The article is devoted to the reconstruction and critical analysis of the communicative and medialinguistic optics of video game consideration, presented in the monograph of the German digital media researcher A. Ensslin, “The Language of Gaming”. Video games have now become a legitimate part of the discursive field of electronic media, acting as a translator of meaningfully diverse meanings and concepts. The language of video games is multimodal and has a number of original semiotic structures, which distinguish it among other screen media and provide qualitatively new opportunities for the formation of narrative messages. A. Ensslin's monograph is the first fundamental study in the discourse of game studies, which comprehensively reveals the structures and modalities of video games language, relying on multimodal discourse analysis.

The polymorphic, techno-cultural nature of the object of study requires a variety of approaches and methods characteristic of media/game studies. The specific subjective optics of consideration creates the need to rely on the methods of multimodal and discourse analysis, as well as the methods of communicativism. The article systematically reveals and critically analyses the main ideas, concepts and research conclusions of A. Ensslin's monograph “The Language of Gaming”. The article identifies the substantive core of each chapter of the work, focuses on the strengths and weaknesses of the study. The author concludes that A. Ensslin's book “The Language of Gaming” is an important event in the interdisciplinary development of game studies, forming the contour of the linguistic and discursive direction of research into communicative possibilities of video games.