Refining and Redefining "Game Studies" (original) (raw)

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