Alisha Karabinus et al. eds., "Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be" (Punctum Books, 2025)

Sep 17, 2025

Carly A. Kocurek, a prominent figure in Digital Humanities, and Cody Mejeur, Director of the Amatrix Gaming Lab, engage in a vibrant discussion about their anthology, exploring the evolution of game studies. They tackle the challenges of curating diverse voices while maintaining cohesion. The conversation highlights the need for innovation in academia and emphasizes inclusivity within the field. Anecdotes about collaborative gaming experiences and the joy of tabletop role-playing games bring a personal touch, further emphasizing the importance of diverse narratives in game studies.

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INSIGHT

Fields Are Defined By Their Exclusions

Fields are defined as much by what they exclude as by what they include, shaping identity and boundaries.
Game studies' interdisciplinary nature intensifies contested boundaries and professional investments.

INSIGHT

Boundary Work Shapes Professional Identity

Defining a field is a boundary exercise that separates activities and identities.
Interdisciplinarity in game studies makes those boundaries more contested and meaningful for scholars.

INSIGHT

Rhetoric Opens Or Closes Academic Gates

Rhetorical choices shape who and what is included in a discipline and open up new conversations.
Editors intentionally push to 'kick the gate open' to include marginalized or siloed perspectives.

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Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be (Punctum Books, 2025) offers a first-of-its-kind reflection on how game studies as an academic field has been shaped and sustained. Today, game studies is a thriving field with many dedicated national and international conferences, journals, professional societies, and a strong presence at conferences in disciplines like computer science, communication, media studies, theater, visual arts, popular culture, and others. But, when did game studies start? And what (and who) is at the core or center of game studies? Fields are defined as much by what they are not as by what they are, and their borderlands can be hotly contested spaces.

In this anthology, scholars from across the field consider how the boundaries of game studies have been established, codified, contested, and protected, raising critical questions about who and what gets left out of the field. Over more than two dozen chapters and interviews with leading figures, including Espen Aarseth, Kishonna Gray, Henry Jenkins, Lisa Nakamura, Kentaro Matsumoto, Ken McAllister, and Janet Murray, the contributors offer a dazzling array of insightful provocations that address the formation, propagation, and cultivation of game studies, interrogating not only the field’s pasts but its potential futures and asking us to think deliberately about how academic fields are collectively built.

Alisha Karabinus (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Studies at Grand Valley State University.

Carly A. Kocurek (she/her) is Professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Cody Mejeur (they/them) is Assistant Professor of Game Studies at University at Buffalo, SUNY.

Emma Vossen (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Game Studies in the Department of Digital Humanities at Brock University, Canada.

Rudolf Thomas Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies (LMU & University of Passau). Currently, he's teaching as a professor for game design and game studies at the University of Applied Sciences Neu-Ulm, has submitted his third dissertation at the University of Vechta, holds the position as lead editor at the online journal TITEL kulturmagazin for the game section, hosts the German local radio show Replay Value and is editor of the weekly game research newsletter DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist.

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