What We Know About Games

Abstract

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.

The End of Casual: Long Live Casual

“…To this point, in a recent Games & Culture article, Coavoux, Boutet, and Zabban. (2017) argue that Game Studies as a field is dominated by research about specific kinds of games, often neglecting research into other kinds of games.…”

Women Representativity in Games

“…According to Deterding [5] games are not treated in literature as a single discipline but as an interdisciplinary field, and like most interdisciplinary studies, studies on games seek to answer new social and epistemic questions that arise with new technologies. Coavoux, Boutet and Zabban [6] add, according to their study, which analyzes some of the largest journals on game studies, which is a highly interdisciplinary field, bringing together academics from literary disciplines, cultural studies, sciences [6]. Much of this diversity is due to the complexity by which video games are composed that involve from the technologies employed in development the platforms that will run the game, as well as developers, players and advertising, thus allowing the studies on games explore different perspectives.…”

How to define games and why we need to

“…This leads to other problems, as Fifty Years On stumbles over hurdles that others have already overcome. For example, the definition excludes zero-player games (Björk and Juul, 2012) and games that do not require "electronic visual displays," like the Dark Room Sex Game (Korsgaard et al, 2008; see also Karhulahti, 2015b) or games in the Audio Game Hub (Sonnar Interactive Ltd, 2016). Perhaps there are good reasons not to include these in videogames, but it is hard to tell why, when no reasons are given.…”