This thesis explores the activity of play as a form of narrative discourse. It is argued here that the game exists dyadically and to understand its textual form it is necessary to integrate play and its unique contribution into the meaning making process. Through differentiating the game between its existence as a conceptual object and its textual actualisation through play, the methods of embedding and generating narrative content can be better understood. Play as an appropriative and expressive act (Sicart, 2014; Henricks, 2015a) is justified within this dyadic understanding of the game's ontology, and a theoretical model is developed which illuminates it as a form of narrative discourse in the game text The thesis first interrogates the variety of ways in which games and play are understood through ontological, existential, and essentialist lenses. The discourse surrounding the application of these lenses is contextualised within an understanding of the digital fallacy (Stenros and Waern, 2011) which stipulates that with the advent of game studies, approaches towards the game concept were overwhelmingly object oriented. By extracting from these approaches the concept of affordances, the thesis addresses the concept of play as crucial to the generation of the game text through the appropriation of these affordances.