The International Journal of Computer Game Research

Our Mission - To explore the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming.

Game Studies is a non-profit, open-access, crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research, web-published several times a year at www.gamestudies.org.

Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games, but any previously unpublished article focused on games and gaming is welcome. Proposed articles should be jargon-free, and should attempt to shed new light on games, rather than simply use games as metaphor or illustration of some other theory or phenomenon.



Game Studies is published with the support of:

The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet)

The Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and the Social Sciences

Blekinge Institute of Technology

IT University of Copenhagen

Lund University

If you would like to make a donation to the Game Studies Foundation, which is a non-profit foundation established for the purpose of ensuring continuous publication of Game Studies, please contact the Editor-in-Chief or send an email to: foundation at gamestudies dot org
Disciplining Games

by James Malazita, Rebecca Rouse, Gillian Smith

This article offers a counter-reading of game research's oft-deployed concept of interdisciplinarity, highlighting how interdisciplinary commitments can serve to support neoliberal formations of the university and undermine political scholarship as much as they can serve as a liberatory framework. [more]
Thinking Ecologically with Battlefield 2042

by Lawrence May, Ben Hall

User-generated paratexts shared in online player communities associated with Battlefield 2042 (DICE, 2021) demonstrate the game’s entanglement with the climate crisis, and reveal the multiplicity of player encounters with different forms of ecological thought. [more]
“If You Can See Something for its True Essence”: Exploring the Origins of the Personal Computer in TIS-100

by Gregory Phipps

This article explores how TIS-100 depicts interconnections between the cultural context of early programming methods and philosophical questions about the essential basis of the relationship between individuals and computers. [more]
Death Road to Capitalism: Business Ontology of the Zombie Apocalypse in Death Road to Canada

by Caighlan Smith

This article examines how zombie apocalypse management game, Death Road to Canada, highlights the capitalism- sustaining business ontology embedded in the zombie game genre more broadly. I advance this argument through a reading of the video game zombie as both living and dead labor, which allows simultaneously pro- and anti- capitalist gameplay. [more]
In Pursuit of Ourselves: Roleplaying (Self-)Control and the Doppelgänger Trope in Videogames

by Erick Verran

This article first identifies the doppelgänger trope in videogames as a battle against the self through a consideration of self-recognition, othering and the ambiguous object-subject hierarchy implicit in roleplaying videogames. The player, controlling a player-character, is described as themself a kind of ghostly doppelgänger haunting the avatar. [more]

 

©2001 - 2024 Game Studies Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the journal, except for the right to republish in printed paper publications, which belongs to the authors, but with first publication rights granted to the journal. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings.