Snider, Gaming as a Paradigm for Academic Debate, 1982 (original) (raw)
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Refining and Redefining "Game Studies"
Academia Letters, 2021
Since its appearance around the late 1990s and early 2000s, "Game Studies" has pretty much come to mean the study of video games. At the same time, the term "Game Theory" has become ambiguous and context-dependent, meaning either theorizing about video games, or its older, original meaning referring to the mathematical modeling of rational decision-making and strategic interactions, as found in the work of mathematicians like John Von Neumann and John Nash. Certainly, there is good reason to suggest that the mathematical Game Theory should also be a part of anything we call "Game Studies", as well as the study of the wide variety of games that exist beyond video games; and it is precisely this landscape that I wish to briefly survey here. How did video games come to dominate the term "Game Studies"? In the early days the study of video games was establishing its legitimacy and seeking to become distinct from other disciplines like Film Studies. It shared many things in common with Film Studies, particularly from the late 1990s onward, when video games increasingly began adopting cinematic conventions, such as photorealistic graphics, three-dimensional worlds displayed on-screen, cut-scenes, opening title sequences and end credits sequences, and so forth; the high-profile games of the time seemed to aspire to become more cinematic, rather than become more like board games, card games, or other kinds of games. Around the same time, video game scholarship turned to the theorists of Play, namely Johann Huizinga, Roger Caillois, and Brian Sutton-Smith. Much of their writings applied to games of all kinds, and sometimes even more broadly to gamelike situations; but their work was easily adapted to the study of video games. Within the study of video games, there was also a variety of ways to refer to the subject of study; not only was there "video games" and "videogames" (considering them a peripheral technology like videotape or videodiscs), there was also "electronic games", "computer games", and "digital games"; with "electronic games" broad enough to include LED-based
Media and Communication, 2021
The article explores the limitations of the current scholarly game studies (GS) field. Its central presuppositions are (1) that there are certain attributes broadly understood as “GS” by those writing in or adjacent to the field; (2) that those attributes are historically rooted in an attempt to disassociate videogames from other types of electronic (and later—digital) media; and that (3) the preconditions that have led to this split are currently moot. In the first section of this article, I elaborate on these presuppositions through reading GS as a historically rooted field, centred around the videogame artefact. Following, by examining the notion of being ‘against’ something in academic work, I move to my central claim for the article: that maintaining this conception of GS is counterproductive to the state of contemporary videogames scholarship and that adopting a post-dualistic and post-humanities stance will greatly contribute to the broadening of the field. I break down this ...
No Worries? Game Research in Denmark 1984-2014
Cultures of Computer Game Concerns
However narrow or wide its demarcation might be, following the establishment of game studies as an organized, interdisciplinary field (cf. Aarseth, 2001) and the establishment of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) in 2003 (Di-GRA, 2012), the academic activity of studying the entertainment phenomena colloquially known as games has gained a visible presence in universities across the industrialized world. Although research on games and play has existed prior to this upspring of game studies (Bateson, 1955; Caillois, 1961; Huizinga, 1971; Avedon, 1971; Sutton-Smith, 1997), the demarcation of game studies as a field of study runs in parallel with the relative popularity and economic success of the digitally-mediated games in software packages usually known as video/computer/digital games (Aarseth, 2003, p. 1). The increase in academic institutions that employ scholars who research games and gamers therefore motivates a retrospective that traces the history of computer game research. Concurrently, it is prudent to uncover how particular histories of game research occur in regional and local contexts (Wolf & Iwatani, 2015; Liboriussen & Martin, 2016). As scholars situated in a Danish context, we look backwards into the local history of Danish computer games research across the different national academic institutions that have or have had scholars who studied the phenomena known as computer games. Of course, research focused on computers and computer games did not start in 2001, but some five decades earlier. The first research effort involving a computer game was Alexander Shafto "Sandy" Douglas' doctoral dissertation on humancomputer interaction (Douglas, 1954) at the University of Cambridge, in which he developed one of the very first the first computer games, Noughts and Crosses or OXO (Douglas, 1952), a tic-tac-toe simulator, in 1952. While there has been scientific work on games in the decades that followed (such as Ken Thomson's famous initial development of Unix in 1969, motivated
Controversies: Historicising the Computer Game
ABSTRACT Games which involve historical topics have always been a staple of digital games, but at the same time they have often caused controversy and debate. This paper traces some of the pitfalls inherent to the creation of historical games, as well as trying to reach an understanding of how a history game can be defined. Throughout the paper, we investigate how some aspects of history can be problematic, and how others have been made more difficult by a lack of definition or an expectation that all historical games operate on the same intellectual level. We also examine how controversial games have coped with difficult subjects, and relate this to the development of complexity and scope within gaming. Author Keywords Gaming, History, Historical Gaming, Games Studies, Digital Games, DiGRA, War Games.