Despite the pervasive rhetorics of immersion and embodiment found in industrial and social discourses, playing a video game is an exercise in non-linearity. The pervasiveness of trial and error mechanics, unforgiving game over screens, loading times, minute tweakings of options and settings, should lead us to consider video games as a medium that cannot eschew fragmentation. Every Game is an Island is an analysis and a critique of grey areas, dead ends and extremities found in digital games, an exploration of border zones where play and non-play coexist or compete. Riccardo Fassone describes the complexity of the experience of video game play and brings integral but often overlooked components of the gameplay experience to the fore, in an attempt to problematize a reading of video games as grandiosely immersive, all-encompassing narrative experiences. Through the analysis of closures and endings, limits and borders, and liminal states, this field-advancing study looks at the heart of a medium starting from its periphery.

Riccardo Fassone is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Torino, Italy, where he works on the history of the Italian video game industry. He is among the founders of GAME. The Italian Journal of Game Studies has published several articles and book chapters on the history and theory of video games, and their intersections with other media. He has a background in film and media studies and has worked as visiting researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and as research fellow at The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, NY.