God Is a Game Designer: Accelerating 'Existential Ludology'

This paper argues that existentialist frameworks, which emphasize thrownness, formlessness, and the denial of god as a source of meaning, are fundamentally at odds with computer games, which are well-formed artifacts designed by skilled individuals and entered into voluntarily by players. To resolve this tension, the author proposes an accelerationist extension of the "existential ludology" project, drawing on occasionalism, the theological view that God is the original cause of events and operates within moments of causation. The central question is whether one can simultaneously attend to a game's material existence and emergent "worldness" while recognizing the designer as an arbitrator of meaning, imagining the designer as a Malebranchian watchmaker whose agency appears within cause-and-effect relations.

The paper grounds its argument in several motivating observations. Players often experience games as self-contained worlds, open-world titles frequently produce emergent events that designers did not foresee, and games admit natural-scientific explanations at multiple levels of abstraction, from hard-coded rules to platform studies. At the same time, the author notes that games are engineered products, often refined by quality-assurance teams specifically to eliminate formlessness, and that players enter them voluntarily rather than being thrown into them. These differences are used to diagnose why materiality-centered existential accounts sometimes produce strained claims about intended versus unintended features.

The analysis focuses on two phenomena. The first is transgressive, boundary-seeking play, which the author compares to religious seeking and to experiences of disillusionment that might resemble being abandoned by the designer-god, raising questions about transcendence and the balance of power among author, material, and user. The second is the ambiguity between bug and feature, illustrated through the City of Heroes incident in which a player was pursued by an angry community for playing by rules he believed were valid. The paper questions whether community hermeneutics, organized theorycrafting, or platform-studies methods can reliably determine how a game is meant to be played. The work is primarily conceptual and philosophical, relying on a bibliography spanning game studies, phenomenology, theology, and critical theory rather than empirical data.