5

The Future of Game Studies

Mia Consalvo

Introduction

Most academic fields have traditions and canons that have evolved over decades if not centuries, always being subject to scrutiny, but also bearing the increasing weight of tradition and expectation. Not so with game studies. As a new field, it is still in the process of inventing itself, just as the videogame industry itself is still working out how it should be structured, what genres dominate, and who its player base is or should be. When I first started researching videogames in 2001, the dominant model for the industry was appealing to hardcore gamers, primarily thought to be young males, through selling console systems at a loss in order to generate an installed base large enough for game publishers. While few games researchers studied the logic of that model, most did accept the idea that men were the primary demographic of the industry, and “female gamers” were considered a rare find, with tastes confusing to standard designers. In regard to game content, discussions of Tomb Raider, Myst, and Doom often encompassed much of the discourse about games. Such limited foci have obviously changed – the industry itself has transformed, rejecting its almost blinkered focus on console games to now create a mixed array of games and platforms, designing new categories of games such as casual games, social games, and massively multi-player online games (MMOGs), and rushing to populate new platforms such as Facebook, the iPhone, and the iPad. And if games have always been a profitable industry, they are increasingly valuable. The Entertainment Software Association has reported that US videogame software sales for 2009 generated $10.5 billion, and that 67% of US households now play digital games (ESA, 2011). And apart from the traditional industry, Facebook officials have stated that approximately 40% of usage time on its site (with its 400 million + users) is spent playing games (Siegler, 2010).

Academics studying games have begun to structure a history for this field, drawing from the work of the Dutch cultural historian Johann Huizinga and the French sociologist Roger Caillois for help in understanding concepts such as “play” and “game.” Game scholars have deepened their work, theoretically and methodologically, and have moved from limited effects models and marginalization to a robust field of inquiry and critique. Yet scholars are just beginning the process of establishing game studies as a field. This chapter explores that developing landscape, pointing to some of the more important developments in scholarship on games, as well as challenging future researchers in this area to expand their research and make it more relevant, not just for the field, but for everyone who makes and plays games.

A Prehistory of Game Studies

Game studies has a curious relationship to past work done relative to videogames. Although Aarseth (2001) declared 2001 “year one” in computer game studies, he was, either purposefully or not, ignoring nearly three decades of social scientific work on video and computer games. Part of that move was likely political: the move did decisively break with work done primarily on the negative effects of videogames relative to violence and gender stereotypes. But it also sought to claim ground for the study of games apart from traditional disciplines, theories, and methodologies.

Some of the earliest research (and perhaps the most infamous in the popular media) is the effects-driven approach to studying players of violent videogames. For example, Anderson and Ford (1986) ran experiments to establish how videogames deemed highly and mildly aggressive affected players. While they found that “hostility was increased in both game conditions” (p. 390), it is also important to note that they classified the 1982 arcade game Zaxxon as “highly aggressive” (p. 395), despite its lack of blood or realistic images, suggesting that criteria for what counts as aggressiveness in games have evolved, making it difficult to build off past research.

The effects tradition draws heavily from existing research on other media forms, including film and television most centrally. Scholars have built on past work, exploring if and how videogames with violent content can cause increased aggression and create the potential for violence in players (Anderson & Bushman, 2001; Anderson & Dill, 2000; Anderson & Ford, 1986; Hartmann & Vorderer, 2010). While some meta-analyses have questioned such a link and its statistical significance (Sherry, 2007), proponents still claim measurable effects, which they believe will become stronger as games become more realistic and immersive (Anderson & Bushman, 2001).

Yet there are consistent challenges to these studies from several areas, including from effects researchers themselves (see Sherry, 2007). One concern is the short duration of exposure to games in the studies, with most experiments less than 30 minutes in duration. In looking to determine if longer exposure would provide different results, Williams (2006) conducted a study of Asheron's Call 2 players (an MMOG), finding mixed results: family relationships were unaffected, but prior friendships eroded; news media use was unaffected, but other entertainment media were “displaced” by online play (p. 651). Other researchers have raised different concerns, including Ferguson, whose studies suggest instead that “family violence and innate aggression as predictors of violent crime were a better fit to the data than was exposure to video game violence” (Ferguson et al., 2008, p. 311). Ferguson also argues that many effects researchers are more focused on creating a moral panic than finding the real causes of violence such as school shootings (Ferguson, 2008). Indeed, Anderson and Bushman's 2001 article begins by listing the locations of several school shootings and stating, “the shooters were students who habitually played violent video games,” making the link very clear (p. 363).

Other game studies scholars question the assumptions that underpin effects theories and experimental research writ large. Researchers including Henry Jenkins (2006), Jim Gee (2007), and Janet Murray (1997) have all argued that, in contrast to seeking out quantifiable effects on players, we should look at how individuals use videogames, and the pleasures as well as frustrations that might be a part of that play. In one of the first examples of such research, Gareth Schott found that among youth in New Zealand, playing violent games offers many pleasures, even as players themselves contend with the negative atmosphere surrounding their activities. For example, he writes that one game, Dead Rising, “offers players an opportunity to resist the forces that control social spaces” (Schott, 2009, paragraph 22). Thus, instead of employing a passive construction implying little resistance on the part of the individual, research taking this approach demonstrates there is more at work than a simplistic input–output model between game and player.

Another early focus was content, with scholars taking various approaches to studying what was “in” popular videogames of the time, particularly Nintendo's games. One of the best known early books, Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo by Eugene Provenzo (1991), was mostly an attack on videogames for their limited range of images and reliance on violence as a central facet of play. By contrast, Marsha Kinder's (1993) Playing with Power provided a more balanced study, applying a psychoanalytic approach to popular children's entertainment, linked to a structural analysis of how videogames were weaving themselves into the fabric of the entertainment industry. Her findings were not all negative – while she did point to gender stereotypes and a preoccupation with violence, she also considered that games might be a positive way for children to work through various issues or stages of their development into adulthood.

Such work was indeed part of the history of studying videogames, but it also led to one of the larger splits that emerged in the field. On one side were effects researchers working comfortably in home disciplines including psychology and sociology, and on the other side were humanists and others who believed that the study of games demanded different methods and theories, and that players were not passive objects to be acted upon by all-powerful games. Some attempts have been made to seek common ground between the two approaches, but mostly they exist in parallel to one another without much crossover. That is because many of the assumptions that underlie each approach, both theoretical and methodological, can be diametrically opposed.

In response, more recent researchers have started studying players as active participants in the gameplay process, constructing and negotiating the meanings that games offer to them. And they have also taken new approaches to examining games, trying to establish how the varied components of game – narratives, representations, gameplay mechanics – are all key in understanding individual games as well as genres. How that research has evolved, and how it has impacted both the field of game studies and new media studies generally, is detailed next.

Videogames are Special, and Not Special

Case 1: Games are Special

Within the field of game studies itself, perhaps the oldest argument stemming from the “games are special” belief is the debate between narratology and ludology, and which approach should have primacy in the study of games. More detailed discussions of this debate exist elsewhere (Frasca, 2003; Murray, 2005; Pearce, 2005) and I will not reproduce them here. But there are a few key points that are important to highlight, as the narratology-ludology debate touches on the heart of what it means to study games and game players.

Central to the original position of narratology is the belief that games can become something greater than they are – they can become more truly interactive, engaging works of art. Much of that depends on games' abilities to deliver fictional works that are the equivalent in some undefined sense of other forms now considered artistic, such as the novel or film. Janet Murray's (1997) call for a Star Trek-like experience detailed in Hamlet on the Holodeck is a major example of this approach. While this is an aspirational call (note the emphasis on how games can become rather than are), others in the narratological tradition would argue that games do have stories as important elements, and we can study games using tools and theories from related disciplines, perhaps with some adaptations (Simons, 2007).

In contrast, ludologists have generally argued that games are more than storytelling narratives and, further, that games should not strive to be stories or even worry about narratives. What makes games special is their interactivity – the fact that they are indeed ludic – and require “non-trivial effort” on the part of the player to be experienced (Aarseth, 1997). As such, they cannot be studied using the traditional methods or theories of fields such as comparative literature or film studies. Indeed, scholars such as Eskelinen (2004) have been polemical in arguing that narratology “is not completely useless” but is helpful only in terms of how it can enhance ludology and “the features inherent to games” (p. 38). Eskelinen has also decried the supposed “colonization” of the study of games by other fields, writing that “resisting and beating them is the goal of our first survival game in this paper, as what these emerging studies need is independence, or at least relative independence” (p. 36). Yet aside from the political boundary marking to establish a new field and define it as important, there are a few key points to take from this debate.

Most importantly, we can recognize that games (and gameplay itself) can be quite difficult to study from a methodological standpoint. Setting aside notions of active and passive audiences first mentioned in media studies in regard to television viewing, games do require active engagement by players in order for them to come into being. Further, the more active games encourage players to be (in the form of greater numbers of choices, whether these be storyline options or even gameplay possibilities), the more complex they become as objects of inquiry. Likewise, while representations and narratives can be key parts of games to study, gameplay itself must be taken into account for games to retain their ludic quality. Finally, another key consideration is the role of the researcher: should it be to objectively watch others play, or to engage with a game herself? These are important questions that have arisen from the ludologists' point of view.

Second, and in line with the narratologists, we must not omit the study of narratives or stories from our understandings of games. As my own work has demonstrated, players often cite the stories in games as a critical element in their enjoyment, and for some players, games must have a strong storyline or narrative to hold their interest, or even to motivate their gameplay in the first place (Consalvo, forthcoming). Game developers themselves are often driven to create games with strong stories such as Choice of the Dragon, Mass Effect, and Final Fantasy, and have also experimented with different ways to tell those stories, such as the ambient storytelling method used in games such as Half-Life and Portal. Clearly, from a player and developer perspective, stories or narratives do have a place in games, and thus how they fit (or not) should be actively studied by researchers as well.

Finally, no one discipline or field should (or can) have control over game research or theorization, and the study of games is enriched by multiple paths of inquiry. Narratives are not the only important elements of games to study, nor are game mechanics. Scholars working in fields as diverse as law (Burk, 2005, Lastowka & Hunter, 2004), philosophy (Ess, 2009, Reynolds, 2002), anthropology (Boellstorff, 2010; Malaby, 2009), art history (Sharp, 2010), sociology (Simon, 2006; Taylor, 2006), computer science (Mateas, 2004; Wardrip-Fruin, 2009), and other areas have all contributed much to the study of games, drawing from their own disciplinary perspectives yet also adapting those practices to the study of ludic practice. Such activities bring us a much more varied, rich, and valuable account of games and game players than one discipline or field (whether communications or game studies) ever could on its own.

Case 2: Videogames and Research on New Media

In addition to research focused on games and play, work done in game studies has also been important in helping us understand developments in new media more broadly. There are connections in multiple areas, including the development of interactive fiction, identity play as it happens online, the formation of online communities, the rise of user-generated content in relation to Web 2.0, and the game industry's role in the global spread of popular culture, to name only a few areas.

In his history of interactive fiction, Nick Montfort (2005) writes of the centrality of games in the development of the genre. In doing so, Montfort makes the case that games can function as literature and can be considered works of art equal to other expressive forms. He goes on to clarify that while interactive fiction may not have much in common with the novel, “the riddle, like an IF [interactive fiction] work, must express itself clearly enough to be solved, obliquely enough to be challenged, and beautifully enough to be compelling” (p. 51). Games that incorporate such riddles have helped to shape and popularize the evolution of interactive fiction (with interactive fiction likewise shaping game development), and games have contributed to that art form in important ways, even as they have eclipsed interactive fiction in terms of popular attention. Yet he also believes that “studies of one of these types of systems will surely yield results about textual and interactive properties that will apply to the other” (p. 224).

The study of games has also contributed findings and led to important theorization in the area of identity play and identity formation online. Much early work exploring how individuals negotiate and experiment with various aspects of their identities was based on the study of online game spaces. Most popularly, Turkle (1995) has written about various multi-user domains (MUDs) and how individuals have used them to create different personas in order to experiment with a different identity, and perhaps to integrate new elements into their real-world personalities. Other scholars have likewise focused on game-based MUDs as sites for gender exploration (Bruckman, 1996) as well as sexual identity play (McRae, 1996). While such work initially led to early celebratory accounts of individuals liberated from static, solitary identities (Stone, 1995), recently we have seen more balanced accounts emerge, suggesting that identity play is not as prevalent as earlier thought (Consalvo, 2010; Lüders, 2010). Nevertheless, forms of identity play can still occur online, and games are popular spaces for that activity. Nakamura (2000) has written about negative forms of identity play, such as racial stereotyping in early online games and virtual spaces, or what she refers to as “identity tourism.”

Alongside identity play, research focusing on games has given us important insights into online communities, and how they develop as well as evolve and die. One of the earliest graphical online games, Habitat (released in 1985), showed its creators the unique challenges of managing online communities composed of diverse individuals (Morningstar & Farmer, 1991). As the developers explained in their subsequent writings about the game, they quickly learned that “we could influence things, we could set up interesting situations, we could provide opportunities for things to happen, but we could not predict nor dictate the outcome.” Morningstar and Farmer tried to take as hands-off an approach as possible, and kept their interactions with residents primarily within the fiction of the game.

Similarly, players of the early MMOG Ultima Online challenged the game's creators in unexpected ways (infamously one player, Rainz, managed to kill the game developer's avatar, Lord British, while he was visiting the virtual space), with those developers likewise learning the importance of managing community as part of a game's world (Bartle, 2006). Dibbell (1993) recounts the history of the more socially themed MUD LambdaMOO, and how one particularly famous incident (a virtual rape perpetrated by an online character named Mr. Bungle) led to debates about the role of democratic processes in virtual worlds and the potential rights of players as citizens of that space. That topic sprung up again more explicitly with Raph Koster's famed “Player's Bill of Rights” written in 2000 (Koster, 2000). Such calls for some type of representation, as well as for the acknowledgment that activities in online games and virtual worlds do matter, have found their way to most other online spaces as well. Yet games have been an important playground for their early development, and games research has done key work in highlighting such movements.

More recently, game ethnographers such as Taylor (2006), Pearce (2009), and Boellstorff (2010) have investigated the communities found in online games and virtual worlds, and have detailed the key role that such formations play in the existence of such spaces. Pearce (2009) in particular explores how the affordances of particular virtual worlds will shape how individuals and groups play within them, and how the different spaces come to shape their virtual and physical identities. Such research is valuable not only for what it tells us about virtual worlds, but also for how it helps us understand how individuals and groups interact with one another in different kinds of spaces, and the ramifications of living a life increasingly online.

Other game researchers have drawn important linkages between the history of games and the (now popular) concept of user-generated content. Those studying mods, such as Sihvonen (2009) and Sotamaa (2009), detail how gamers have played a pivotal role in the development of content for games, creating a role for themselves somewhere between consumer and professional producer – perhaps the “produser” that Bruns (2007) refers to – but which is increasingly recognized as valuable by the game industry. Sihvonen (2009) in particular details how early player-created mods for Doom generated expectations among game developers that players would demand such content, so that mod tools and level editors became a regular, expected element of many games. That expectation has become a larger part of Internet use, as other researchers have illustrated (Jenkins, 2006), particularly in relation to the concept of the “participatory culture” that can emerge relative to media texts that audiences hold dear.

Finally, game research has explored how global media industries are not always dominated by Western products or producers, as the case of Japan's early leadership in the game industry demonstrates (Consalvo, 2006). While earlier media industries, including film and television, have often featured Western control of markets and the inability of other countries or cultures to compete with entities such as Hollywood, the game industry shows another industry configuration. Early console and arcade history featured companies and software produced in Japan, North America, and Europe most centrally, while more recently there has been an upsurge in production in South Korea, China, and parts of Eastern Europe. Such developments speak to the importance of studying global media, and how such media travel and mutate as they cross various cultural and national borders. Given the recent fragmentation of the television industry and increasing practices of runaway production in the film industry, the games industry and research about it offers another model for understanding the complexity of contemporary global media and their audiences.

Methods and their Meanings

For scholars interested in studying particular videogames, the following scenario might seem familiar, as it illustrates many of the issues that studying games themselves raises in terms of methods of analysis. Playing the latest game in the Dream Chronicles series, Book of Air, I am faced with a choice before beginning – to play in casual mode, or to try the “challenging” option. Casual mode includes easier puzzles and the option to skip them if they still prove too difficult. Likewise, I have the option of buying the Collector's Edition and getting additional bonus material, including an extra level to complete; or waiting a few weeks for the cheaper, standard version without those bells and whistles. I wonder how many players try each version of the game, and whether such differences matter to the experience of gameplay. Launching the game brings back memories of past games in the series, prompting me to ask if I can consider this game on its own merits or if past games in the series should be studied as well. For example, the prior game allowed the player to travel to different locations in any order desired, as long as she solved all of the puzzles, unlocking the final challenge in the game. This game is more linear, only allowing me to progress from one area to another by completing the level, which then unlocks coordinates for the next location. The game's story is integrated fairly well with gameplay challenges, but it still relies on traditional narrative elements at times. These are all things to consider when studying what is in a game itself.

Considering the context of my play, other complexities emerge. When I play, I am usually on a laptop, either at home on my couch or traveling, playing with earbuds in. I do not play in windowed mode, to avoid interruptions. Of course there are other interruptions and distractions to contend with, such as the dog barking or the noise of the television. As a player I may not consider such issues important, but as a researcher I must ask if those interruptions matter in deconstructing the gameplay experience, either to understand a particular game itself, or how various players might take meaning from it. Likewise, I could ask if the overall gameplay experience is different for someone who plays in short bursts of time over perhaps a month compared with someone who downloads, plays, and completes the game in one sitting – a matter of less than 10 hours. Finally, is my own experience of play enough to draw from to best understand the game, or should I talk with, interview, or survey other players? Likewise, I may ponder which players I am interested in and how I can find them. These are all questions that arise as researchers face the challenge of studying games.

To undertake their research, academics from disparate fields have faced the challenge of choosing the best methods for answering these questions. Although recently we have seen the development of methods particular to studying gameplay, initially there were no such approaches to draw from. Thus many scholars turned to their home disciplines for help in understanding how players interacted with games, and what “effects” or impacts those games might have on players.

Choices of method are never divorced from the theoretical approaches that scholars draw from, and the study of games and players is no different. Because of this, specific methodologies in game studies have varied widely, with researchers drawing from a variety of fields (including education, law, psychology, sociology, communications, and anthropology) in order to find ways to best study their objects of interest. Some of those methods have included content analyses and textual analyses of games, rhetorical studies of player chat, surveys of players, experiments with players as well as observations in laboratories, virtual ethnographies of MMOGs and virtual worlds, interviews and focus groups with players as well as developers, and other methods that researchers are still developing. More specifically, many media studies scholars have drawn from active audience theories and have used textual analysis as a method for studying individual games. Anthropologists have used ethnographic methods to investigate virtual worlds and MMOGs and their player communities. Sociologists have studied player groups, psychologists have investigated the cognitive processes of players, and English as well as literature and film scholars have used various theories such as poststructuralism, deconstruction, and reader response theory to understand the world of videogames. And as game studies has evolved, researchers have increasingly come to advocate that games should be treated as different from other popular media and that we need newer tools and theories as well as approaches to best understand games.

Methods choices also tend to align with a researcher's particular theoretical home. So those who draw from critical and cultural theories, for example, usually ask questions best answered using qualitative methods, while social scientific research is more inclined to use quantitative approaches. There is some multi-methodological research being conducted as well, but it remains relatively rare compared to other approaches (Williams, Kennedy, & Moore, 2011). Still, it is helpful to discuss the various types of methods that have been chosen and that have evolved in game studies research over the past decade, to identify their advantages and disadvantages, and also to demonstrate how methods could evolve to help us better understand the dynamic nature of games and gameplay.

Many of the earliest methods used to study games and players were quantitative, designed to offer breadth rather than depth in data. Many early researchers used quantitative content analysis in order to investigate the images and representations offered in early videogames (Dietz, 1998; Kinder, 1993; Provenzo, 1991). Content analysis was an obvious way to get started and also offered baselines for future research. Most early work focused on depictions and levels of violence, and also investigated the presence of gender stereotypes as well as the (somewhat rare) presence of female characters. Those early studies found that female characters were indeed few and far between, with games treating the few actual female characters as either princesses in need of saving or as eye candy for the presumed heterosexual male player (Dietz, 1998). Such studies also investigated the prevalence of violence, with Provenzo decrying “the consistent tendency toward the depiction of violence and aggression that is so much a part of the games included in the Nintendo system” (1991, p. 134). Such findings are not that surprising given that one of the earliest games developed was Spacewar! in 1961, suggesting that violence and games have a long history, and activities such as shooting and killing are deeply embedded in the history of the medium.

But while content analyses offer a broad view of many games, they are limited in how much content they can sample from individual games – usually 10 to 30 minutes at most, and almost always from the beginning of the games sampled. Perhaps more problematic, however, is the reliance on studying representations rather than game-play. Most of the gender studies have focused on the appearance of the female characters (or their absence), with a nod to their role in various games – as trophy, as victim to be saved, as eye candy. Some researchers (Children Now, 2001; Williams, Martins, Consalvo, & Ivory, 2009) note the ability to play as a female character or not (thus being the driver of the action and affording the female character agency), yet mostly the focus is on images, which are admittedly problematic. Some studies of violence have examined the options offered to players, such as whether the game offers varied ways to deal with conflict, including negotiating, violence, or other ways; or if violence seems justified or not, or if the player is usually rewarded for engaging in violence (Smith, Lachlan, & Tamborini, 2003). However, there are still many questions left unanswered, including how players make sense of that violence, as studies like Schott's (2009) are beginning to explore.

Other early methods used by games researchers have included surveys and experiments. Some of the best known work includes survey research done by Nick Yee in his Daedalus project, an ongoing survey of players from a variety of MMOGs from 1999 to 2004. Gathering the views and self-reported practices of approximately 35,000 players, Yee (2010) has found wide-ranging results about the basic demographics of players, motivations for play, relationships between avatars and player identity, addiction, relationship formation, and gender-bending. These data paint a picture of the average MMOG player as approximately 26 in age, with about half of all players working full time and playing games an average of 22 hours a week. Although much of Yee's work is about gathering baseline information, it does come to some interesting conclusions, for example that “the two primary reasons why players gender-bend are to be able to be more stylish and to optimize their character.”

Most other survey research is not as broadly based, but is instead usually limited to the players of a particular game. More recently, Williams, Consalvo, Caplan, and Yee (2009) reported the findings of a study of Everquest 2 players, drawing from a survey that was hosted by the game's publisher – Sony – and was presented to all players before their login screen. The resulting data yielded some interesting differences in terms of player-reported interests and activities, suggesting that researchers must take the results of non-random samples cautiously, as it is usually the most motivated and dedicated players who most often respond to requests for interviews, surveys, and general questions for more information.

Meta-Methodological Concerns

There are several challenges associated with methodological choice, however. First, whether studying games as game texts or players and their activities, it can be very difficult to take account of the interactivity of videogames. Games demand effort in order to be experienced. So a game is not quite like a book or television show, with only one central story and one linear path through it. Instead, games can feature no story at all, they may have multiple branching paths that change the experience, and players themselves have the ability to alter some games, not only through their choices in game but perhaps through user-created modifications that can be either minor or major changes to the game and its world. Studying only the representational content misses major aspects of the experience. Thus, a key concern in game studies has been to advocate for study of the gameplay elements of games – how mechanics work, how players make choices, what choices games offer, and how those elements can intertwine with representations, narratives, and player agency. By adding those elements to the mix, game studies can tell us more about why people play games, how players might use them as playgrounds to think through ideas and actions, and how they can function as a space players use for relating to one another. But first we need to get a better sense of how to study games, to see them as more than one more form of media their users are exposed to in daily life.

One such approach is Bogost's procedural rhetoric. Arguing that the most successful persuasive games build their arguments into gameplay itself, Bogost (2007) offers numerous examples of how such a process works. One example he uses is the flash game Tax Invaders, which allows the player to control an image of George W. Bush's head as he shoots down enemy tax proposals. Bogost writes that despite its seeming simplicity, “the battle is both metaphoric and material – the player actually does battle against taxes, in a literal sense. [. . .] In playing the game, the player is encouraged not only to reaffirm a conservative position on taxation, but also to practice using a conservative frame for that position” (p. 108). Such examples help us see how games have meanings as part of their procedurality, rather than simply being formed in the text itself, via a story or narrative. Such methods for exploring those meanings are critical for the future of game studies.

Methods: Continuing the Debates

As we develop (and refine existing) methods for studying games, certain practices have become standardized, allowing us to question or make way for additional considerations. Game studies scholars have largely accepted the charge that one must actually play the games one is studying or using in studies to measure or observe player behavior. Without the knowledge of how a particular game is played – if, for example, a researcher is merely watching a recorded gameplay session much like one might watch a television episode – critical errors in analysis can result. For example, one early study of violence in videogames had the control subjects play a game that was qualitatively different from the violent game that the test subjects played (they used Myst and Doom), making accurate comparisons difficult if not impossible (Anderson & Dill, 2000). Similarly, without playing a game researchers might not understand the level of difficulty involved, or the feel of play, which can also be important.

Finally, this charge has opened the door for considering additional questions: How much should a game researcher play a game? Should we always finish the games we study? If the game does not have an official ending, such as MMOGs, how much should we play? Should we be able to beat the game on various difficulty levels, and likewise, should researchers cheat when they play (consult walkthroughs, use codes), particularly if they are not exploring the way that cheating works in a game? How much should we know about the political-economic structure of the companies that make such games or that structure the larger industry? These are many questions that game studies researchers, particularly those interested in critical and cultural approaches, are still pondering.

Questioning Origin Theories

If game studies is to break with other disciplines to establish itself as a serious field of study, it needs its own theories for understanding play and games, which help us better understand the human condition and the role of play (and games) in our lives. To do so, researchers in game studies have looked to scholars who have conceptualized and studied different types of games (not merely digital games), as well as the historical role of play in human social interaction. Theorists studying games include Huizinga (1950), Caillois (1961), Suits (1978), and Fine (1983), with work on non-digital play by Sutton-Smith (1997) being influential as well.

Such writers provide helpful ways to think about games as more than media products. Caillois (1961), for example, creates a taxonomy for games that includes four types that can be combined: agon (games of competition), alea (games of chance), ilinx (games of vertigo), and mimesis (mimicry or role-playing) (pp. 14–26). Such categories can help us categorize or compare games of like or unlike type, as well as position digital games alongside card games, board games, and so on. Suits (1978) offers extended discussions of how to define the term game, as well as the meaning of cheating or being a spoilsport or a trifler in a game, definitions that inform contemporary player behavior in videogames. Gary Alan Fine's (1983) ethnographic study of paper and pen role-playing gamers prefigures the activities of MMOG players to a startling degree, suggesting commonalities in how groups come together – physically as well as virtually – to engage in social activities.

Here, however, I focus on a more recent discussion in game studies, namely the usefulness of one of the field's core concepts – the magic circle – first discussed in relation to games by Johan Huizinga (1950). Huizinga's larger project was to advocate for the centrality of play in human life. He argued that play is older than culture, and has formed a kind of template for many aspects of civilization, if we look deeply enough. Activities such as war, law, art, language, and philosophy, according to Huizinga, have a play element at their core. And central to that play element is the magic circle. For Huizinga, play is set apart from daily life, both temporally and spatially, although the spatial aspect may be a liminal, or transitory, form of everyday space, rather than a physically delineated boundary such as a boxing ring or baseball diamond. According to Huizinga, “all play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course” (p. 10). In that space, he writes, “the laws and customs of ordinary life no longer count” (p. 12).

In seeking to define what makes games different, game studies scholars have often pointed to the magic circle as a way to distinguish play activities from other aspects of daily life. The magic circle boundary appears to make sense, particularly if a player is engaging in an offline multi-player game, or even a single-player game that is online or offline. The rules define the boundaries of the game, and the player must abide by those rules when in the space of the game. The concept has been popular with game designers, such as Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (2004), who have used it in their widely cited game design book, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, to talk about how to conceptualize the space of a game, and how players approach games as seemingly unique artifacts with distinct rules for engagement. They write, “the magic circle of a game is the space within which a game takes place. Whereas more informal forms of play do not have a distinct boundary, the formalized nature of games makes the magic circle explicit” (p. 99).

Some game studies scholars are in agreement with such distinctions. For example, Castronova (2004) has argued in relation to virtual worlds that “any threats to the magic circle are also threats to a person's well being. The magic circle warrants protection by some means, one of which might be the law” (p. 185). Yet other scholars have begun to question both the easy applications of the magic circle concept to videogames (as opposed to non-digital forms of games) and the usefulness of the concept at all for explaining video gameplay. Marinka Copier (2007) provides an extensive discussion of the subject in her doctoral dissertation, concluding that the magic circle concept

Other scholars take similar positions, including Taylor (2006), who studies the intersections of play activities as individuals move back and forth between the play space of MMOGs and the physical space of their daily lives, and Malaby (2006), who argues that “it is how we have sought to account for what is remarkable about games by setting them apart (as play-spaces, as stories) that is the largest roadblock to understanding what is powerful about them” (p. 97).

Lehdonvirta (2010) states that in relation to MMOGs and other virtual worlds, treating such domains as separate is extremely problematic, as once one starts cataloguing the caveats to how to count population, how to distinguish users from avatars, spillover of social relationships and the like, the process becomes shot through with exceptions and problems. Instead, Lehdonvirta (2010) advocates for considering such spaces as social worlds, a concept drawn from sociologist Anselm Strauss.

Liebe (2008) takes a somewhat different approach to dismissing the magic circle for videogames, arguing that “players do not have to adhere to the code of behavior and the rules, but simply have no other choice than to act within the frame of the possibilities provided by the computer program” (p. 332, emphasis added). But Juul (2008) maintains that while some may see the magic circle as a useless concept, it is still necessary to understand player activities, since “the magic circle is the boundary that players negotiate” (p. 62). In my own writing on the topic (Consalvo, 2009a), I agree that players do negotiate various aspects of play, yet suggest another concept that might be more useful in understanding such activity – the notion of frames, as introduced by Erving Goffman and modified to fit the gameplay situation by Fine (1983). This modification suggests that there is no easy distinction to be made between the ordinary rules of life and when they do or do not apply. Instead,

Such diverse and robust attention to this concept indicates that game studies as a field continues to evolve. Scholars studying digital games take their relationship to non-digital games, as well as the experience of gameplay, quite seriously. How this matter will be resolved is still an open question, suggesting a key debate for the future of game studies.

One Possible Future for Game Studies

Copier began exploring the development of the field of game studies as early as 2003, at the time of the first conference of the Digital Games Research Association in Utrecht, the Netherlands (Copier, 2003). Certainly the field has evolved since she wrote on the subject, but some elements remain the same. Game studies scholars continue to stake ground for themselves, as Copier suggested as a characteristic of all new fields. Part of that work involves setting boundaries – defining what is “outside” is just as critical (perhaps more so) as defining what is “inside” the field.

The time of Aarseth's 2001 proclamation declaring the beginning of game studies was a key moment in the process of establishing the field's boundaries. Researchers in Europe and North America had begun studying and writing about games using qualitative and critical methods, and had started to scrutinize games as unique objects. At the same time, researchers looked at the tools they had been trained with via their relative disciplines, and wondered if they were adequate to the job. A central question emerged: what is the best way to study games? Game scholars are still debating that question more than a decade later.

During that time, however, the makings of a field, if not a discipline, have begun to emerge. The online journal Game Studies was launched in 2001, and the Digital Games Research Association was formed in 2002, holding its first conference a year later. Other journals devoted to games have been created, including Games and Culture, Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, International Journal of Role-Playing, International Journal of Computer Games Technology, and Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, to name a few. Likewise, book series have developed at presses including MIT Press, Routledge, Sage, and other important venues. DiGRA has continued to hold semi-annual conferences, the Canadian Game Studies Association has been formed, and numerous smaller games conferences have been held around the globe. Finally, colleges and universities have started full-scale departments of game studies and design (such as the Georgia Institute of Technology and the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark), while many others have created undergraduate programs in game design, or worked to create interdisciplinary programs stressing game design and game studies.

Research has become specialized and sustained, with scholars carving out areas of expertise and engaging with questions and problems in increasingly sophisticated ways. Yet where should the field go next, as games scholars establish better methods and theories? Writing in Eludamos, I have already questioned the structures that game studies has created in its drive to establish itself as a serious scholarly endeavor (Consalvo, 2009c). Likewise, I have called for more research on the business aspects of digital games and virtual worlds, more studies of virtual worlds targeted to children, and more studies of the global aspects of games (Consalvo, 2010). These remain viable concerns, and there are also others that demand equal if not greater attention, including areas of study, terminology and practices, and the communication of results.

One of the most important, if not most pressing, is the challenge to adapt research methods as well as develop better ones to understand the complexities of both games themselves and game players. Many of these issues have already been addressed in this chapter but deserve highlighting here. We are only beginning to understand how individuals play games and the meanings derived from that activity. There is currently little in the language of game studies to account for such experiences – witness debates about whether games are merely “fun” or solely escapist entertainment. This is not a problem specific to game studies – media studies scholars have also grappled with how to draw meaningful insights from audience members, who are taught from a young age to denigrate their own consumption practices of popular culture. Games, however, are usually even lower on the status list than television and film, and thus have an even greater uphill battle to fight, still often being pigeonholed as “for kids” and “not serious.”

Even studying the act of play is challenging. As Taylor and Witkowski (2010) remind us, we have done little to theorize playing spectatorship and what that might mean for different types of player/spectators. Are there ways to engage with a game without holding a controller and guiding it? How can that engagement be measured? How do relationships between players and spectators influence game-play or the gaming situation? We need much more study of different types of play, beyond looking at how players fall into categories such as achievers, explorers, and socializers.

Likewise, game studies needs better guidance in studying how games are produced, in terms of both design-based research and how business and cultural practices shape game design. Beyond studying balance sheets or observing the development process, how can design itself be a research tool? What would success or failure in that regard look like? And finally, game studies scholars should continually question the reliance on industry terms to define their research. As my own work indicates, terms such as “casual” and “female player” are largely meaningless (Consalvo, 2009b), given that female players have diverse play styles, interests, and practices, and many players of “casual” games can be quite dedicated to their playing, spending multiple hours with the games.

Related to this, but more broadly, game studies should widen the scope of analyses, to see how play and games are integrated into the everyday lives of individuals, groups, and communities. Although it is difficult enough to study games in isolation, they are not played in isolation, except perhaps in the test labs of game researchers. As Radway (1988) suggested in relation to earlier media audiences, individuals do not focus their attention solely on one text; instead they live their daily lives, and media are an important element, but only one part of it. Similarly, games are only one slice of most folks' lived experiences, yet research often treats those experiences as singular, isolated, and special. For many people, games probably are not that special. Research on mobile games is beginning to show just that (Parikka & Suominen, 2006). Yet we also need to account for how games are part of that wider scope of daily experience. For example, Kolos (2010) found that the daily practices of a dorm community centered on playful experiences rather than on specific videogames. Yet she would have missed that more important finding had she only questioned individuals about their gameplay habits. While such deep explorations can be insightful, we need more such studies, which help us see where games fit in the rhythms of a person's or a family's life; how that group influences the styles of play witnessed; and how particular games might foster or even challenge those styles. Such studies are necessarily bigger and more difficult to do, but they would offer a better picture of the role of games in everyday life, of how their ordinariness can also be special.

Related to this, game studies scholars need to respond to the increasing game-ification of life we see emerging. Products such as Foursquare and sites such as Chorewars are only the beginning – if games are seen as motivating to individuals, and people strive to earn badges and achievements for almost anything, we will see this practice grow, as Schell (2010) and Hecker (2010) have predicted. Yet aside from the ramifications of entertainment games, and our purchasing habits, what might this mean for daily life? Huizinga argued that play preceded culture and was deeply structured into many of the institutions and practices we think of as serious (including law, war, and sports). What will such consciously crafted game-like systems mean for people in terms of being good citizens, careful parents, or interested media audiences? Game researchers need to investigate this trend, before its prevalence overtakes what we know about its effects.

We must put to rest the concept of the “gamer.” Games are ubiquitous, and this concept is more exclusionary than helpful in scholarly conversations as well as in identifying how individuals envision games in their lives. Except for the most hardcore, there is little benefit to labeling oneself a gamer, and a host of stigmas attached. One prevalent stereotype of the gamer is the slacker with negligible social skills, alone in his parents' basement, grinding away at violent, gory, and sexist videogames. Most of us know the stereotype is not accurate, but for many individuals who play an astonishing amount of games, this is what being a gamer means. Just as people now watch television or go to movies, they also play games – whether on consoles, computers, or mobile phones, on board games, with cards, or using physical objects such as balls and hoops. Using the term gamer sets up artificial distinctions and creates tensions where instead we should be making connections. To do that, game scholars should move away from gamer as an identity marker and instead focus on how games or play make people's lives more interesting, richer, better, and even more frustrating at times.

Lastly, even as scholars become more specialized in their knowledge domains (studying casual games or MMOGs, looking at the effects of violent games or exploring design practices in serious games), they need to keep the broader research picture in mind. Already there are interesting convergences in the study of female players – whose activities are strikingly similar across casual, MMOGs, and social games. Where else will we see such commonalities, or what could be important differences? Likewise, game studies must continue its conversations with other fields and disciplines. Most centrally, I believe games studies scholars have important things to say to their home disciplines as well as related fields of study – such as in the domain of online behavior that Internet studies scholars scrutinize, or ways to enrich conversations in anthropology when it comes time to conduct a virtual ethnography, as Pearce (2009) has done. Even as games are special and need more specialized methods to be understood, research findings can and do speak to broader communities of knowledge, and game scholars must be forceful in making that known. In that way, games studies makes the case that games do matter, and that play is central to the experience of being human. Our play activities are critical to map and understand, and they also play a role in the rest of our daily activities. They help to shape our cultures, our senses of ourselves. They are increasingly being mapped onto daily living. How could we not study games?

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