Academic Journal on Computer Games

Espen Aarseth writes: "The world's first academic journal on computer games, Game Studies, is now online. With several international conferences and a peer-review journal, 2001 is the year that the academic world finally takes computer and video games seriously."

Comments

Missing something...

[ChristianBaekkelund]

As someone who actually does some amount of game studies in my actual academic studies, I feel that some of the posts here so far are missing an important feature...

People have stated that games are "science"...and that they are "feats of engineering"...but, what's missed is that to a large degree they are also works of "art" and as a whole comprise an artistic medium. There are journals analyzing film-work, television, music and such from a cultural, social, and/or humanistic academic standpoint. It was important for this distinction (in both ways) to happen with respect to gaming as well...

Computer games have become feats of engineering

[hillct]

It's about time this happened. Computer game programming has evolved since it's inception from an amusement of a few engineers, to a legitimate commercial enterprise, to a force in the marketplace and finally to an area of academic research.

In fairness for those who look on this with skepticism, the computer gaming industry integrates a variety of areas of research which together can be applied to computer gaming, buy are legitimate areas of study seperately: Mathmatical modeling, Graphic Arts, a whole variety of areas around AI research from the 70s, and the study of sociology, in attempts to create acccurate simulations of human responses. Aparently, all we really needed was some motivation to study these areas, and the pursuit of entertainment is just such a motivator.

--CTH