies, produces identities, sustains communities, and configures imaginaries. By interrogating videogames as expressive, procedural, and relational systems, this issue contributes to an ongoing redefinition of the field—one that recognizes games not merely as objects to be analyzed, but as environments where culture happens, meanings circulate, and transformation becomes possible.
2. Games as cultural, aesthetic and epistemic devices
The opening section of this issue foregrounds the plurality of perspectives through which games can be examined when understood as cultural, relational, and design-driven systems. The first contribution, Vincenzo De Masi’s Ecological Rationality and Cultural Innovation in China’s Game Design, explores how sustainability in the Chinese gaming industry operates as a socio-technical paradigm that integrates environmental responsibility, aesthetics, and governance, positioning games as infrastructures that mediate ethics, policy, and collective imagination . Shifting from infrastructures to communities, Aida Gallego-Márquez and Pablo Soto-Casás, in Digital Ethnographies on Discord: The Diaspora Between Hostile Spaces and Online Refuges, interrogate the methodological and ethical implications of researching gaming cultures on Discord, proposing a participatory ethnographic model that transforms research into a practice of care and co-creation . The global–local tension in game production is then addressed in The Myth of Global Games, National Games, and the Folkloresque, which draws on Brazilian case studies to show how developers negotiate cultural identity through strategies that oscillate between transnational appeal and situated authenticity. From questions of cultural positioning, the issue moves toward the pedagogical dimension of interactivity: in Moral Learning and Ludic Responsibility, Luisa Ferraro examines interactive storytelling as a hybrid form between cinema and videogames capable of fostering critical reflection, ethical awareness, and experiential learning. Finally, Yiling Hu’s Smitten with a Virtual Character analyzes Slay the Princess to rethink digital intimacy and subjectivity, arguing that the game destabilizes traditional affective structures of dating simulators by transforming attachment into a relational “wound” that binds player and nonhuman character.
Together, these contributions establish the conceptual foundations of the issue: games emerge not simply as playable systems, but as sites where design, culture, politics, affect, and knowledge production intersect.
The issue then turns toward the political economy of participation and the infrastructures that sustain contemporary play cultures. In Entering the Battlegrounds: Fan Labour in PUBG and its Connection to the Mega-Platform, Argyrios Emmanouloudis analyzes how community-generated content, modding practices, and platform ecosystems contributed to the success of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, revealing the ambivalent dynamic in which participatory creativity strengthens communal bonds while simultaneously producing value for corporate actors. Questions of interpretation and reception are foregrounded in Raúl Alejandro Treviño González’s A Reading Typology for Video Game Players, which proposes a framework integrating cultural studies and game studies to map how players construct aesthetic, narrative, ideological, and ludic readings, emphasizing meaning-making as an active and situated process. The affective dimension of play is explored in Tamires Lietti’s Split at the Core, a study of Split Fiction that examines how branching narratives and emotionally coded decisions transform gameplay into a space where trauma, grief, and moral ambiguity are structurally mediated through design. The socio-cultural dynamics of visibility and exclusion are then addressed in Ezequiel Ramon-Pinat and Diana Moisés Toro’s The Challenges Female Streamers Face on Twitch, which investigates how gendered harassment, platform governance, and audience interaction shape the experiences of female content creators in a male-dominated streaming ecosystem. Focusing on narrative complexity in contemporary game design, the authors examine Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding through an antagonist-centred analytical framework. Combining film analysis and game analysis, the article investigates how the character of Higgs Monaghan operates across cutscenes, gameplay mechanics, and symbolic characterization to structure the game’s narrative tensions between connection and isolation. By foregrounding the role of antagonistic encounters in shaping player experience and thematic meaning, the study proposes a methodological approach capable of addressing the hybrid cinematic and ludic dimensions of narrative-driven games. Closing this section, Friske, Novy, and Wimmer’s contribution further consolidates this perspective by advancing an antagonist-centred methodology that bridges film and game analysis, offering a nuanced framework for understanding how narrative complexity in contemporary games emerges through the interplay of character, gameplay, and audiovisual storytelling.
Concluding this section, Fabrizio Matarese’s Ritual Elements in Souls Games interprets Elden Ring and the Souls series through anthropological theories of liminality and communitas, arguing that these games function as ritualized digital spaces where challenge, transformation, and communal meaning-making converge. The final section of the issue further expands the horizon of what games do as aesthetic, cultural, and epistemic devices. In The Study of the Players’ Pixel Aesthetics in Design-Driven Practices, Hsiao-Yueh Yu investigates pixel art as both visual language and experiential driver, showing how design frameworks such as Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics illuminate the ways nostalgic visual styles shape emotional engagement, player identity, and even material culture beyond the screen. The relationship between play, community, and designed environments is explored in Chiara Bertasini, Rossetta Preziosa Bocchino, Luca Carlevarino, Adriana Ribalcenco, and Francesca Vulpiani’s EXON | Delusion of Equilibrium, which presents a research-through-design case study of a multiplayer Roblox project conceived as a sociological laboratory, demonstrating how aesthetic transitions, ritualized interaction, and cooperative mechanics generate hybrid communities that blur boundaries between individual and collective, online and offline . Finally, Katie Garrett’s “True Colours”: Queering Gender, Monstrosity, and Humanity in Little Nightmares II offers a close formal and narrative analysis of the indie horror game to reveal how audiovisual design, mechanics, and paratext enable queer interpretations that destabilize normative constructions of gender, embodiment, and otherness, even when such readings are resisted by dominant player discourses .
Across these fourteen contributions, games emerge not as isolated artifacts but as relational systems: infrastructures of governance, laboratories of pedagogy, economies of participation, ritual environments, aesthetic dispositifs, and contested sites of identity formation. Together, they exemplify what it means to move beyond play.
References
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(Nota: l’edizione originale è 1994; questa è la versione inglese rivista più citata.)
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Author’s Info
Alessandra Micalizzi
SAE Institute Milano
a.micalizzi@sae.edu
Fabrizio Festa
Conservatorio di Matera
fabrizio.festa@conservatoriomatera.it
Claudio Pomo
Politecnico di Bari
claudio.pomo@poliba.it
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.