What does it mean to “understand” games? What does it mean to have a critical
discussion about them? What does it mean to be literate, or even fluent, in games? These
questions are the driving motivators of this research. As I will show, there isn’t really a
consensus of what it means to understand games. When we ask people involved in their
design and production, or scholars from the nascent field of game studies, we learn that
they are also working on ways to figure it out. They point out the need for a unified
language and vocabulary for describing games (Costikyan, 1994; Kreimeier, 2002) as
well as a need for creating spaces for contributing deep, critical knowledge about them
(Mäyrä, 2005). Even journalism, through a movement called “new games journalism”, is
looking for alternative ways to explore game design, play, and culture. There is need for
a space where ideas about games can be created, proposed, built upon and linked to
existing knowledge that has been developed. Thus, my motivation is to make sense of
what it means to understand games.