Media and games: an intermedial framework

This paper addresses the relationship between games and media and discusses to which extend games can be conceived as media, and how they should be studied as such. The paper proposes a revised version of Elleström’s intermedial framework that has been harnessed to better describe games. The framework acknowledges the heterogeneous nature of not only games but all media. Elleström’s framework allows us to address games as particular tangible objects in the world in a way that avoids normative assumptions about games in general as well as specific types of games such as digital or analog games. This framework has several usages. It can be applied in an analysis the relationship between different modalities in a single game; it can be used to compare different games; and finally, it can be used to discuss the similarities and differences between games and other media objects.