Hmm, the "Videogames are a mess" talk is fairly interesting. I can't help but wonder if the suggestions actually require the proposed metaphysics and ontology, though. A reductive physicalist, for example, could accept all your practical suggestions about how game studies ought to proceed by simply replacing all references to "object" or "unit" with "useful level of description" (few reductive physicalists think actually reducing everything to physics is a good way of understanding the world). Does the metaphysical distinction matter?

Actually, there are plenty of reductive physicalists who think exactly that... although perhaps at a higher level. Consider the current state of neuroscience, for example.

Anyway, it might be possible to ignore or bracket ontology, but it's still there all the same. For the moves I want to make, I can't see how it's not required philosophically, even if it then becomes McLuhan-like ground in practice.

I really enjoyed that paper. I was waiting for John Law to appear and he has been weighing heavily on mind as well. What a thinker and yet so straight to the point! The world is a mess but no we do not need to clean it up ;).

Yeah, I agree lots of scientists are reductive in practice, but my impression is most philosophers who hold the physicalist position have more nuanced views. Would the heretic who accepts object-oriented ontology as a way for humans to understand the world, while denying its metaphysical realism, have any non-metaphysical disagreements?

(And what about the one who accepts its realism, but via a different route, e.g. a G.E.-Moore-style commonsense realism that holds, roughly, that the things our intuition tells us exist actually do?)

Ah, ok Mark, I see where you are coming from now. Perhaps the objects of study might appeal to the hypothetical physicalist in a similar way, but their nature surely would not. I guess it won't surprise you to hear me suggest that "useful level of description" is not sufficient for me, because it says nothing about the ontological status of whatever level it is we are talking about.

That said, I'm not sure I agree that there are any suggestions in the paper anyway :)

Yeah, I'm thinking of the reductive physicalist who agrees with you that reduction is an unproductive and boring way of trying to understand the world. Given that, he looks for a plan B to actually use, and from that perspective a flat ontology is almost the natural one to pick. If everything interesting---cartridges, VCS joysticks, players, rooms, nation-states, films, rocks, love, elections, oral histories, rainforests---are equally non-real (they're all particles and particle interactions), it's not hard to invert it and treat them all as if they were equally real.