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Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games, but any previously unpublished article focused on games and gaming is welcome.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
Uncivil Engineering: A Textual Divide in Game Studies

by John Aycock, Patrick Finn

This article identifies new kinds of hidden text in computer games and uses a collaborative methodological approach designed to address incommensurability in game studies. [more]
Post-apocalyptic Games, Heroism and the Great Recession

by Óliver Pérez-Latorre

How do dystopian videogames resonate with the social imaginary of the Great Recession? This article analyses post-apocalyptic videogame bestsellers released between 2009 and 2017 to identify three “utopian enclaves," understood as discursive frames or referents associated with heroism and hope within these dystopian worlds. [more]
Life Is Bleak (in Particular for Women Who Exert Power and Try to Change the World): The Poetics and Politics of Life Is Strange

by Holger Pötzsch, Agata Waszkiewicz

The article conducts a critical reading of Dontnod's 2015-title Life Is Strange. Moving from poetics via psychology to politics of games and play, we firstly appreciate the qualities of the devised narrative, before showing how it gradually dismantles and ultimately subverts its initial critical potentials. [more]

 

©2001 - 2019 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.