What Is It Like to Be a Player? The Qualia Revolution in Game Studies

Abstract

The article aims to explore the reasons why the discipline of game studies requires a shift toward player analysis. This can be done without leaving an object-oriented approach, thanks to the efforts of social ontology, a recent philosophical discipline that investigates social facts. The integration of social ontology into the research on games will be displayed through some mind experiments on the nature of the paradigmatic example of rules. The result of this integration leads to give up the reductionism shared by the majority of game scholars.

Gamebooks and branching narratives in education: fostering sustainability competences to promote positive social change

“…Tree graphs such this describe the dialectic between the tree of possible pathways within the pages of a gamebook created by the designer and the single one performed by the player. They are simple and clear tools to represent and communicate the minimum ontology shared by ludic phenomena and constituted by the relation between the structure (game), the agency (play), and the medium (toy, see Mosca, 2017).…”