Disciplinary Identity of Game Scholars: An Outline

---

Mäyrä Frans Van Looy Jan Quandt Thorsten
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

There has been academic research work directed at games and play for decades, but the field has been somewhat scattered, and around the turn of the millennium the idea of establishing a new discipline, dedicated to the study of games in their own right gained prominence. The conference, journal and other publication activity in games research has expanded during the last decade, but it remains unclear how many contemporary academics working on games could be seen to represent a unified group, sharing a common disciplinary identity. This paper reports the first results from an international survey (valid n = 544), carried out among the DiGRA mailing list subscribers, as well as among the members of ECREA and ICA games research groups, aimed at probing the background education, orientation and academic practices of games researchers. The findings highlight the great diversity of educational backgrounds and of the current self-identified research fields, but also the dynamic interdisciplinary changes from one field to another, and how strong the identification as a “digital games researcher” is among the survey respondents.

 

The other game researcher: participating in and watching the costruction of boundaries in game studies

---

Copier Marinka
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

Game researchers are busy doing game studies: researching, writing and publishing articles, organizing conferences and creating a curriculum. I will argue that creating a new autonomous discipline such as game studies mainly involves constructing boundaries on different levels. In this article I would like to discuss how we can watch and analyze where and how these boundaries are being constructed, while realizing that I am also participating in this process. I mainly focus on the construction of borders between game studies and other disciplines and the ways in which a line is being drawn between game researchers, game designers and gamers. I will argue that Donna Haraway’s concept of situated knowledge can help us to realize where and how knowledge is being produced. I will claim we have to look into the empirical situation of game research in order to see that we all produce knowledge from a certain (hybrid) position and perspective.