FYI - A Source for Academic Study of Video Games

Are you bored? Are you a serious gamer? Do you consider yourself to be an intelligent serious gamer? Well, hey, us too! So the next time you are bored and you are looking for something gaming-related to read that will help make you a smarter and well-informed member of the gamer community, check out the website "Game Studies" over at http://gamestudies.org. Seriously.

The website above is actually called "Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research" and its mission is to explore the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; and to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming. Game Studies is a non-profit, open-access, crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research, and it is web-published several times a year at www.gamestudies.org.

The site, its function, and its presence is funded and sponsored by Lund University, The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet), The Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils for the Humanities and the Social Sciences, and the IT University of Copenhagen, and how cool is that?

In addition to serving as an official publication for research papers for and about gaming, the site also offers book reviews for books that relate to gaming and gamer culture, and if you happen to be an academic as well as a gamer, may very well be a place you can go to have your own research published. Heck, just reading that site may cause you to want to go ahead and indulge your urge to write a paper on the dichotomy of mushroom colours in Mario Brothers games! Who can say?

Among the very cool papers published in that site and publication is a paper by academic writer Mikael Jakobsson, who is an Associate Professor at Malmö University where he teaches interaction design, game design and game criticism called "The Achievement Machine: Understanding Xbox 360 Achievements in Gaming Practices."

If you have ever been curious about the point to Achievements and their impact on the gaming community, that paper is worth a read!

Jesper Juul is a Ph.D. student in computer games at the IT University of Copenhagen, and he has written a paper titled "Games Telling stories?" that is worth a read as it explores the issues that are present in the process by which stories are translated from other media -- TV Shows, Movies, and Books -- into video games. Cool that!

Aki Järvinen is currently employed at Tampere University's Hypermedia Laboratory as an assistant professor, working on a PhD on video game aesthetics, and he write a paper titled: "Halo and the Anatomy of the FPS" that examines how the Halo games have helped to define the FPS genre.

There are so many great papers on this site that it is hard to believe we discovered it completely by accident, and that it is not widely known in the gaming community! Well, now you know!

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