Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>Although game studies are widely viewed as an interdisciplinary field, it is unclear how interdisciplinary they actually are. In response, this article reads scientometric data and game studies editorials, handbooks, and introductions through the lens of interdisciplinarity studies to assess game studies’ status as an interdiscipline. It argues that game studies show drivers and hurdles typical for interdisciplines. Yet instead of establishing themselves as the broad umbrella interdiscipline of digital game research, they are becoming one narrow cultural studies multidiscipline within the growing and diversifying field of game research and education. Researchers from fields like human–computer interaction or communication are abandoning game studies venues in favor of disciplinary ones—ironically thanks to game studies legitimizing game research. This article suggests that a design orientation and cross-disciplinary boundary objects such as middle range theories could help to broaden, deepen, and secure future interdisciplinary game research.</jats:p>

<jats:p>This article approaches the historiography of digital games by suggesting a categorization of four different genres that can be utilized in the presentation of the history of digital games: enthusiast, emancipatory, genealogical, and pathological. All of these genres are based on various conceptions of what is important in the history of digital games and to whom the history is primarily targeted. The article also evaluates the premises of the authors of the histories. The present article’s main objective is to create suggestions for a unique classification that would be especially suitable for the historiography of digital games.</jats:p>

<jats:p>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 &amp; 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.</jats:p>

<jats:p> The article aims to explore the reasons why the discipline of game studies requires a shift toward player analysis. This can be done without leaving an object-oriented approach, thanks to the efforts of social ontology, a recent philosophical discipline that investigates social facts. The integration of social ontology into the research on games will be displayed through some mind experiments on the nature of the paradigmatic example of rules. The result of this integration leads to give up the reductionism shared by the majority of game scholars. </jats:p>

<jats:p> This article initiates a provocation for a collective discussion of what we might call an unserious epistemology for the study and design of games. How can we find ways of taking the unseriousness of games seriously? Starting with the idea that most players take their games much less seriously than game studies scholars, I reflect on the importance of the idea of unseriousness for the theorization of gameplay as a sociocultural activity of last resort in a contemporary world defined by the grave seriousness of life. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Comparison of user experience between multiplayer digital games and board games is largely unexplored in the literature, with no instrument found to suitably measure user experience across game formats. This study explores the use of the Social Presence module of the Games Experience Questionnaire to measure user experience in a multiplayer board game involving 12 participants across 3 separate sessions. Scale analysis and correlation with semistructured interviews held with the participants suggest that the instrument is reliable and valid and can thus be used for measurement and comparison of user experience across game formats. The Games Experience Questionnaire can therefore be used to scale-up board game research by diminishing reliance on interviews as well as to assist in the choice between digital and nondigital implementation of gameplay forming part of an overarching story, such as in transmedial productions. </jats:p>

<jats:p> We address the subjective experience of social network gamers playing Restaurant City, a game hosted on Facebook. We adopted a netnographic approach to studying the culture of transient Internet communities shaping the player off-line communities. Fieldwork was conducted over the entire life span of the game (3 years). Data were analyzed using a qualitative thematic approach and the software EdEt. The results describe the evolution of the gaming experience through online interaction and its importance in everyday off-line life. Players were observed to play an important role in the production of social meanings associated with gaming and with the gaming community online and off-line. We discuss the implications of our findings regarding how the gaming process is a far more complex scenario than envisaged by a business vision based on acquisition, retention, and monetization. </jats:p>

<jats:p> The game designer Jason Rohrer has self-identified as an artist. By doing so enters his work into a critique process that, according to James Elkins, dates back to the Romantic period in which artists are evaluated by peers on an individualized basis according to the ideals and creative direction they produce in the form of written and verbal artifacts. Arthur Danto calls these artifacts “artistic identification” in his essay, “The Artworld,” written in 1964. The study applies this critique method to Rohrer’s work in the game medium and asks how it fares when subjected to what Howard Becker calls, “a continuous process of selection” through critique. It asks, finally, how can knowing this methodology help to elucidate the path for the eventual full-fledged integration of games into the Artworld. </jats:p>

<jats:p>This article looks at three narratological concepts—focalization, granularity, and the mode of narration—and explores how these concepts apply to games. It is shown how these concepts can be used as tools for creating meaning-effects, which are understood here as cognitive responses from the player. Focalization is shown to have a hybrid form in games. This article also explores the different types of narrators and granularities in games, and how these three concepts can be used to create meaning-effects. This is done by discussing examples from several games, for example, Assassin’s Creed III, Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas, and Civilization.</jats:p>

<jats:p> Although much has been written about the potential of games for historical representation and their status as historical texts, there is little research placing games into a broader “cultural memory” framework. In this article, I argue that one unique way games as a medium can participate in constructing cultural memory is by simulating historically situated structural metaphors. To do so, I first introduce the concept of cultural memory and link it to material culture studies. I argue that games can be cultural memory “objectivations,” but in order to fully analyze them in this respect insights from game studies, namely, the meaning potential of rules, need to be applied as well. I then discuss how three board games, 1830: Railways and Robber Barons , Age of Steam, and Empire Builder simulate the structural metaphors identified by Wolfgang Schivelbusch that were used by contemporary observers to understand the experiential changes wrought by the railroad. I close by arguing that this type of research is valuable in that it opens up new understandings of how games influence the way a culture thinks about and remembers its past. </jats:p>