Game Studies - History

History

Prior to the late-twentieth century, the academic study of games was rare and limited to fields such as history and anthropology. For example, in the early 1900s Stewart Culin wrote a comprehensive catalog of gaming implements and games from Native American tribes north of Mexico while Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois explored the importance of games and play as a basic human activity that helps define culture. As the video game revolution took off in the early 1980s, so did academic interest in games, resulting in a field that draws on diverse methodologies and schools of thought.

These influences may be characterized broadly in three ways: the social science approach, the humanities approach, and the industry and engineering approach. In addition to asking different types of questions, each approach tends to use different methods and tools. A large body of social scientists prefer quantitative tools and methods while a smaller group makes use of qualitative research. Academics from the humanities tend to prefer tools and methods that are qualitative. The industry approach is practice-driven and usually, less concerned with theory than the other two. Of course, these approaches are not mutually exclusive, and a significant part of game studies research blends them together. Tracy Fullerton and Kenji Ito’s work are examples of interdisciplinary work being pursued in game studies.

The youth of the field of game studies is also another reason for blurred boundaries between approaches. Williams, in a call for greater inter-disciplinary work in communications-oriented games scholarship, noted how the “study of videogames is poised to repeat the mistakes of past academic inquiry”. He argues that the youth of the field means that it is not bound to follow the traditional divisions of scholarly work and that an opportunity exists to rediscover the strengths and contributions that different scholarly traditions can offer.