What We Know About Games A Scientometric Approach to Game Studies in the 2000s

This article proposes a reflexive approach on the scientific production in the field of game studies in recent years. It relies on a sociology of science perspective to answer the question: What are game studies really about? Relying on scientometric and lexicometric tools, we analyze the metadata a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inGames and culture Vol. 12; no. 6; pp. 563 - 584
Main Authors Coavoux, Samuel, Boutet, Manuel, Zabban, Vinciane
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.09.2017
Subjects
Humanities and Social Sciences
Sociology
epistemic culture
game studies
path dependence
sociology of science
trading zone
multidisciplinarity
lexicometric analysis
topic modeling
World of Warcraft (WoW)
interdisciplinarity
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Summary:This article proposes a reflexive approach on the scientific production in the field of game studies in recent years. It relies on a sociology of science perspective to answer the question: What are game studies really about? Relying on scientometric and lexicometric tools, we analyze the metadata and content of a corpus of articles from the journals Games Studies and Games & Culture and of Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) proceedings. We show that published researches have been studying only a limited set of game genres and that they especially focus on online games. We then expose the different ways game studies are talking about games through a topic model analysis of our corpus. We test two hypotheses to explain the concentration of research on singular objects: path dependence and trading zone. We describe integrative properties of the focus on common objects but stress also the scientific limits met by this tendency.
ISSN:1555-4120
1555-4139
DOI:10.1177/1555412016676661