ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of transmedial games appears to be widespread—think of the number of tabletop games, card games, and sports that all have videogame versions. Using the ontology of musical works as a model to talk about the ontology of games is helpful, but many of the problems that haunt the ontology of musical works arise for the ontology of games. Jesper Juul suggests that games are transmedial just if they possess the same rules, though he offers little in support of this suggestion. To say that some game is transmedial is to say that two game-tokens are instances of the same game-type despite any difference in their respective media. The basic point of the skill set constraint is to recognize that the ability to play some games can be carried over across different media, while the ability to play other games cannot.
