Games saturate our contemporary lifeworld. Entertainment media often center around games of competition and chance: Reality game shows test everything from knowledge, physicality, and romantic compatibility to drag, baking, and topiary in “last one standing” formats; fictional TV series, novels, and films regularly take games as a theme or motif;1 e-sports mark the expansion of sporting spectatorship into virtual worlds. Outside of entertainment, games serve as military training simulations,2 metaphors in economic theory, and a frame for political “races.” In our day-to-day lives, applications facilitating exercise, language learning, task management, and even sleeping adopt the ludic.3 Simultaneously, both so-called analog and digital game industries boom. Video games alone reportedly had 2.7 billion players in 2020.4
What to call this twenty-first-century prevalence of the game? Names abound: McKenzie Wark’s “gamespace,” Joost Raessens’s “ludification,” Eric Zimmerman’s “ludic century,” Steffen Walz and Sebastian Deterding’s “gameful world,” and Jaakko Stenros,...
