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It shows further that contemporary discourse in computer game studies addresses computer game/play as if it still was the romantic form of play rooted in the paradigm of liberalism.

Schiller, Huizinga and Caillois) are circling around the notion of play as ‘free’, which emerged in parallel with the philosophy of liberalism and respective socio-economic developments such as the industrialization and the rise of the nation state. The article shows that romantic play theories (e.g. The argument is grounded in Claus Pias’ idea of games as always a product of their time in terms of economic, political and cultural history. This article introduces the juxtaposed notions of liberal and neo-liberal gameplay in order to show that, while forms of contemporary game culture are heavily influenced by neo-liberalism, they often appear under a liberal disguise. According to this sequence, the videogame’s position as a ‘game’ in the historicized evolution of culture is mainly metaphorical, while at the same time its artifactuality, dynamic system structure, time-critical strategic input requirements and aporetically rhematic aesthetics allow it to be discovered as a conceptually stable but empirically transient uniexistential phenomenon that currently thrivesbut may soon die out. Videogames are theorized as ‘games,’ ‘puzzles,’ ‘stories,’ and ‘aesthetic artifacts’ (or ‘artworks’), which produces a geneontological sequence of the videogame as a singular species of culture, Artefactum ludus ludus, or ludom for short. To counteract these problems this dissertation establishes a geneontological research methodology that enables the identification of the videogame in relation to its cultural surroundings. Such generalizations make it increasingly difficult to comprehend how the instances of this phenomenon actually work, which in turn generates pragmatic problems: the lack of an applicable identification of the videogame hinders its study, play, and everyday conceptualization. The persistent surfacing of novel ludic forms continues to expand the conceptual range of ‘games’ and ‘videogames,’ which has already lead to anxious generalizations within academic as well as popular discourses. Along with the phenomenon’s proliferation the aspects that constitute its identity have become more and more challenging to determine, however. Within the last few decades, the videogame has become an important media, economic, and cultural phenomenon.