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Game Studies
computer game research
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Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games, but any previously unpublished article focused on games and gaming is welcome.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
by Ana Bahia
This article explores Flash as a minor videogame platform that enabled independent creators to produce critical and poetic games. Focusing on Molleindustria and Alienmelon, this analysis examines their expressive oeuvres through an Art History methodological lens. [more]by DA Hall
This article argues for an analytic practice in game studies that accounts for videogames’ participation in the long histories of genre. This approach recognizes the historically and culturally-specific interventions games make into aesthetic traditions rather than assuming a naive reflection of ideological structures. [more]by Patrick Munnelly
This article does a comprehensive qualitative study on the field of Queer Game Studies, using Social Semiotic Analysis, Constant Comparison Analysis and Keywords-in-Context. Featuring Twitch streamers and the video game Dead by Daylight, this article reviews the language used by “gaymers” to review LGBTQ gaming practices. [more]by Moritz Wischert-Zielke
This essay explores how indie games like Shrinking Pains, The Longest Walk and The Psychotic Bathtub practice demarginalization in the context of mental health depiction. Using the lens of “mindspacing,” it shows that the titles not just tell different stories but reimagine the culturally dominant forms of play as practices of self-care. [more]by Taylore Nicole Woodhouse
Drawing from archives of Black-targeted newspapers, this article diversifies histories of the golden age of arcades by examining how Black Americans encountered and understood arcades and video games in the 1980s and 1990s. [more]