Ludosis in Video Game Ontology or How to Live within a Mess

From its very beginning, the field of game studies is haunted by the question of video game ontology: what is a game and what are its fundamental components? Numerous authors, such as Ian Bogost and Alex Gekker, have written on the impossibility of establishing an exhaustive ontology of games. At the same time, game design frameworks, such as MDA or SSM, are being continuously developed, being ontological models themselves, designed for practical application. Striving to compare extant models, many authors in game studies employ the term “ontology” in an uncritical manner, haphazardly inheriting meanings from different disciplines: ranging from philosophy to technical fields. In order to work through the resulting contradictions, the article proposes an overhaul of the video game ontology project, taking into account its roots in computer science, borrowing the concept of conceptualization from the latter—and using this concept to replace the pursuit to pin down the fundamental metaphysics of video games. Drawing from Ian Bogost’s “flat video game ontology” and the post-humanities, the article argues for the necessity of “democratizing” video game metaphysics—so that static models and fundamental definitions are surpassed by mutable conceptualizations made by multiple actors involved in the construction of games (or in their “ludosis”). By analogy with “infra-language” of actor-network theory, the article offers a “ludosis-language”, which can be employed to juxtapose, modify, and construct different ontological models of video games. A project of an interactive platform called LUDOSIS is also described, in order to outline a possible operationalization of the ludosis-language.