Abstract

Though no field or discipline’s historical vector presents itself as a strictly linear building of knowledge, the historical trajectory of Game Studies is problematic: certainly not linear, yet also not even multiplicious or rhizomatic. Instead, we are cyclical. Past debates often re-emerge, zombie-like, muttering the same arguments, often encased in binaries as endemic to our field as they are to the objects we study: unbridgeable disagreements on fundamental concepts; incompatible ontologies and epistemologies; incommensurability writ large. We view this as a chronic issue which has of late culminated in a crisis, exacerbated by changing institutional prerogatives championing multidisciplinary approaches and demands for “public impact”. This article takes a metaphysical approach, performing a meta-review to search for the root cause of our field’s cyclical nature. We identify and explore a key issue, namely our continuing status as pre-paradigmatic field, and ask questions designed to provoke ways forward, to provide more inflection points and fewer endless loops.

Highlights

  • Challenged, improved, or discarded for a new one as anomalies are identified, agreed upon, and investigated. This pattern of paradigm emergence, stabilisation, crisis and revolution is spelled out in rigorous detail within Thomas Kuhn’s landmark text, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970)

  • The question of morality is often tangentially discussed both outside and within Game Studies, and again we find siloed commentaries, conversations at cross-purposes, and incompatible frameworks

  • We cannot deny that rather than paradigms, we find more than a hint of moralizing and essentializing syntagms in some strands of game studies—Cassell and Jenkins' From Barbie to Mortal Kombat (2000) stands out—and an abdication of any acknowledgment that something happens to the player—Aarseth’s infamous comments (2004, p. 48) disavowing the impact of Lara Croft's physique immediately come to mind

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Summary

Introduction

We don’t really know what we’re talking about, do we? Perhaps we should rephrase: We know what we’re talking about, but not what they are talking about. For example, outlines how the problem of incommensurability is what allows a paradigm to emerge (or replace an old one): during pre-paradigm periods and during the crises that lead to large-scale changes of paradigm [...] many speculative and unarticulated theories [...] can themselves point the way to discovery.

Results
Conclusion

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