Play vs. Procedures

Through the theories of play by Gadamer (2004) and Henricks (2006), I will show how the relationship between play and game can be understood as dialectic and disruptive, thus challenging understandings of how the procedures of games determine player activity and vice versa. As such, I posit some analytical consequences for understandings of digital games as procedurally fixed (Boghost, 2006; Flannagan, 2009; Bathwaite & Sharp, 2010). That is, if digital games are argued to be procedurally fixed and if play is an appropriative and dialectic activity, then it could be argued that the latter affects and alters the former, and vice versa. Consequently, if the appointed procedures of a game are no longer fixed and rigid in their conveyance of meaning, qua the appropriative and dissolving nature of play, then understandings of games as conveying a fixed meaning through their procedures are inadequate in capturing the complexity of how games convey their meaning to the player and how players interpret and configure this meaning.