Games as art: playtime over

Truncated, repetitive, coin-operated nihilism? To a point. The 'insufferable philosophy of our time' is not a single object or symbol, but an array of signs and symbols placed at odds with each other, made to wage a type of war we aren’t told how to engage with. We were told that play would desensitise, depoliticise and disconnect us, and now games are presented by the museum as the latest historical and contemporary cultural artefacts. So what happened? [Introduction]