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11 - Games are not what you think

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 December 2025

David Myers
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Summary

This chapter claims that games and game play come before culture, before language, and before the sort of human thought we call referential and symbolic. Games and game play are integrally connected to each of these: as proto-culture, proto-language, and proto-reference. But games and game play are also different from these. During game play, seduced by its aesthetic pleasures, we return to a proto-state of mind and a proto-experience: liminality. A critical function of game play is then to separate itself from what our non-proto-state of mind thinks game play is, to separate our selfish and culturally determined desires from our more universal aesthetic experience of being human, of being natural.

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Games are not
The difficult and definitive guide to what video games are
 , pp. 161 - 180
Publisher: Manchester University Press
First published in: 2025

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