oh, yeah I get what you mean, I was thrown by the framing of
metrics.
That abstract makes perfect sense in a very specific context, which is: it's using the language and tools established by prior fields of study as lenses through which the medium of video games can be analyzed. It's not written with the expectation that a reader understands the piece in isolation (or even that the reader understand the piece by reading it linearly), but is intended to be in dialog with other existing pieces of academic writing. That the opening seems to obtusely reference liminality without defining it seems like shoddy writing, but keep reading and liminality is defined ... four paragraphs later, for some reason. In a sense, you're supposed to just read it expecting to be confused and then bounce around. It's not literature. An analog in computing might be reading man pages or RFC's or whitepapers: stylistically obtuse at first, but each format starts to make sense once you've read a handful of them and have learned the language patterns and the most widely cited cross-references. Also a lot of it is just self-aggrandizing bullshit. (I enjoy this piece btw, and had not read it before.)
That's kinda why I like stuff like the Atlantic pieces; those pieces are written to stand up independently, and don't need the support of many prior writings to make sense.
In my last comment I was going to say something about foundational academic texts, namely Huizinga's "Homo Ludens", which the piece you just cited mentions almost right out the gate:
> There is a long history of association between war and play, as mapped out initially by Johan Huizinga, who argued that both share an essential identity in their earliest history: “Play is battle and battle is play” (89).
Homo Ludens is, to me, more accessible than a lot of other games writing because it's foundational, so it doesn't require a lot of prior knowledge to comprehend. The thing that's weird about games writing is that the prior knowledge cited by a lot of games writing is ... not about games; it's often writing from anthropology, or sociology, or critical film theory, etc.
My all-time favorite publication for intelligent games writing for a general audience was Kill Screen, but that project collapsed and is no longer in print. They have ebooks on Amazon still. I think my favorite single piece from them was an interview in issue 5 with Tetsuya Mizuguchi, the designer of Rez and The Tetris Effect: https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Screen-5-Sound-Issue-ebook/dp/B0...
that interview used to be available online as a pdf, but I can't find it any more.
he talks about celebrities as symbols and the evolution of celebrity as a concept and how it intersects with games. For me that was an incredibly mind-blowing piece. Nothing has ever come close to the quality of that publication. It struck the perfect level of sophistication and accessibility that has been completely unmatched since.