Existential ludology: Computer games as worlds
- Dec 9, 2025
- 2 min read
Leino, O. T., & Möring, S. (2025). Existential ludology: Computer games as worlds. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Games (pp. 90-108). Routledge.
In this chapter, we propose existential ludology as a general framework and a method for understanding computer games and play. We cross-expose insights from a branch of game studies known as ludology with insights from a branch of continental philosophy known as existentialism. Our resulting approach is ludological in the sense that it is faithful to the technological specificity of computer games, and existential in the sense that it considers the player’s being in the world of the game as a baseline for the analysis. We identify central tenets of existentialism and ludology and observe their initial incompatibility. However, we find that while ludology has, through its extensive use of classical play theory, an existential basis, it has nevertheless overlooked the material specificity of computer games because of its insistence on projecting the essence of gameness on computer games. We observe that materiality and gameness can be reconciled, and doing so allows arriving at the notion of a “game world”, and observing that play is one activity among many one can do in computer game worlds. We argue that play in computer games is by no means self-evident or automatic and cannot be taken for granted; the essence of computer games is not ludic, but existential. This observation allows (re)introducing the distinction between play and non-play into the analysis of what happens in the world of the game. Following this observation and building on Heidegger’s notion of authenticity, we are in a position to distinguish between undifferentiated beings (“being played by the game”), inauthentic beings (“playing the game”), and authentic beings (“playing-in-the-world-of-the-game”). We conclude by engaging in a contemporary debate in the aesthetics of computer games and by reflecting on the implications of our findings for game ontology, hermeneutics, game criticism, and game politics.