What's important to a game?: Adding a Hierarchy to the Cybermedia Model

This paper argues for the necessity of adding a hierarchy to Aarseth and Calleja’s Cybermedia model (2015). The cybermedia model describes games as the player’s perspective on a cybermedia object, which consists of materiality, a sign system and a mechanical system. The author’s description, as well as visual representation, of the model suggests an equal importance of these three dimensions. We claim that such symmetry is unattainable. Through the exploration of the three dimensions relationships to one another, we will show that the mechanical system has a higher importance to games than the model’s other dimensions. Through this argument, we arrive at an improved weighted cybermedia model. This weighted model enables us to explore the ontology of concepts such as ports and clones of games, amongst other things.