EXCERPT Games are more culturally important than they have ever been. As an example, the videogame industry now generates more revenue than the music and film industries combined. The prevalence of videogames raises some interesting philosophical questions. One of the most common is: Can games be art? However, all too often, because of the outsize prevalence of videogames, this question is limited to whether they can be art, at the expense of the various other forms of games played throughout history and in the present. This inevitably turns into a comparison between videogames and cinema, which invites us to analyse their artistic merits purely in terms of visual beauty or narrative complexity, and on that basis find videogames wanting. However, the increasing cultural significance of games is not limited to that of videogames. There are also board games and tabletop roleplaying games (e.g., Kolejka, Twilight Imperium, and Dungeons and Dragons), whose popularity and wider cultural influence has grown steadily over the last few decades. If we want to ask the question of whether games qua games are art, or to put it another way, whether the features specific to games can be seen as being artistic, then we first need to ask what actually makes something a game, or what the characteristic features of games are. This turns out to be a far more difficult question than it initially appears.…