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Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games, but any previously unpublished article focused on games and gaming is welcome.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
“There Has To Be More To It”: Diegetic Violence and the Uncertainty of President Kennedy’s Death

by Carrie Andersen

This article examines videogame representations of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the ways that games have opened the historical narrative to reinterpretation, building upon an interdisciplinary methodology that merges close reading and players’ online discourses. [more]
Defining the Videogame

by Veli-Matti Karhulahti

Skepticus: Performance evaluation distinguishes videogames from games. Grasshopper: I doubt it, but your claim might be worth a discussion. Videogames are computational artifacts with evaluation potential, indeed. Skepticus: If you have the time, I would be glad to have that discussion. A critical dialogue is never final, but always useful. [more]
Inspecting Video Game Historiography Through Critical Lens: Etymology of the First-Person Shooter Genre

by Carl Therrien

This paper highlights some of the problematic biases that influence the way video games are documented and historicized. It demonstrates these biases through a critique of the “shifting moment” associated with the “birth” of the first-person shooter genre at the beginning of the 1990s. A proper etymology of the genre reveals a strikingly different [more]
Working Out Memory with a Medal of Honor Complex

by Laquana Cooke, Gaines S. Hubbell

Our essay looks at Medal of Honor as an example of games that do memory work. We define games that do memory work as games that attempt to represent historical events using historical, functional, and mimetic realism. We argue that games that do memory work rupture the official versus popular memory binary of memory studies. [more]

 

©2001 - 2015 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.