Enter the Disagreement Matrix or "Let's Talk Ontology, Game Studies"

This paper argues that game studies needs a clearer account of its own foundational assumptions, proposing a "disagreement matrix" as a way to map its disciplinary landscape. Drawing on Craig's (1999) model for communication studies, the author suggests that the field's disciplines can be identified and then crossed against one another to reveal the specific points at which scholars disagree. The paper shifts the central question from "what is a game?" to "what types of enquiry are we performing and what assumptions underlie them?", framing the question of whether game studies has a unitary or fragmented academic identity as the core issue.

The proposed mapping is illustrated with a proof of concept built on conference tracks from DiGRA and FDG. Five broad disciplines (humanities, social sciences, design, computer programming, and game production) would yield a 5 x 5 matrix, which the author considers more tractable than the 11 sub-disciplines identified in the survey by Quandt et al. (2015), which would produce roughly 121 disagreement cells. The author notes that the matrices mask significant internal diversity within each discipline, that boundaries with psychology, sociology, anthropology, and engineering are increasingly permeable, and that issues such as gender cut across all disciplinary divisions.

As a remedy for this complexity, the paper proposes that scholars make their disciplinary ontologies explicit, meaning the concepts and relationships each field treats as real and relevant. The author argues that every discipline carries ontological commitments, and that much game studies work implicitly rests on more than one ontology, such as conceptions of players, design structure, or cognition. Explicit ontological declaration is presented as a precondition for productive interdisciplinary dialogue, with the real value lying in the structured disagreements that follow from it. The paper is a short extended abstract, so its proposals are offered as an agenda rather than as empirically tested findings.