One would be pointing out the obvious if one were to note that digital games are produced and played within specific sociocultural contexts that, both as technological artefacts and as cultural texts, will inevitably reflect the ideologies and worldviews that structure those contexts, and that, furthermore, they can only be understood within, and in relation to, those contexts. Accordingly, if we aspire to understand the existential significance of digital games, we should always approach them in relation to the historical and sociocultural contexts within which they are developed, understanding them as products and reflections of these contexts.

In this chapter, we will consider digital games as products of the system of thought that emerged with the Industrial Revolution in eighteenthcentury Europe, a system that—as a techno-socio-cultural organisation of the world—continues to hold sway across what we call ‘the West’. The interlinked and mutually determining elements of this organisation include industrially motivated technological development, a capitalist economy, and an individualist notion of subjectivity and selfhood that finds its first thorough articulation in post-Kantian Romanticism. As products of this episteme, it is hardly surprising that digital games reflect these elements of their context. Not only are they technological products produced and consumed within a capitalist economy, but they also reproduce, and are structured on the assumption of, the liberal notion of the self that has dominated Western thinking in the era of capitalism (Möring & Leino, 2016).