Over the last several decades, video games have become a ubiquitous part of culture on a global scale. While game studies, or “ludology,” has roots in literary, sociological, and anthropological research applied to the study of board games and sports, the popularization of video games has spurred a new generation of gaming scholarship that has won increasing popularity and credibility within communication studies. Contemporary researchers bring the relatively specialized perspectives of ludology into robust dialogue with communication scholarship, including media and technology studies, critical / cultural studies, and performance studies, to build an original and diverse body of academic research primarily focused on digital gaming.
While interdisciplinary in nature, game studies has found an institutional home in communication, and studies of video games have become an increasingly vital part of media and technology scholarship. In light of this, this guide provides an introduction to game studies that is meant to be useful to prospective graduate students, especially those interested in communication scholarship on video games. After surveying the history of game studies, the following sections discuss what distinguishes games from other forms of media, how games operate as social spaces, and approaches to studying the sociopolitical and economic impacts of the rise of gaming culture.
A Brief History of Games Studies
Games have played a vital role in human cultures for millennia. The earliest games date back at least to the Bronze Age civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, while researchers believe play has likely always been an integral part of social life. Despite this, interest in games and play remained a specialized focus of anthropological and sociological research for a long period of time. Game studies has only distinguished itself as an interdisciplinary field and become an important part of communication scholarship relatively recently — in large part due to the newfound social, economic, and political importance of digital gaming.
One of the most famous public debates surrounding video games concerns representations of violence in gaming and their social impact. As video games moved, via consoles, from the arcade to the home, outcry grew over graphic violence and gore contained in hugely popular games such as Mortal Kombat. U.S. Congressional hearings in 1993 and 1994 and public debates over the link between video games and school shootings that followed helped motivate a wave of social scientific research, mostly based in psychology, that investigated the thesis that those who play video games are more likely to engage in aggressive and violent behavior.
It might be surprising to learn that some early social scientific research on video games also ventured a contradictory thesis: that video games actually might reduce aggressive behavior by providing a cathartic outlet to players. But, despite their stark differences, these two theses have something in common; decades of research has failed to find empirical proof of either. In other words, there is little evidence that demonstrates a causal link between the playing of violent video games and increased aggression or violence in players, nor is there any conclusive evidence of the opposite phenomenon. In response, social psychological studies of gaming moved away from the strong causal claims of psychological media effects scholarship and toward a more audience-centered and critical / cultural approach.
As discussed further in the following section, this research does not leave out concerns over the content of games — but it is rarer to see scholars make strong claims that media causes certain behavioral effects. Instead, today’s communication scholars explore the significance of video games on a number of different fronts; some attend, like those concerned with video game violence, to what they represent. Others are interested in the uniqueness of gaming as a medium and probe what distinguishes it from other forms of communication media. Still others are interested in the cultures that emerge around games, including the fan cultures surrounding them and the economic and organizational cultures that facilitate their production. The following sections explore these ideas in more detail, beginning with considering why games are a unique media technology.
Spotlight on Scholarship – Featured Scholars in Game Studies
Discover how contemporary scholars have conducted research on videogames, from analyzing the procedural rhetorics of game design to exploring the fan cultures that develop around specific games.
Dr. Ian Bogost is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University with joint appointments in the Department of Film & Media Studies and the Department of Computer Science & Engineering As one of the most prolific and influential contributors to game research today, Dr. Bogost is most famous for innovating a theory of procedural rhetoric, as well as for his research on the materiality and political economy of game design. He is the author of a large number of single and co-authored books, including How to Talk about Video Games (2015) and Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (2016). Dr. Bogost is also an award-winning game designer, a founding partner of Persuasive Games LLC, and a contributing editor for The Atlantic.
Dr. Mia Consalvo is Professor of Game Studies and Design and Communication Studies Canada Research Chair at Concordia University in Montreal, where she also serves as Canada Research Chair. Her research focuses on the culture of game play, with a specific emphasis on the role of class and gender in games, and the impact they have on both the game industry, and games and players themselves. Dr. Consalvo has published numerous books on gaming, including Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Contexts (2016) and, with Christopher A. Paul, Real Games: What’s Legitimate and What’s Not in Contemporary Video Games (2019). Her book chapter, “Why We Need Feminist Game Studies,”appears in the collected volume The Handbook of Contemporary Feminism, edited by Andrea Press and Tasha Oren. You can read our interview with Dr. Consalvo here.
Dr. Nicole Martins is a Professor in The Media School and an Affiliate Faculty member in the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University Bloomington, where she also serves as Director of Research and Creative Activity. Dr. Martins conducts interpersonal and family communication research on representations of violence in media and video games, with a specific focus on the impact of mediated violence on youth audiences, especially young women. She has published widely in social scientific journals in the field, producing dozens of single and coauthored publications in journals such as Communication Research, Journal of Communication, and Computers in Human Behavior, and has won top paper awards from the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association. She has served on the editorial board for the Journal of Children and Media, as well as Communication Research Reports.
Dr. Souvik Mukherjee is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His research focuses on how the narrative and aesthetic elements of video games differ from and complement previous generations of media. As a critical / cultural scholar, his work investigates the relation between these aspects of video games and cultural identity, with a particular emphasis on colonialism and postcolonialism. These research interests are reflected in his two books, Videogames and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books (2015) and Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back (2019). Dr. Mukherjee has also served on a number of projects dedicated to advancing video game research and the humanities abroad. He was named a Digital Games Research Association Distinguished Scholar in 2019.
Dr. TreaAndrea Russworm is Professor of Cinematic Arts and Microsoft Endowed Chair at the University of Southern California. Dr. Russworm’s research explores representations of race and racial difference within popular media including television and video games. She is the author of Blackness is Burning: Civil Rights, Popular Culture, and the Problem of Recognition (2016), as well as co-editor and contributing author of Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games (with Lisa Malkowski, 2017) and From Medea to Mogul: Theorizing Tyler Perry). Dr. Russworm’s fascinating article with Samantha Blackman in Feminist Media Histories, entitled “Replaying Video Game History as a Mixtape of Black Feminist Thought,” draws on interviews and popular music to reckon with and revise the racial history of gaming.
Dr. Dmitri Williams is Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. His scholarship is focused on the socioeconomic consequences of new media technologies. Dr. Williams' psychologically informed research blends quantitative methods such as data analytics and longitudinal analyses with original, applied games research. He is one of the first scholars to use video games methodologically as a research tool, and works closely with video game companies. Dr. Williams' writings have appeared in some of the premier social scientific journals on digital technology, including the piece Viral Vitriol: Predictors and Contagion of Online Toxicity in World of Tanks, published in Computers in Human Behavior (2020).
Ludology and the Uniqueness of Games
The early debates over video games and violence described in the last section tend to characterize video games like the old media that preceded them: as a medium that circulates a message. While today’s scholarship rarely argues that video games cause behavioral or psychological effects, many commentators remain interested in the content depicted by games. Further, games are often judged according to the artistic paradigms often applied to evaluate other media, and criticized by their detractors for their insufficiencies, for example, in narrative storytelling, characterization, or dialogue.
While these lines of criticism raise important concerns, they sometimes overlook what makes games unique as both artistic and communicative media. For this reason, some critics have gone to great lengths to distinguish ludology from other forms of media and arts criticism, especially the study of narrative storytelling, or narratology (Frasca 2013). Writing, digital media, performance, photography, and film all share with games the ability to represent the world, whether through text, sound, or images. In each of these media, with the possible exception of performance, which is often invested in play and audience interaction, the primary focus tends to be on the message being communicated and, more specifically, the narratives that those representations tell. Play occurs, but must be kept in the margins, or else one risks communicative clarity.
Games take that which is marginal for these other media and makes it central. As a result, games are spaces of great contingency and unpredictability. What they represent, or communicate, is much more ambiguous. This is, of course, not to say that games do not communicate. On the contrary, games are fundamentally communicative in nature. They even communicate through representations and narratives like other genres of media. There are, however, different ways for video games to have social and political consequences than simply through what they explicitly represent, and understanding games requires understanding these unique qualities. In particular, it requires attention to the ways in which games are interactive and, consequently, open-ended.
One of the unique qualities of games is what Ian Bogost (2007) calls procedural rhetoric. Like the game’s representations, procedural rhetoric is built into the game itself, and deals with the relationship the game’s design engenders with its player. The procedural logics that define games are, however, different than what they represent in text and images. They describe the formal qualities of the game; for example, the controls of the game, what one’s objectives are, and how one is rewarded for accomplishing those objectives or punished for failing to meet them. In Bogost’s discussion of the game Animal Crossing, for example, he emphasizes how its players are confronted with the rather simple objective of collecting in-game currency in order to buy goods and upgrade one’s housing, but realize through time that every purchase they make has consequences for other purchases they make and how much game-based labor they must perform.
The procedural rhetoric of games, then, is not didactic or explicit in its instructions, but rather consists of the creation of “sandboxes” where users experiment and are led to internalize certain values and logics about the world in the process (in the case of Animal Crossing, labor and wealth management). Again, this is not to say that what is represented in games does not matter. Instead, it is to say that what games represent often works in tension and conjunction with their procedural qualities to communicate to us about the nature of the political, social, and economic world.
At the same time, as explored in the next section, procedural rhetorics do not entirely determine how games communicate. The audiences of video games have perhaps more creative interpretive agency than those of any other form of media due to the interactive nature of games. As a result, both the representations and procedural rhetoric of games form only a piece of the larger game studies puzzle.
Video Games and Social Relations
The second major way game scholars have considered the cultural and political importance of video games looks beyond the “text” of the game to the social space that it creates. As discussed in the last section, video games are necessarily interactive and are brought to life differently by the different people who play them. This open-ended nature has also allowed video games to emerge as a new type of social space, something game scholars and technology enthusiasts sometimes refer to as the “metaverse.” Massive multiplayer online games (MMOs) like World of Warcraft, a role-playing game, and Fortnite, a first-person shooter game, have been tremendously popular, not simply as games, but as sites for virtual connection, interaction, and socialization. With games like these, the content matters, but how players behave — what they say and what they do — matters as much, if not more, to the game’s cultural and sociopolitical impact.
As a consequence, many scholars of games are deeply invested in exploring the communicative cultures that video games have helped bring to life. Following in the footsteps of cultural studies and media scholar Henry Jenkins’ (2014) work on fan cultures, these critics look to the rise of celebrity streamers, player-produced game modifications (or “modding”), and the social groups that form around particular games as examples of the opportunities for new forms of socialization and creative production that games afford.
At the same time, there is a dark side to the fan cultures surrounding video games. Researchers over the past decades have had to confront the fact that video games’ audiences have often been engaged in the circulation of classist, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and hetero- and cis-normative discourses. Video game culture has, in this way, been linked with white supremacist culture in the contemporary moment. The following section discusses this in more detail, exploring critical / cultural research on the social, political, and economic consequences of video games (Shen et al, 2020).
The Cultural Politics of Video Games
Whether through the study of representations, procedural rhetoric, or fan cultures, much of the research surveyed so far is motivated by an interest in the politics of video games. Today, debates over representations of violence within games have not fully subsided, and valuable research remains on video games of violence, especially in critiques of racialized and gendered violence in games (in the work of Nicole Martins, for example). But concerns about violence have largely given way to debates over how games represent (or fail to represent) cultural identity and difference.
Scholars of fan cultures, like those discussed in the last section, have also turned their attention to the misogynistic, racist, anti-LGBT, and otherwise exclusionary discourses the promulgate online. In some instances, these issues are, perhaps, a negative consequence of the radically contingent and unscripted nature of games, as well as the anonymity afforded by digital gaming. Rather than fostering a world in which we can escape from the disparities that characterize the “real world,” games often recapitulate and work to maintain these same social hierarchies.
Critical / cultural and social scientific research on the ways in which games are exclusionary, and the possibilities for more politically progressive uses of games, have emerged as a leading area of research in game studies, though calls for the importance of continued research in this area have been longstanding (Leonard 2006). At the same time, critical scholars pointed out a variety of ways in which video games are not simply exclusionary. Depictions of Blackness and femininity in recent games, for example, allow for socially empowering gameplay in some cases, while, sometimes in the same games, facilitating the “consumption” of cultural otherness in a way that has its own unique problems (Russworm 2017).
Another important aspect of critical media studies at the forefront of games research today concerns the political economy of gaming. Video games are a novel communication medium, as well as a novel communication industry. The rapid growth and profound success of this industry has raised many important areas of research for scholars interested in the political economy of communication. As reflected in the high-profile battle between Epic Games, the developer of the popular game Fortnite, and Apple over access to Apple’s App Store, questions regarding who controls access to games have become central to the development of this industry. Of critical concern, too, has been the labor practices involved in the development of the hardware used in gaming. Researchers interested in labor have also pointed to microtransactions and in-app purchases now common among mobile games as examples of the unique forms of economic exploitation engendered by games.
Contemporary Game Studies and Further Reading
As a relatively young field, video game scholarship is still in the process of defining itself and shoring up a rigorous research program. The trajectory of this scholarship has moved from psychologically oriented studies of what games represent and their impacts on human behavior to more nuanced cultural and scientific research on both the possibilities and pitfalls of games and gaming culture.
Today’s most pressing scholarship remains methodologically diverse and continues to make use of quantitative social science to address these issues. The state-of-the-art in gaming criticism today seeks to use all of these tools to create a more inclusive future for gaming, which unlocks its creative and political potential. Many scholars have invested in the idea that games have unique pedagogical capacities and can be instrumental in the education of young people. Others have pointed to the need to reform toxic online communities, where antidemocratic and exclusionary ideologies proliferate. The future of games, then, is a space of both great potential and potential danger, and game critics have an important role to play in shaping how they develop.
Sources Cited and Additional Resources
Scholars interested in keeping up with game studies should check out the journals Games and Culture, Computers in Human Behavior, New Media and Society and Game Studies, as well as the following resources:
- Bogost, Ian. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT Press.
- Dena, Christy. 2008. “Emerging Participatory Culture Practices: Player-Created Tiers in Alternate Reality Games.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14(1):41–57. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1354856507084418.
- Frasca, Gonzalo. 2013. “Simulation Versus Narrative: Introduction to ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader, edited By Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron, Routledge, 243-258.
- Harper, Todd. 2011. “Rules, Rhetoric, and Genre: Procedural Rhetoric in Persona 3.” Games and Culture 6(5):395–413. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1555412011402675.
- Jansz, Jeroen, and Raynel G. Martis. 2007. “The Lara Phenomenon: Powerful Female Characters in Video Games.” Sex Roles 56(3–4):141–48. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-006-9158-0.
- Jenkins, Henry. 2014. “Participatory Culture: From Co-Creating Brand Meaning to Changing the World.” GfK Marketing Intelligence Review 6(2):34–39. https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/gfkmir-2014-0096.
- Martins, Nicole, and Andrew Weaver. 2019. “The Role of Media Exposure on Relational Aggression: A Meta-Analysis.” Aggression and Violent Behavior 47:90-99.
- Shen, Cuihua, Qiusi Sun, Taeyoung Kim, Grace Wolff, Rabindra Ratan, and Dmitri Williams. 2020. “Viral Vitriol: Predictors and Contagion of Online Toxicity in World of Tanks.” Computers in Human Behavior 108(106343). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563220300972?via%3Dihub.
- Russworm. TreaAndrea. 2018. “Computational Blackness: The Procedural Logics of Race, Games, and Cinema, or How Spike Lee’s Livin’ Da Dream Productively ‘Broke’ a Popular Video Game.” Black Camera 10(1):193-212. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/707694.
- Russworm, TreaAndrea. 2017. “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in the Walking Dead and the Last of Us.” Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, edited by TreaAndrea M. Russworm and Jennifer Malkowski, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 109–128.
- Williams, Dmitri, Nicole Martins, Mia Consalvo, and James D. Ivory. 2009. “The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games.” New Media & Society 11(5):815–34. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444809105354.
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