The keynote talk slides for the Summer School of Games and Play Research, Utrecht, 18th August 2014.

1. From Interdisciplinarity
to Identity and Back: The
Dual Character of
Academic Game Studies
Frans Mäyrä
University of Tampere
frans.mayra@uta.fi-//-gamelab.uta.fi-//-SIS-/-TRIM-/-game-research-lab-

2. Talk outline
• Introduction: contemporary game studies, and disciplinary
organization of knowledge
• Is the object of game studies inherently situated between
disciplines?
• Some results from a survey that was targeted to probe the
academic background and practices of games researchers
• What kind of disciplinary backgrounds and research traditions
the current practitioners of digital games research are coming
from?
• What we can say about the disciplinary identity of game
researchers?
• How unified or diversified the field of games research Academia
appears to be today?
• Game Studies / research of games: from emergent discipline to
multidisciplinary meeting ground, interdisciplinary field, and
back?

3. Disciplines and interdisciplinarity
• Disciplinary nature of learning is rooted in antiquity
• Plato favoured unified science, but Aristotle aimed to establish
clearly lineated areas of inquiry (e.g. Poetics, Politics,
Metaphysics)
• Already Romans concerned about dangers of overspecialization
• Educational ideal: integration of knowledge through:
– community of disciplines of knowledge (universitas
scientiarum)
– community of teachers and students (universitas
magistrorum et scholarium)
• The original root for our word for ‘university’
• During the late 1800s, universities started organising
themselves around modern disciplines, fields of knowledge and
learning

4. Call for interdisciplinarity
• Thomas Kuhn (Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962) called
‘normal science’ that ‘conservative form’ of scientific operation
that continues to operate on shared assumptions
• By 1960s universities had become subject to new demands:
– the rapid development of sciences, new needs of students,
professional training, changing society, economic and
administrative challenges to contemporary university
• Universities were now required to produce ‘innovations’,
boundary-breaking or paradigm-shifting new knowledge, to
contribute to national competitiveness
• Public calls for research grants started to emphasise
interdisciplinary collaboration, emerging new areas of
knowledge

5. Early studies in games
• Multiple origins:
• Anthropology: e.g. Stewart Culin, Games of
North American Indians (1907)
• History: e.g. H.J.R. Murray, A History of
Chess (1913)
• Mathematical game theory: e.g. John von
Neumann (1928)
• Cultural & art studies: e.g. Johan Huizinga,
Homo Ludens (1938)
• Computer Sciences: e.g. chess program
studies, Alan Turing (1947), Claude Shannon
(1950)
• Educational sciences: e.g. Richard Duke,
Gaming: The Future’s Language (1974)

6. Modern game studies emerging
• Contemporary game studies started to emerge (particularly in
late 1990s) in a transforming academic and socio-cultural
context for research and education
• The rising popularity starting in early 2000s is the sum of many
things
• Generational shift in the universities: personal experiences
among digital games made aware about the qualitative leap
from traditional board or card games
• Many new digital games provided the sense of entering an
extensive alternate simulated world, facing rich and dynamic
array of chancing challenges, often immersed in high-speed
action, with spectacular audiovisual displays
• New focus on ontology: what games are? What is the
“gameness” of games? And epistemology: how we can study
games? What is valid knowledge about games and/or play?

7. Inherent interdisciplinarity
• Deceptively simple appearance of early digital games, plus their
low cultural status, had arguably hidden the potentials of this art
form from critical awareness
• Gameplay of e.g. Pac-Man can be recorded as video and then
analysed as a storyline of compulsive eating and fight for
survival (metaphor for consumerism & predatory capitalism?)
• When actually played, the dominance of gameplay often
displaces representational and narrative aspects: under the
graphical surface, the underlying dynamic system of forces and
counter-forces is revealed
• Dual structure of games: both interactive, digital media and
playful performances of players

8. The-semiosis-and-ludosis)of-games-are-inseparable:-the-mul?dimensionality-
in-contemporary-digital-games-is-a-challenge-for-disciplinary-knowledge-
hBp://gamestudiesbook.net--

9. Why a discipline?
• “There is no-one understanding my work – my studies on
games are judged by people who know nothing about them”
• Discipline is a form of organising (scientific and scholarly)
knowledge and related practices
• Disciplines can be rigid, but they also facilitate
communication, community formation, institutional support, as
well as continuity and progress in scholarship
• Disciplines promote terminological clarity (shared language)
• They bring together people focused on same, or closely
related phenomena (shared subject matter, expertise)
• Disciplines support: degree programs, conferences, journals,
associations, academic work positions

11. Disciplinarity: does it matter?
• Discussing the academic affiliations helps to make us
aware of our differences and similarities in questions
such as e.g.
– What is the role and status of games and play in culture and
society?
– How, and from what kind of starting points should they be
researched?
– What kind of knowledge about games and play is relevant or
valuable knowledge?
– What kind of purposes should the knowledge about games
primarily be used for?
• Room for genuine disagreement, as well as agreement

12. Tensions in interdisciplinarity
• Acknowledging the complex character of games and play does not
automatically lead to agreement about what the proper research
focus and methodology should be
• Humanities scholars: hermeneutic and phenomenological traditions
of thought, critical explorations into the ontology of a work of art
• Social sciences: research needs to be based on empirical data that
has been collected systematically and which can be verified
• Design research: aim is at contributing to the innovation in games
• Economic, legal, health, education and many other fields have their
own knowledge aims and established practices
• Espen Aarseth (2007): in e.g. social sciences/humanities, informal/
formal methods, will lead into incompatible differences in what is
the object of game studies, and what should be its proper
methodology
• I perceive the difference, but also room for collaboration

13. Survey: implementation and the sample
• Designed by scholars from multiple backgrounds and
rather substantial in length (46 questions/statement
groups, some with multiple statement lists)
• Distributed online to the mailing lists of DiGRA, as well
as to the ECREA and ICA game studies groups (email,
Facebook pages); NOT e.g. among CHI Play participants
• The survey gained 808 responses, with 561 respondents
(70.8 %) completing the entire survey
• After removing some invalid entries (including all those
cases where an incorrect response had been given to at
least one of the control questions), 544 valid responses
(67.3 %) formed the data that was used in the following
analysis and discussion

14. Results: Disciplinary background
0- 2- 4- 6- 8- 10- 12- 14- 16- 18-
Other-(s?ll-in-High-School)-
Game-Studies-
Informa?on-Studies-
Natural-Sciences-
Economics,-Business-&-Management-
Design-
Social-Sciences-
Arts-
Engineering-
Media-Studies-
Psychology-
Computer-Sciences-
Educa?onal-Sciences-
Humani?es-
Communica?on-Studies-
Percentage-

15. Current research field
0- 2- 4- 6- 8- 10- 12- 14- 16- 18-
Other-(not-specified)-
Informa?on-Studies-
Game-Studies-
Economics,-Business-&-Management-
Natural-Sciences-
Computer-Sciences-
Arts-
Social-Sciences-
Engineering-
Humani?es-
Design-
Educa?onal-Sciences-
Psychology-
Communica?on-Studies-
Media-Studies-
Percentage-

16. Transfers between fields
• 55-%-(300-respondents)-stayed-in-their-original-field,-45-%-(244)-had-changed-to-another-field-

17. Identification as a “digital games researcher”
0- 5- 10- 15- 20- 25- 30- 35- 40- 45- 50-
Strongly-Disagree-
Disagree-
Neither-Agree-nor-Disagree-
Agree-
Strongly-Agree-
Percent-
• C.-79-%-considered-themselves-as-’digital-games-researchers’.--

18. Identification as a “digital games researcher” by
original degree
• Design,-Engineering-and-Humani?es-researchers-appear-slightly-less-likely-to-agree-
• Differences-are-not-sta?s?cally-significant-(ANOVA-F(9,-503)-=-1.896,-p)=-.05;-neither-Tukey’s-
HSD-showed-no-sta?s?cally-significant-differences-between-groups)--

19. Identification as a gamer
0- 5- 10- 15- 20- 25- 30- 35- 40-
Strongly-Disagree-
Disagree-
Neither-Agree-nor-Disagree-
Agree-
Strongly-Agree-
Percent-
• 66-%-saw-themselves-as-gamers;-those-who-selfciden?fied-as-‘gamers’-also-more-likely-to-
iden?fy-themselves-as-‘digital-games-researchers’-(r)=-.295,-p)=-.000)--

20. Research collaborations
0- 50- 100- 150- 200- 250- 300- 350- 400- 450- 500-
Other,-please-specify-
Interna?onal-Government-(e.g.-European-Union,-U.S.-Federal-Government)-
Na?onal/State-Government-
NoncGovernmental-Organiza?on-
Industry-
Researchers-from-another-country-
Researchers-from-another-ins?tu?on-in-your-country-of-residence-
Researchers-from-your-own-ins?tu?on-
• Majority-(433-of-544,-76-%)-had-at-least-some-research-collabora?on;-49-%-had-done-
interna?onal-collabora?on;-39-%-reported-industry-collabora?on-

21. Lessons from data
• In light of the findings, it appears clear that:
• a) in terms of background education, no single discipline plays a key
role for organizing the academic identity of contemporary games
researchers, and that
• b) the research on digital games and play is in fact highly
multidisciplinary and highly dynamic as almost half of the survey
respondents reported currently working in a different field than from
which they gained their highest degree
• On the other hand, the respondents also predominantly identified
themselves as “digital games researchers”, which appeared not to be
an exclusive feature of their academic identity, but rather something that
they were capable of combining with other academic affiliations.
• Research collaboration was also very common, probably contributing to
more interdisciplinary contact among those academics who are
interested in researching games, but are originally coming from different
academic fields. It was also interesting to note that, whilst the majority
of the respondents agreed to a statement of being gamers themselves,
over a third did not.

22. There and back – and the way forward?
• Views from the Critical Evaluation of Game Studies seminar:
• Espen Aarseth: game studies is a “field”, and its establishment as a
discipline should not be desired
• Bart Simon: game studies should remain true to the “unserious”
character of games and play
• Sebastian Deterding: game studies has already established an
epistemic and methodological ‘core’, but since there are few career
opportunities, researchers are also building multiple sub-communities
within established fields (e.g. games research special interest groups
in Computer Sciences, Communication Studies etc.)
• Consequently, there is no one ‘game studies’, but many: an ongoing
dialectic between humanities, social sciences, art, design studies,
computer sciences, economics etc. based “polyphonic game studies”
• However, basic theories and terminology need to be shared,
otherwise teaching, evaluating and building upon earlier research is
not possible

23. References / further reading:
• Aarseth, Espen J. (2007) “I Fought the Law: Transgressive Play and The Implied Player.”
In: Situated Play – Proceedings of DiGRA 2007. Tokyo, Japan: DiGRA Japan. [
http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/07313.03489.pdf]
• Bok, Derek (2004) Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher
Education. Princeton (NJ): Princeton University Press.
• Charle, Christophe (2004) “Patterns.” In: Walter Rüegg (ed.), A History of the University in
Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 33-82.
• Klein, Julie Thompson (1991) Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and Practice. Newcastle
upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books.
• Kuhn, Thomas S. (1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago (IL): University Of
Chicago Press.
• Mäyrä, Frans (2008) Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture. London & NY: Sage
Publications.
• Mäyrä, Frans (2009) “Getting into the Game: Doing Multi-Disciplinary Game Studies”. In:
Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf (eds.), The Video Game Theory Reader 2. New York:
Routledge. [
http://people.uta.fi/~frans.mayra/Mayra_Multidisciplinary_Game_Studies_2009.pdf]
• Mäyrä, Frans, Jan Van Looy & Thorsten Quandt (2013) “Disciplinary Identity of Game
Scholars: An Outline”. Proceedings of DiGRA 2013. Atlanta: Georgia Tech & DiGRA. [
http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/paper_146.pdf]