Talk:Game studies

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Untitled section

There is much more to ludology than "video game studies". Video games are a subset of games, yes, and worthy of study on their own. But the meat of ludology does NOT rely upon video as a medium; it is about human-culture-system interaction in the contrived context of a game. Ludocrat 07:17, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Agreed. This article should be under "ludology" or (preferably, as the term "ludology" is loaded, to Frasca's dismay) "game studies."

The whole "ludology vs. narratology" debate barely exists outside a handfull of academic papers. Moving page to Ludology. - Tzaquiel 07:02, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

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So what is the term to describe the science studying *all* games, not only video/computer ones? --213.227.93.57 16:20, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

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I thought I would point out that the text on this page is identical to the text on this other page: http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Ludology

I don't know who's copying who, but it seemed worth mentioning. --Omeomi 02:22, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

They're copying Wikipedia. TheFreeDictionary is a Wikipedia mirror; see Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks/Def#TheFreeDictionary.com. --Mrwojo 05:02, 22 Dec 2004 (UTC)

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I'm confused... this entry claims that Aarseth is a ludologist, whereas I have read in other sources (can't name them right now) that he is primarily a narratologist... I read Cybertext, and seem to recall that he was fond of arguing that, even when a traditional narrative isn't explicit, gameplay allows the user to construct their own narrative of play, which seems it would put him more in the narratology camp... can anybody comment or clarify on this? Thanks. --Anonymous 11 Aug 2005

You could call Aarseth a "renegade", in a way. Originally a narratologist, he did not agree with certain assertions his fellow researchers made and "founded" ludology. You may want to check out the following link which sheds some light on the issue: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/vigilant --84.130.121.151 17:39, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

"Ludology" = "video game studies"?

Hang on — isn't "ludology" defined as the study of games, implying all games? The wiktionary definition wiktionary:ludology seems to think so. If this is so, isn't it a bit misleading to say that ludology is a synonym for "video game studies"? This article should be at "video game studies" or "video game theory" or whatever, and of course linked to from (and perhaps touched briefly on at) ludology, even if ludology is a small field. Neonumbers 14:01, 6 April 2006 (UTC)

Literal translation of the German WP's article intro:

Ludology (lat. ludus = game) is the study of games and refers to the still young transdisciplinary branch of research dealing with the aesthetical, cultural, communicational, technical and structural aspects of the phenomenon of "game" from a cultural and structural science perspective. Its main focal point is the history, evolution, analysis and theory of digital games.

The term is most common in the Anglo-Saxon language area and typically used synonymously with (video) game theory, though not only corresponding to mathematical game theory, which is limited to certain game types, but to the much broader theory of games in general.

However, in the narrower context of the "ludology vs. narratology" debate, ludology describes the paradigm that regards simulation as the core concept of games. Hence, the more neutral term game research is often used alternatively.

FYI, "Structural science" (or "Strukturwissenschaft" as there seems to be no equivalent in English) is defined as a science that predominantly deals with revealing structures and developing concepts and methods on a highly abstract level, which can then be found and used in a broad, interdisciplinary range of fields. The prime example is mathematics, others are systems theory, linguistics, informatics, cybernetics etc. --84.130.121.151 09:41, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

This is a bit of a thorny issue. Basically, ludology can be used to describe game studies... except that there's also a particular theoretical orientation that identifies as ludology, and so referring to game studies as a whole as ludology is POV. Accordingly, I've moved this to Game studies. Phil Sandifer 00:51, 31 July 2006 (UTC)

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The article seems to use the holodeck as an example of narrativism. This seems ludicrous, surely it's a far better example of simulationism. The 'fun' of the game comes from the simulation of a complete, real-seeming environment within which the participant ('player') can act as they please. Think Grand Theft Auto, The Sims etc. Have I got the wrong end of the stick here, can someone clarify?--SilverMt 12:29, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Simulation can be quite an abstract process, with little or no sensual resemblance to the "real thing". Its system usually describes specific aspects of a model of reality (or even something completely unreal); just think of Pong vs. Tennis. The holodeck is used as an example for narrativism, because it's a (fictional) device predominantly used for "playing a story"; characters become "real", players develop an identity, or as the narrativists put it, it's "constructing sense". However, the main ludological argument is that narrative (i.e. storyline, characters, player identities, sense) is often an important part of games, but does not define them, since many games lack it completely, like Tetris, for instance. Cutting right to the chase: all games include simulation of some kind (more or less realistic), but only some include narrative. --84.130.93.20 01:26, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

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I think the problem is complicated by the fact that videogames are not simply a subset of games; they are rather a cluster of artifacts circulating around the intersection between digital media / software culture, screen media culture, and games in the traditional sense. Many videogames aren't really games at all (e.g., Elektroplankton) or are in a gray area at best (e.g., The Sims), yet definitely fit in under the category of "videogame studies."

At the same time, I recognize the need to study games as such as an autonomous field of inquiry. My suggestion: ludology should direct to "game studies," and "videogame studies" should be treated as a distinct field of its own. Whuber (talk) 19:28, 5 February 2009 (UTC)

a few comments

I work somewhat in this field (though more from a CS/AI perspective) and with a number of well-known people in it, so a few comments based on my knowledge of it. "Game studies" is more or less becoming the grudgingly accepted name for the field, insofar as people bother to name it at all. "Ludology" now has too much baggage so people generally avoid it unless talking specifically about Frasca's approach, and even Frasca's close collaborators (like Ian Bogost) don't really use the term much. The two main journals in the field are Game Studies and Games and Culture (the latter cleverly avoids coming up with a name for the field by just using a descriptive phrase).

The article should in any case probably focus less on these foundational debates, or spin off the ludology v. narratalogy debate to a separate article, and expand coverage of what it is that people actually do in the field. Some things worth covering, with a focus on the areas I'm familiar with (mostly somewhat practice-slanted) include:

• newsgames and other persuasive games (see also Bogost's Persuasive Games [MIT Press, 2007])
• interactive narrative and its possibilities and status (see also Façade)
• code studies and humanistic readings of computer code
• more generally the relationship (or not) between the field and computer code; e.g. arguments over procedural literacy (though that term/discussion predates the field, it's been revived recently); "platform studies" as an approach (see Montfort's "Combat in Context" in Game Studies); and so on
• Some comments on the field's forerunners, many of which have been revived and retroactively incorporated (often quite influentially), most notably Johan Huizinga's 1938 book Homo Ludens and especially its "magic circle" concept
• the "are games art?" question, and somewhat relatedly, the production of games (or something resembling games) by artists, often as absurdist concept art, but occasionally with real games in mind (e.g. Bill Viola's collaboration on The Night Journey)
• Probably a bunch more from a non-practice-oriented approach I've left out

--Delirium 03:08, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

References

I think some work needs to be done on the citation front. We've got two different styles, which I can't believe is ever a good thing, and there does not seem to be any section to which the parenthetical references refer. Some input would be great, but if there are no objections sometime soon I will go through and convert everything that I can to footnotes. -- The Fwanksta (talk) 21:48, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

go ahead, please --83.60.59.251 (talk) 17:51, 8 November 2009 (UTC)

Change the parantheticals to ref tags...    Jhonka 00:09, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Case in point, (Aarseth, 2001) is missing an entry in the list of references 130.89.155.116 (talk) 13:42, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

I would really appreciate it if the (Aarseth, 2001; Eskelinen, 2001; Eskelinen, 2004) citations were given proper URLs. I conducted google scholar searches for some of these, and found some writings, but they may not be the actual source intended. 128.206.28.105 (talk) 19:44, 17 June 2014 (UTC)Joe Hilgard

On further research, the Eskelinen 2001 citation seems to refer to http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/ , but Frasca (2003) at http://www.ludology.org/articles/frasca_levelUP2003.pdf insists that to take this as wholly discarding graphics and stories as incidental is a misreading of the text out of context. 128.206.28.105 (talk) 22:30, 19 June 2014 (UTC) Joe Hilgard

I just popped over from trying to edit a game academic's bio. Wikipedia is a mess for references on these people. The good publications in games and computer science are from conferences, so complaining about too many URLs as citations is annoying. This article could use more content, but from people who know the subject. As one editor noted, they should perhaps stick to editing sports articles. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.12.13.10 (talk) 15:39, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Readability?

While well written, this really isn't in encyclopedic format... "Introduction" contains history, characterization, theories... This page simply reads like an essay. see Television Studies for a better way of organizing information. You shouldn't have to read the whole page to understand this topic.    Jhonka 00:04, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Importance

I've bumped this topic up from mid to high because this article is so vital to the "games and sports" portal that more attention needs to be called to the fact that it needs cleaning up. This is equivalent to if the Psychology portal had a poorly written article on Psychology.Darqcyde (talk) 16:35, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Ludoliteracy

This article is structured closely after the introductory chapters of Jose P. Zagal's dissertation Ludoliteracy. Most suspicious is the way it discusses the multi- and inter-disciplinary nature of Game Studies. The language throughout is also stylistically similar. People have already mentioned the strange parenthetical citations, and while these follow a widely-disseminated style (I think APA?), the fact that the style of citation is the same as the citations that appear in Zagal's dissertation raises red flags. Shouldn't this article cite the dissertation as its source? Rumirumirumirumi (talk) 17:39, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Annotated bibliography for future changes.

Festl, Ruth, Michael Scharkow, and Thorsten Quandt. "Problematic Computer Game Use among Adolescents, Younger and Older Adults." Addiction 108.3 (2012): 592-99. Web.

In this article, they discuss how only .2% of participants met every criteria of the GAS scale (Gaming Addiction Short Scale), while 3.7% of participants were considered problematic, meaning they met half the requirements. 7.6% of adolescents were considered problematic. They concluded that gaming addiction was not a widespread phenomenon, but is linked to problematic aspects of an individual’s personal or social life.

Wiegman, Oene, and Emil G. M. Schie. "Video Game Playing and Its Relations with Aggressive and Prosocial Behaviour." British Journal of Social Psychology 37.3 (1998): 367-78. Web.

This study found that there was no link between video game playing and aggressive behaviors, however there was a significant link between video game playing and less prosocial behaviors. There was also a link between a preference for violent video games and aggressive and less prosocial behaviors, further analyses showed that children who preferred violent video games tended to have lower intelligence.

Shaw, Adrienne. "Rethinking Game Studies: A Case Study Approach to Video Game Play and Identification." Critical Studies in Media Communication 30.5 (2013): 347-61. Web.

This article shows that the field of game studies, or ludology, is constantly changing. It is a new field, and is being changed, updated, and revised constantly. In this article, they discuss new methods they are developing for identifying gamers, and what It means to be a gamer, and how it fits into a persons daily life.

Stein, A., K. Mitgutsch, and M. Consalvo. "Who Are Sports Gamers? A Large Scale Study of Sports Video Game Players." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19.3 (2012): 345-63. Web.

This article talks about sports gamers, and the studies being done on them to find out more information about how/when they game, and possibly better target advertising to them. This gives a better insight at another form of games studies, the capitalistic side, other than the effects gaming may have on a person.

Souders, D. J., W. R. Boot, N. Charness, and J. H. Moxley. "Older Adult Video Game Preferences in Practice: Investigating the Effects of Competing or Cooperating." Games and Culture 11.1-2 (2015): 170-200. Web.

In this article, they are studying adults to find out what their preference for gaming is. They set them up with two different types of games, a game you play by yourself, and a game you play cooperatively, and they also put them into two different situations, they were either by themselves, or with someone else. The study concluded that multiplayer gameplay is associated with greater enjoyment in adult gamers. Jacobhutchinson95 (talk) 04:06, 26 February 2016 (UTC)

new lead paragraph

Game studies, also known as luology or gaming theory, is the study of games, or the act of playing them, most commonly video games. Game studies 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 may often times be confused with the study of video games, but this is only one area of focus for game studies, in reality it includes all types of gaming, including sports, board games, etc. Before the creation of 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 was updated to performs sociological, and psychological observations to observe the effects of gaming on an individual, and 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, the humanities approach, and the industry and engineering approach. The social science approach asks itself how games affect people and uses tools such as surveys and controlled lap experiments. The humanities approach asks itself what meanings are expressed through games, and uses tools such as ethnographies, 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. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jacobhutchinson95 (talk • contribs) 03:30, 1 March 2016 (UTC)

Peer Review

I really enjoyed the information given in your lead paragraph, I felt like I got a good feel for the article's main topic and liked the way you touched on multiple approaches and the history of game studies. When reviewing and editing for you finally draft, I would be sure to cite your sources, especially in your lead section. You seem to do a good job of it in the edits you posted within the article's body, but the lead paragraph is also important. I agree with your decision to move the topic of video game related aggression to the social science part of the article and thought the information added throughout this section was well researched and a great addition. My suggestion for the overall edits to the article would to be review your sentence structure and the professionalism with which the information is presented. I think for your final edit, it would be helpful to make small edits throughout the article dealing, focusing on grammar and sentence structure to make a more cohesive piece that reads more like an encyclopedia and less like an opinionated essay. Overall, great job with your edits and addition of information. Your research has really inspired me to look deeper into other topics of my article! Haberme3 (talk) 02:25, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

The article entry gives a good overview of the ludology. One of the small improvements that I would make would be correcting some grammatical errors in the entry. This would make the article flow better and be a little more clear.

One possible idea that I had for improving this area of video game would be to look into the "uncanny valley" idea. I learned about this in a class discussion last year. This is the idea that perhaps video game influence may be different is much more recent times. In sum, the idea is that more realistic video game or computer generated graphics could increase feelings of uneasiness or aggression to viewers. On the face, graphics today look far more influential than those of the original 1993 Doom video game. I looked at the game studies wikipedia page and it did have discussion of how better graphics could possibly influence the effects of video games. I think possibly looking more into the idea of "uncanny valley" could help you possibly expand on this part of the article, although I did also find that the uncanny valley hypothesis has its own Wikipedia article.

Would the legal stance(s) on video game distribution according to age appropriateness ratings be applicable to your discussion of violence in video games? I am unsure about the current legal stances; however, this may be outside the scope of the "game studies" article. Jernig13 (talk) 03:59, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Dubious

The statement "Economists observed that during a recession the absence of a minimum wage make the labour market bounce quickly, and suddenly, the economy is back to growing." is not verified by the cited sources. It seems to come from a brief statement in the Washington Post: "Labor markets quickly bounce back from recession because there’s no minimum wage". But it does not mention which economist observed this or even that it was observed in EVE online itself. They state it almost as if it's an obvious truth rather than a new discovery. It does not cite any scholarly articles or research on this causal relationship. Searching the sentence on google only brings me to articles that show evidence of no impact on labor markets by the minimum wage, leading me to believe this statement is false or at best misleading. Even if correlation is established, saying that the labour markets are bouncing back *because* of lack of minimum wage would need some serious evidence. In a virtual reality where hunger, disease and homelessness are not critical issues, it could be the lack of danger rather than a lack of safety net which caused a quick bounce. Furthermore, implying that this has greater implications in the real world without any serious evidence is inappropriate in an encyclopedia. 76.10.180.79 (talk) 03:07, 1 May 2016 (UTC)

I've removed the claim to resolve the maintenance tag, but feel free to discuss further. czar 15:44, 7 May 2016 (UTC)

Sentence incomplete

The second sentence under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_studies#Virtual_economies_in_gaming is just incomplete. I'm guessing it was supposed to say something along the lines of "[...], and thus real problems in the economy, [blabla], can be closely observed and tracked in real time". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.108.111.232 (talk) 12:04, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

Copyvio tags

This issue has been raised at least since 2011 (or earlier in 2009), and it's time the potential copyright violations were investigated. The original language was inserted back in 2007 in a series of edits like this, this, and this. They are word-for-word identical to sections from Jose P. Zagal's Ludoliteracy (published in 2010). On its surface this would seem to suggest that Zagal is copying Wikipedia, but Zagal's work actually provides endnote sources in addition to parenthetical citations whereas this Wikipedia article includes only short-hand parentheticals and does not list the full source anywhere. So it strongly appears that Zagal's work was the original and that the text in this article copied that. Zagal's writing goes back to 2000 (see papers), so it's possible that the language from his 2010 book originated in earlier papers he has published. It's also vaguely possible that both Wikipedia and Zagal are copying from an earlier work (or works). Anyway for now I've tagged the most obvious duplicated sections that match word-for-word with Zagal's Ludoliteracy. There may be more copyvios present in the article. I will try to investigate this more deeply myself if I can find some free time... -Thibbs (talk) 16:34, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

It's hard to located copy-vio portions from between the non-copyvio segments, but the line starting "For example, in her book Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle explored how..." also seems to be an exact match with Ludoliteracy. We should probably examine all parenthetical-style citations. -Thibbs (talk) 16:59, 7 August 2017 (UTC)

I just realized that I haven't provided a link to the Ludoliteracy paper itself, so here it is, and a quick check against Earwig's copyvio detector gives us a violation score of 95.4%. I'll continue to look into the issue of the dates as I can. -Thibbs (talk) 12:45, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

Another possibility struck me while looking through Tajoman's edits (this user was one of the ones who had added the suspect material back in 2007) and noticing that some of Zagal's other works were also linked (e.g. here). It's at least a possibility that Tajoman may be Zagal himself and that he had been using Wikipedia in 2007 as a sounding board for the material that became his 2010 book. The portions that were (sloppily) added to Wikipedia (without full endnote sources) may have originated in an unpublished manuscript that eventually became Ludoliteracy. If that's the case, and if Wikipedia was the original point of publication for the suspect material then I assume it would be OK to leave the material as-is and just fix the endnotes. I'll contact Tajoman to see if I can find anything out, but that editor's last edit was in 2016 so it may be too late... We'll see if Tajoman can shed any light here. -Thibbs (talk) 13:20, 13 August 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your work here, Thibbs. Did you ever hear anything definitive about this? I ask because my students might be interested in editing this entry for their work this semester. -Grlucas (talk) 18:29, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

Hi, Grlucas. The copyvio process is rather slow. I've posted a question to User:Tajoman's talk page about these edits and I haven't heard anything back since then. It's possible that we'll never hear back. So for now I would say that it's probably OK to just remove the tagged text and replace it with non-copyright-violating text. The copyvio process will still slowly be completed and if at a later date the article is found to have breached Zagal's copyrights then historical versions of the article may be removed. All new non-copyvio text should be left intact so your students' work would remain. I hope that helps. Let me know if you need further clarification. -Thibbs (talk) 18:37, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

I've started looking at this. I chose the phrase "Stewart Culin wrote a comprehensive catalog of gaming implements and games from Native American tribes north of Mexico (Culin, 1907)", added as part of large edit at 21:42 on 19 November 2007. The whole of that edit is substantially identical to the Zagal source, which contains that exact phrase. For Zagal to have copied it from us, he would have had to do so in the three-minute window before "(Culin 1907)" was replaced with a Wikipedia-style reference at 21.45 on the same day. This is so unlikely that we can exclude it, and must assume that our text was taken from elsewhere, even if the exact mechanism by which that happened is not entirely clear (all the explanations provided by Thibbs are reasonable). All the (presumably) offending text needs to be completely removed, including any parts that have been partially rewritten. Reversion to an early 2007 version does not seem to be a good option; the best solution would probably be a complete rewrite from scratch. Any volunteers? Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 12:26, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

Interesting. Thanks for looking into this, Justlettersandnumbers! Grlucas, this sounds like a perfect opportunity for your class. What say you? -Thibbs (talk) 13:48, 4 September 2017 (UTC)

Justlettersandnumbers, thanks for the detective work. Thibbs, I'll certainly make them aware of the opportunity. -Grlucas (talk) 17:35, 5 September 2017 (UTC)

• I've removed a large amount of material which I think includes all the copyvio, concentrating on the material added by Tajoman in 2007. I'd appreciate review to see whether we've got all of it. I haven't done a massive revdel on the edit history to hide the copyvio revisions but I'm open to doing so once we're confidence we've got it. Hut 8.5 21:25, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Hi everyone! I'm sorry I missed all this discussion and conversation. To answer the question, yes I (Tajoman) am Jose Zagal. Back when I started adding stuff to this page there wasn't much stuff and I was working on my dissertation so, once my dissertation intro stuff was ready I just copied it over to WP. I've seen published it as a book (Ludoliteracy) which is also released under a creative commons license. So, there's no problem using text from the book on the WP page. Though by now it might be all gone anyways? I haven't checked... Tajoman (talk) 19:06, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

The book is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 licence. This is not compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence used by Wikipedia. (Wikipedia articles can be used for commercial purposes, the book text can't.) Hut 8.5 19:12, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

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