Game Studies

It is well known and acknowledged that the virtual world might add something significant to our life. But, why are online games (video games, computer games, and sometimes digital games) worth researching and necessary to study? What makes online games special? First of all, “for millions of us, computer games will be our point of entry into …[the] mediated and mediating world” and “the computer games industry is the most established of all sectors of emergent new media landscape.”1 In addition, as Edward Castronova put it, this world is “a genuine place of macroeconomic activity” and it can “affect macroeconomic condition on Earth” (49). Moreover, it is the place where “two interesting areas—networks and play—that have historically represented threats to or departure from capitalism”2 meet, thus the place heavily loaded with political implications. In short, it is more or less imperative for us to see the emerging virtual world of online games as a technologically, economically, and politically sensitive area.

As a new media technology itself, computer games are representative of the transitions to new phenomena: from centralized media to ubiquitous media, from interpretation to experience, from spectatorship to immersion, from work to play, etc. In other words, the study of online games includes the questions of agency, subjectivity, production and consumption. Thus, it seems very natural to investigate the structure and narrative of online games as texts, in the context of the interdisciplinary studies. I think, following Aarseth, that game studies should not be just subsumed by “the current pseudo-field of ‘new media,’” since “games are not a kind of cinema, or literature.”3 That is to say, computer game studies should not be a new method of literature studies or cinema studies (narratology), but a clearly self-sustained academic field (ludology).

As the most remarkable and important (epi)phenomenon accompanied by the increase of gamers and gaming hours as well as the prevalence of virtual economy, many studies on online games point out the blurring of boundaries: between reality and fantasy; between real economy and virtual economy; and between work and play. For a successful understanding of the role of online game is playing in contemporary network society, it might be inevitable to examine how the boundary blurring, as a cultural, economic, and political symptom, is generated and functioning on and below the surface of digital information technology.

1Jon Dovey and Helen W. Kennedy, Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media, (Open University Press, 2006), 2.

2Alexander R. Galloway, “Warcraft and Utopia,” CTheory.net 16 Feb. 2006.

3Espen Aarseth, “Computer Game Studies, Year One,” Game Studies. 1.1 (2001).