Over the past decade, we have had the pleasure of working with many of the major researchers in game studies, as well as with new and promising scholars coming from a wide range of disciplines, all of which has broadened and enriched our own perspectives regarding the field. Therefore, in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, we have pursued a very productive collaboration in order to push the field’s boundaries further, survey its wide and growing horizon, and to provide a unique, authoritative and multi-disciplinary overview.
The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies addresses a series of themes pertinent to the ongoing theoretical and methodological development of game studies. While the number of publications in game studies has expanded greatly since 2000, and continues to grow, many anthologies and textbooks have, however, often studied video games from a limited number of theoretical perspectives, focusing for the most part on their formal and sociological aspects. Trying to remain true to the key issues, and the thinkers, texts, and approaches necessary to understanding video games, the Companion features essays on such topics as interactivity, ludology, narratology, fiction, education, sociology, media ecology, culture, research, and more. These essays survey—not without constructively debating about their outcomes—the general ways video games have been thought about and dealt with, giving a broad overview of the issues at hand.
We have also tried to propose new divisions or distributions of knowledge in order to enlighten study and stimulate analysis from new angles. For instance, gender studies generally talks about questions of femininity in video games, while men’s roles are more typically overlooked and rarely dealt with (despite their overabundance, or perhaps because of it); thus “Femininity” and “Masculinity” are separate essays here. If multiplayer gaming by and large leads to the analysis of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) and is opposed to the ways single-player games are played, studying the two experiences together sheds light on their similitude. The video game might well be considered the tenth art, yet we barely question how we talk about the game as an artifact. As video games are rule-based, the notion of “conventions” is as important to the game activity, and is rarely addressed directly. In the same manner, we have also examined the subject inductively, and instead of merely dealing with the classical opposition of play and game, separate inquiries into challenge, cheating, conflict, objectives, and repetition will certainly aid new and more in-depth accounts of the activity of playing games. Other topics, such as resolution, dimensionality, and worlds, present new ways of considering the artistic and technical aspects of games and their graphics and sound.
Overall, we have divided the Companion into seven broad parts, ranging from the material to the philosophical, into which our essays are organized. We begin with Technological Aspects, considering the machinery that makes games playable, and that underlie all games and systems. Formal Aspects are explored next, and these are concerned with design, graphics, and sound, and the way they are used in game structures. Moving up another level, Playfulness Aspects examines the experience of video gaming, the ways games are used, and what they have to offer players. The next part, Generic Aspects, looks at some of the popular genres of video games, and their connection to video games in general. From there we move out to Cultural Aspects, considering such topics as convergence, ecology, education, violence, and more. Closely linked to these are Sociological Aspects, which examine the way video games depict, engage, and influence human beings, both individually and in groups. Finally, Philosophical Aspects covers a broad range of topics including cognition, ideology, meaning, ethics, ontology, transcendence, and more.
Naturally, we realize that a single volume, substantial as it may be, can give only a sampling of the many topics and lenses through which video games can be considered and studied; and as time passes the field of game studies will grow broader and deeper, just as its object of study continues to expand and evolve, as games find new forms and venues and create new experiences for their users. It is our wish, then, that readers will find the Companion useful for its summaries of existing work in the field and for its variety of writing styles and essay structures—there are indeed many ways to write about video games and different methodological approaches. But above all, we hope that it will be a point of departure for the readers’ journeys into the vast regions of inquiry that are hinted at in the essays but remain unexplored.