A new look at digital gaming and the aesthetics of play

 

Play is a very interesting thing. Somewhat strangely, though, play is not studied as often as are the consequences of play.

 

The reason for this becomes clear when we try to study play: it is a very hard thing to study. Play resists our scrutiny in characteristically slippery ways. One of these is the degree to which play is dependent on and determined by paradox. In The Nature of Computer Games (2003), I spent a great deal of time focusing on the paradoxical nature of play. In that book, I classified paradoxes according to commonly accepted categories, examined common features of those categories, and concluded that paradoxes—and most particularly play-related paradoxes—are a form of self-reference.