To celebrate the beginning of 2021, the special issue I edited with Teresa de la Hera (Erasmus university Rotterdam, The Netherlands) and Felix Reer (University of Münster, Germany) came out in the journal Media and Communication (open access). Titled Games and Communication – Quo Vadis? it includes a selection of articles that show a variety of approaches game scholars take to studying games and play.
In our introductory text, we go through the included articles, and also briefly discuss what it means to be involved in a broad, pragmatically oriented field. As I see it, game studies has been, and continues to exist, as a loose umbrella under which scholars coming from different fields come together to study emerging phenomena. And this is good so. It is refreshing to go to any conference in the field, and listen to the wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches scholars employ – it really challenges the mind. At the same time this means that in order to participate in the scholarly discussion surrounding game studies, one sometimes feels the need to be a jack of all trades just to be able to follow it, let alone understand and contribute to it. Challenging, but fun!
This year, I will try to lift up academic publications by writing short posts concerning them here. The idea behind this endeavour is both to increase the publications’ visibility, as well as to lower the threshold of reading them. At the same time this activity will serve as an exercise in simplifying or popularising academic thinking:)
Digital Wilderness 