There is No Such Thing as "Video Games"

We have argued extensively that there is “no such thing as a gamer”, since there is no essential definition of a “video game”[i]. The term is a material designator only, which denotes an accidental or material overlap between specifically different preoccupations, not coincidence of type or kind.

Note how surgeons and murderers can both be said to cut flesh… but their occupations are entirely inverse, defined not by the temporal and local and tangible features of the act but its formal and final causality. Similarly, when we designate something a “game”, we do not indicate its form or concept[ii], that-which distinguishes it from other creations making use of the same matter… we merely point out the [accidental, material, instrumental, coincidental, extraneous] mode of its expression.

These considerations enable us to understand the extent to which contemporary discourse (coverage, reviews) surrounding “games” is entirely materially defined. Unlike other artistic mediums, few consumers of games conceive of an essential difference between offerings, indiscriminately consuming whatever they fancy superficially, with no thought paid to the abyssal difference between the concepts the medium has and IS being used to communicate. We are left with a purely-quantitative medium of equivalence wherein artworks are reduced to facile metrics; media and individuals alike fixate on subject-relative aspects of playing. Game-worlds are obfuscated behind an ideological membrane that reduces them to exchange value or “fun” and renders it impossible to register them as things in themselves.

References
[i] https://greendragoncvr.com/game-anatomy

[ii] https://greendragoncvr.com/wtf-is-a-gamer