Game studies

Game studies is the study of games, the act of playing them, and the players and cultures surrounding them. It is a discipline of cultural studies that deals with all types of games throughout history. This field of research utilizes the tactics of, at least, anthropology, sociology and psychology, while examining aspects of the design of the game, the players in the game, and finally, the role the game plays in its society or culture. Game studies is oftentimes confused with the study of video games, but this is only one area of focus; in reality game studies encompasses all types of gaming, including sports, board games, etc.

Before video games, game studies often only included anthropological work, studying the games of past societies. However, once video games were introduced and became mainstream, game studies were updated to perform sociological and psychological observations; to observe the effects of gaming on an individual, his or her interactions with society, and the way it could impact the world around us.

There are three main approaches to game studies: the social science approach asks itself how games affect people and uses tools such as surveys and controlled lab experiments. The humanities approach asks itself what meanings are expressed through games, and uses tools such as ethnography and patient observation. The industrial and engineering approach applies mostly to video games and less to games in general, and examines things such as computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and networking. Like other media disciplines, such as television and film studies, game studies often involves textual analysis and audience theory.

Before the creation and popularization of video games in the late-twentieth century, the study of games was mostly confined to fields such as anthropology, studying the games of past civilizations. Some of the most popular examples of ludology during these times are works such as Stewart Culin’s comprehensive catalog of Native American games and gaming implements north of Mexico, and Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois discussed the importance of gaming and play to a societies culture, and even how it may help define it. As video games became more and more popular in the 1980s, so too did the interest in studying games rise. It wasn’t until Gonzalo Frasca popularized the term Ludology (from the Latin word for game, ludus) in 1999, the publication of the first issue of academic journal "Game Studies" in 2001, and the creation of the Digital Games Research Association in 2003, that scholars began to get the sense that the study of games could (and should) be considered a field in its own right: game studies. As a young field, it gathers scholars from different disciplines that had been broadly studying games; such as psychology, anthropology, economy, education, and sociology.

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