The Semiotics of computer games is a more or less entirely new discipline or perspective. Its newness is due not only to the fairly recent emergence of the computer game as an artefact of popular culture, but also because such games have not been systematically taken into consideration by semiotic studies until quite recently. This latter claim may seem a rather curious one, since computer games are apparently de jure an object of semiotic pertinence: a hybrid, technologically mediated form of expression that both reflects, and motivates, many important tendencies in contemporary culture; in cinema, dance, music, art, literature and science, to name but a few. Its logics and practices are highly contagious and are infecting not only the more immediately interactive material and practical spheres of cultural meaning production, but also the more ephemeral, imaginary and experiential spheres of our everyday lives too. However, we may also ask ourselves if this apparent lack of interest might not lie in a fear that the traditional model for semiotic analysis-the text-developed originally to interrogate and understand traditional literary aesthetic/ artistic artefacts and other, more everyday forms of expression, is not de facto applicable to computer games? Indeed, most theoretical research so far in the field of computer games and gaming seems to have been carried on outside the confines of the international semiotic community (more strictly defined), and within a broader conceptual framework that builds on a distinction between narratological and ludological approaches to games and gaming. There is, however, a second such conceptual framework we believe is of particular relevance for semioticians wishing to deal with this complex empirical object. This is a framework that builds on a dynamic distinction between text and practice. As an introduction to this special number of E|C we shall offer a few brief remarks on the nature of the relationship between the two conceptual frameworks mentioned above. With this special number our aim is to develop and strengthen interdisciplinary ties, cooperation and dialogue between computer game Semiotics on the one hand, and other disciplines that deal with the same object from different or analogue perspectives, on the other.