ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a short extensional survey of the objects that are generally supposed to be included in the category of videogames. It then considers several positions that hold that videogames are video, games, narrative, and fiction. The chapter provides an account of games that excludes some videogames and then do the same for a technical notion of video, as well as narrative and fiction. It also discusses the stronger position that these criteria are not even disjunctively necessary, and that something could be a videogame even were it to have none of the disjuncts. The chapter offers some brief remarks for the hope of historical and intentional definitions of artifacts and their application for defining videogames. Two commonly discussed features are that videogames are, or at least can be fruitfully understood as, narratives or fictions. More plausible, however, is the claim that all videogames are fictions, in particular, interactive ones.
