Games Studies Journal Club

[InGameScientist]

Hi everyone!

Wondering if any of you are interested in games studies journals (free) -- while I am not a games researcher, I love reading about the research in this area and thought that some of you might as well. If you're open to it, I'll share some links here (as long as that's allowed) to the journals and articles that I find interesting!

 

[Antimatter]

Absolutely, go for it! Feel free to share any link here, except for the piracy & stuff like that.

 

[InGameScientist]

The first resource I want to share is Games: Research and Practice, the inaugural first volume published this past March.

GAMES: Vol 1, No 1

dl.acm.org

My suggested reading for this volume is Games Matterr: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3582928
It's an editiorial talking about how gamers solve societal problems in their micro environment long before it becomes mainstream.
TL;DR, gaming is good

 

[Antimatter]

A great read. Overall, agree with the whole volume. This paragraph in particular, very insightful and spot on:

"In gaming, the smartest developers realized this decades ago, and have long since shifted to iterative development processes that take up user practices, innovations and feedback. Many game companies now watch the creative technical and social innovation of their user communities, and leverage what they observe back into the formal product. Foundational forms of social organization, such as guilds, were actually user innovations first, which developers in turn started designing for. Forms of governance on live streaming services, such as the use of mods, first originated with users and were then picked up and integrated into the next product release. Online spaces are co-creative––generated by complex mixes of human and non-human actors, often with varying stakes and in tension, but always lived as a complex circuit of production––and we'd be remiss to overweight either side of the equation."

 

[InGameScientist]

Maybe I'll update this thread twice a month as some of these articles can be lengthy...so the second reading for May is this one:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15554120231170152

This one talks about quest and quest design, something that I think you all would appreciate as you play (or run/design) games. Rather than the task-focused quests, these authors propose adding in elements of player transfiguration, an evolution of the player as it were, to quests and quest design. Combining that with procedural quest generation, the authors say that it will help to reduce game development costs while at the same time providing variety in gaming experiences.

As I am thinking about potentially designing a game myself, this kind of thinking/information is really helpful!