Game-Studies

It might not be immediately apparent that to make paperclips, you need to take over the stock market. But every step in Universal Paperclips follows logically from the next. Soon you will be developing more effective trading algorithms so you can make a bigger profit. As long as you are working within capitalism, having more money means having more resources for things, including making paperclips. Of course, that is true only as long as you’re working within capitalism. ...

A bunch of role-playing game scholars wrote a handbook for role-playing game studies. It’s published by Routledge, but as an academic handbook, it’s fairly expensive. For Free RPG Day, the editors suggested that the authors would share their authors copies of the chapters they wrote – according to the publishing agreement, authors can share their own versions of the texts, but only the their own chapters and only the versions that precede the professional layout. So if you are interested in what we wrote and don’t care about how pretty it looks, here’s most of the chapters as author’s copies. ...

There are, I think, some things best expressed by games, as opposed to other media. When I say ‘games,’ I mostly mean videogames, but some of this probably applies to other games as well. I don’t think these are necessarily qualities of games themselves, but of how we currently develop games; nevertheless, I think these apply at least to games as we now know them. These qualities mostly come back to two things that games have and most other media don’t (or have less): procedurality and interactivity. Games consist of processes and players interact with them. Other things can also consist of processes and be interactive, but games are currently the most prominent example of both. ...

I read a lot of texts on computers and games from the humanities and social sciences perspectives. They are usually non-technical papers that deal with the human side of computing. Because of the context, there is still a lot of discussion on computation, data, digital systems and other more technical aspects. While reading those papers, I’ve noticed an unfortunate tendency to treat computers as black boxes with unknown or magical operations within, especially among the humanities scholars.1 ...

After reading game studies for years, there are a few issues that I regularly encounter and that I find problematic. I thought about writing a more thorough paper about these issues, but that would take more time than I currently have. The issues I mention below are also pretty diverse, so maybe the only thing they have in common is that they’re issues that I regularly see in game studies papers. ...

What do players do when they can’t talk to each other directly? Argue on the forums, it seems to be. We studied the forum users of the popular card game Hearthstone, looking at how they negotiated the use of emotes. Players argued, negotiated, ranted and preached about the proper use of the emotes, frequently disagreeing on what they actually meant in different contexts. Some players seemed to long for a set meaning for the different emotes, but there didn’t seem to be any way to reach a consensus on what that meaning would be, since different people used them differently. ...