Scholars from disciplines across the academy are discovering what game developers, publishers, and players have known for years: video and computer games are not only fun, but remarkably compelling. They engage players deeply, and facilitate rich (and sometimes even unusual) kinds of human/computer, computer/computer, and human/human interactions. More importantly, games teach. In fact, they always teach—at the simplest level, a player must learn a gameʼs rules in order to play. For a classic title such as Galaga (1981), these rules might only involve a few play logics (e.g., move left, move right, and fire). Contemporary titles, by contrast, often demand that players learn dozens (sometimes even hundreds) of play logics, and ultimately synthesize those logics into elaborate resource management and interpersonal skills including high-level multi-tasking, complex hand/eye movements, and even learning the principles of textile manufacturing, cartography, and metallurgy (e.g., A Tale in the Desert II [2004]).

Video and computer games teach more than just rules, however. They ask players to learn new languages and styles of information processing and communication. As sociologist Johan Huizinga notes:

The great archetypal activities of human society are all permeated with play from the start…law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of play. (4-5)

Because play is at the heart of all games (whether they are fun or not), games embody the most fundamental ways human beings interact with each other and the world around them. It is no wonder, then, that scholars throughout the humanities, arts, and sciences are starting to attend more closely to the compelling world of video and computer games.

This issue of the International Digital Media and Arts Association Journal marks the first in a series of special issues devoted to the burgeoning field of video and computer game studies. Though still inchoate, the field is startlingly broad, making comprehensive analysis difficult. As a result, each of the issues in this series will function as a snapshot, encompassing only a small portion of the game studies vista. The idea is that over time, these snapshots will together form an historical panorama of sorts. Our hope is that this panorama will provide the next generation of computer game scholars with a genealogy of the discipline. Tomorrowʼs scholars will be able to look back and see not only which ideas todayʼs scholars considered important, but also which ideas enjoyed continuous investigation, which were anomalous, and which (by their very absence) were not considered important at all.

The contributors to this issue are as diverse as the field of game studies itself, and their interests range from the study to the teaching with to the building of games. In keeping with this diversity, we have left the essays relatively unadulterated. Part of capturing a snapshot of a field is capturing the various languages, styles, and theoretical orientations at play in its formation. Thus, this issue contains work by and in the patois of lexicographers, computer scientists, university administrators, game developers, and others. Readers will also find represented in the following pages work by scholars spread across the career continuum, from graduate students to full professors. This range, too, is important to apprehend because it illustrates many of the ways that the medium of the computer game—a medium that itself has experienced a dramatic demographic expansion over the past three decades—is approached by different generations of scholars. We hope you enjoy this first snapshot, and see in it ways you might initiate your own game studies.

Works Cited:

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon, 1955.