Game Studies Now, History of Science Then

Lowood, Henry

doi:10.1177/1555412005281404

Cited by 14 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…In the first issue of Games & Culture , in 2006, Henry Lowood compares the current development of game studies as a research field to the emergence of the history of science as a discipline during the 20th century (Lowood, 2006). Both fields took shape via externalization .…”

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confidence: 99%

What We Know About Games

2016

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This article proposes a reflexive approach on the scientific production in the field of game studies in recent years. It relies on a sociology of science perspective to answer the question: What are game studies really about? Relying on scientometric and lexicometric tools, we analyze the metadata and content of a corpus of articles from the journals Games Studies and Games & Culture and of Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) proceedings. We show that published researches have been studying only a limited set of game genres and that they especially focus on online games. We then expose the different ways game studies are talking about games through a topic model analysis of our corpus. We test two hypotheses to explain the concentration of research on singular objects: path dependence and trading zone. We describe integrative properties of the focus on common objects but stress also the scientific limits met by this tendency.

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confidence: 99%

What We Know About Games

2016

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“…The first emerges in light of past and ongoing efforts across the wider gaming and new media research community to challenge stereotypical views of game, play and new media such as waste of time, of money, and entertainment-centered (e.g. Boellstorff, 2006;Castronova, 2005;Bogost, 2006;Fine, 1983;Lowood, 2006;Malaby, 2007;Mayra, 2006;Pearce, 2006, Turner, 2006a, Yee, 2006. Our first goal was not so much to justify the study of games and new media practice in China itself, rather to provide a new vantage point to consider the mutual reliance of game play and the production of value and meaning.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Promise of Play: A New Approach to Productive Play

Lindtner

2011

Games and Culture

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Games are woven into webs of cultural meaning, social connection, politics, and economic change. This article builds on previous work in cultural, new media, and game studies to introduce a new approach to productive play, the promise of play. This approach analyzes games as sites of cultural production in times of increased transnational mediation and speaks to the formation of identity across places. The authors ground their explorations in findings from ethnographic research on gaming in urban China. The spread of Internet access and increasing popularity of digital entertainment in China has been used as an indicator of social change and economic progress shaped by global flows. It has also been described as being limited by local forces such as tight information control. As such, gaming technologies in China are ideal to ask broader questions about digital media as sites of production at the intersection of local contingencies and transnational developments.

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“…They are not simply variations of something else but a thing of their own, a thing worthy of academic study. It might even be that the disagreements and struggles with self-identification are a normal part of an academic discipline trying to define itself (Lowood, 2006).…”

Section: A Brief Look At Game Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-time hermeneutics: meaning-making in ludonarrative digital games

Arjoranta¹

2018

Preprint

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Digital games are a relatively new medium. While they have been around for over half a century, they only became a major part of the culture relatively late. Like every other medium before, games also have struggled to find an expressive language of their own. Some of the expressive styles of other media are still relevant for games, but new ones have to be created specifically for videogames.This dissertation is a study of how ludonarrative videogames, videogames that combine game elements with narrative elements, express and convey meaning. This is done as part of game studies, a multidisciplinary approach to studying games. The purpose is twofold: to build a foundation for better understanding of meaning-making in games, and to provide game designers with tools for analyzing issues related to meaning.This study uses philosophical tools to analyze meaning in games. The philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer is used to compare the meaning-making in games to the interpretation of works of art. The theory of the interpretive process is based on the idea of the hermeneutic circle. Wittgenstein’s concept of language-games is used in examining how games should be defined and how their relations to each other should be understood. These philosophical methods are combined with the study of procedurality, narrativity and players.This study shows that ludonarrative games are procedural systems that are interpreted both during gameplay and as a part of the surrounding cultural context. The result of this interpretation is neither predetermined by the game designer nor fixed during gameplay, but potentially open for endless reinterpretation as players interact with the game in new ways and as the cultural context changes. In order to convey meaning, ludonarrative games can borrow expressive tools from other media, for example by using perspective in the way it is used in cinema.Additionally, this study provides guidelines for designing meaning. It is shown how meaning can be used as a game mechanic, and how games contain unique ways of expressing things that would be hard to convey in other media.

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Game Studies Now, History of Science Then

Cited by 14 publications

References 2 publications

What We Know About Games

What We Know About Games

The Promise of Play: A New Approach to Productive Play

Real-time hermeneutics: meaning-making in ludonarrative digital games

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