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Our primary focus is aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games, but any previously unpublished article focused on games and gaming is welcome.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
“I Harbour Strong Feelings for Tali Despite Her Being a Fictional Character”: Investigating Videogame Players’ Emotional Attachments to Non-Player Characters

by Jacqueline Burgess, Christian Jones

This study investigated players’ emotional attachment to two non-player characters from BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. Qualitative analysis of forum posts found players expressed intense emotional attachments but from different viewpoints. These emotional attachments also influenced how players engaged with the game mechanics of Mass Effect 2. [more]
Sick, Slow, Cyborg: Crip Futurity in Mass Effect

by Adan Jerreat-Poole

Can science fiction stories imagine more just futures for disabled bodies? Turning away from a future where technology has eradicated disability, this article explores crip encounters in Mass Effect 1-3 and interrogates the complex relationships between technology, culture, and disability. [more]
Playing Virtual Jim Crow in Mafia III - Prosthetic Memory via Historical Digital Games and the Limits of Mass Culture

by Emil Lundedal Hammar

This article applies the concept of prosthetic memory to Mafia III in order to discuss the significance of both contexts of production and reception in determining memory-making potentials of historical digital games with attention to racialized oppression in and beyond games. [more]
I'd Like to Buy the World a Nuka-Cola: The Purposes and Meanings of Video Game Soda Machines

by Jess Morrissette

Why do soda machines appear so frequently in video games? What purposes do they serve? What values do they represent? This article examines how virtual soda machines help anchor video games in a world we recognize as similar to our own, while simultaneously reinforcing the consumerist values of modern capitalism. [more]
Liminality and the Smearing of War and Play in Battlefield 1

by Debra Ramsay

This article interrogates how war and play are smeared together in Battlefield 1, the first AAA game set in World War I. It advances liminality as a conceptual framework to investigate the ambiguities and contradictions that emerge in the tension between the history, memory and cultural meanings of World War I and the game’s ludic qualities. [more]

 

©2001 - 2020 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.