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International Perspectives on Video Games and the Humanities Today

This text is a contribution to the edited volume „Geisteswissenschaften und Digitale Spiele: Debatten, Data & Desiderata“, published on the occasion of the AKGWDS’ tenth anniversary. A brief introduction and overview of all previously published contributions can be found here (German).

The book series Video Games and the Humanities was founded under the editorial care of Rabea Rittgerodt at De Gruyter in 2019. The founding editors were Nathalie Aghoro, Iro Filippaki, Chris Kempshall, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Jeremiah McCall, and Sascha Pöhlmann; Kate Cook and Esther Wright joined the team in 2024. As of mid-2025, the series comprises 18 volumes, with more in the works.

Our common editorial work on these books, as well as on those projects that never made it to the publication stage, was broad and varied from a disciplinary perspective, but it certainly does not qualify us to do justice to the most general presumption made by both our series title or its inversion in the title of the current volume, Humanities and Digital Games. It also does not qualify us to give more than a subjective and selective take on the ‘current state’ of the work done in this vast discursive field, in academia and elsewhere. But as our series overlaps and resonates with the project at hand, we are pleased to add our perspectives to the ones collected here, as both do contribute to something that is, clearly, ambitious to the point of arrogance. However, as it has been noted, ambition seems to be the only way to approach video game studies: “[W]ith their military origins, emergent and programmable nature, and ubiquitous popularity, video games provoke multiple scholarly approaches.”[1] Creating a new discipline of game studies automatically relies on processes of inclusion and exclusion, and of creating self and other.[2] What our series then seeks to do is to be conscious of these processes of exclusion and inclusion and to decolonize, to the extent that this is possible, the dominant voices and discourses of the field. This is shown by the different scholarly investment of the members of the editorial board, as well as the diversity of the writers in terms of academic occupation and discipline. Thus, our series exhibits what Karabinus et al. call active self-reflection with game studies “own stakes, politics, and inequalities”.[3] In keeping with contemporary theoretical approaches to the study of video games that view playing not as an unproductive art form, but rather as meaningful engagement with performance and spectatorship, Video Games and the Humanities includes scholarly work that examines video games as historical, material, cultural, as well as digital artifacts.[4] This series seeks to reconnect media-centric Game Studies to the disciplines it had to distance itself from in its foundation, such as literary studies, film studies, or political science, in an attempt to use their differences and contact zones in a mutually productive dialogue. Seen as integral yet often invisible parts of Game Studies, other disciplines can defamiliarize and enlighten video gaming.

This is the first point worth making here, and perhaps a programmatic one: ‘Video Games and the Humanities’ is undoubtedly not a framework that even a book series can hope to address in anything but a deeply partial and exemplary way, and yet such broad scope is necessary to begin to address it, without too many limitations. Our initial motivation was simple, and it can be summarized in one single question: What do the humanities do with video games and what do video games do to the humanities? Coming from various disciplinary backgrounds, we editors each had our own answers to that question with regard to the fields we felt at home in, but we were interested in the disciplines we did not even think about when we thought about other disciplines. We knew that video games, as the prominent medium and cultural factor of the twenty-first century, potentially had an impact on every single scientific field in the humanities – but we also knew that they would respond to them in very different ways, including not at all. We also knew that there would be patterns and common developments, methodological and theoretical cross-currents and indeed also attempts at seclusion, detachment, and even rejection. We also knew that there would be local, regional, national, and international differences, similarities, and cross-currents that would provide us with both surprising patterns and surprising distinctions. Inviting contributions from all the humanities, without even defining what they are, meant casting the widest possible net, but at the same time we framed this explicitly in reference to particular disciplinary frameworks.

This is the second programmatic point our framework makes: We want to resist the tendency to understand the interdisciplinarity of game studies as non-disciplinarity and instead highlight the specificity of approaches from particular disciplines without privilege or hierarchy. In other words, the broadness of the label of game studies allows for covering it up when an approach is not really based in any kind of distinguishable framework, often with a vague inflection of media studies or cultural studies. This sounds like gatekeeping and an insistence on disciplinary boundaries, but it is actually the opposite: Any genuine interdisciplinarity must have a disciplinary grounding first, otherwise it is not able to engage in any kind of methodological or theoretical transfer or dialogue. If you cannot say why you are writing that book in your field, and if you may just as well write it in another, you are not really writing it anywhere at all – and this is not promoting interdisciplinarity but preventing it. Instead, we are interested in how these particular perspectives come about, how they intersect, and how they change; ideally, this results in a proper kaleidoscope of approaches instead of a myopia where eventually all perspectives are more or less the same.[5]

A third and final programmatic point also cannot go unmentioned, even though it adds yet another layer of presumptuous arrogance. In the phrase ‘Video Games and the Humanities’, the contemporary relevance of only one item is assured – and it is the games and not the humanities. It has become a common trope to ‘defend’ the humanities, and they are and have been under attack from various angles for a very long time now. Yet it is better to promote them instead, not least to avoid narratives of victimization or justification that actually further downplay their relevance. The humanities clearly matter, and one way in which they do is that they are uniquely equipped, in their vast conceptual and methodical repertoire, to understand video games – the materiality, the media, the culture, the production, the players, and so on – as well as play itself, the act of playing, the meanings of play, and how we interact with each other, with our media, and with our machines. The humanities do not need video games to legitimize what they are doing, but we clearly need the humanities to understand video games, and this is a connection worth insisting on.

Theory formation in the humanities, rooted in this range of disciplines, affords sound investigations into the complex situated entanglements video games find themselves in as they meet various international audiences on the stage of global entertainment. Video games engage players on the imaginary plane by appealing to the individual imagination and sense of play as well as by referencing and negotiating historical and cultural imaginaries, philosophical ideas, and ideologies through sound, image, and gameplay. These encounters between player and game are also always informed by socio-cultural and (geo)political constellations on all levels of production, reception, and consumption. Retracing those particularities helps to understand the work that video games do, often simultaneously, on local, regional, and global levels as well as in the intimate settings in which the game experience is lived. This is where the humanities’ capacity for setting a disciplinary frame of reference from which to engage in interdisciplinary conversations will prove most valuable.

Cultural studies, for instance, can help elucidate how video games use their possibilities as a medium for creative invention and artistic expression in the cultural contexts they situate themselves in and are adopted by, such as the gaming communities that coalesce around them. In Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games,[6] Agata Waszkiewicz explores the cultural politics and aesthetics of food in video games. Notably because of its status as a universally shared practice with local and regional inflections, food participates in world-building by mediating particular cultural markers, affords fun gameplay mechanics, and, ultimately, forges relations of comfort between player and game. But, as Waszkiewicz demonstrates in their study, these ludic relations are also fundamentally political since food as a practice affords the negotiation and queering of gender conceptions in the process of preparing and eating it in digital environments as much as in real-life kitchens. The connection between the universal and the particular also affects the ways in which video games mediate between regional formations and global popular culture. In Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture,[7] Sören Schoppmeier investigates such transnational entanglements through the discussion of open-world video games that are developed in international teams and reproduce American culture, specifically – a combination that, as a result, establishes interlaced clusters of situatedness and globality in popular culture. The local-yet-global discourses that Schoppmeier sheds light on in games such as Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and Red Dead Redemption encompass neoliberal capitalism, surveillance, systemic racism, and reprisals on the cinematic genre of the western. Such studies demonstrate that video games are a preponderant expression of the dynamic interplay between the local and the global in an era of globalization.

Other works, like the authoritative collected edition End-Game: Apocalyptic Video Games, Contemporary Society, and Digital Media Culture,[8] edited by Lorenzo DiTommaso, James Crossley, Alastair Lockhart, and Rachel Wagner, show that interdisciplinary conversations between the humanities and game studies help following the multi-layered web of nodes and pathways through which particular themes – like imaginaries of a world-ending catastrophe, a Western religious discourse most notably locatable in American media contexts in the early twenty-first century – become pervasive in (digital) media landscapes, reshape public discourse in general, and pervade the social in a transnational manner. As the editors of End-Game explain in the preface, “[t]wenty-three invited papers investigate a variety of post/apocalyptic video games and address topics ranging from game design to themes, symbolism, music, player agency, ludic textures, the gaming experience, and, above all, the social functions of the games”.[9] Focusing on the apocalypse as a dominant pop-cultural phenomenon thus reveals, on the one hand, how video games popularize virulent themes that inform the social fabric, and on the other hand, how the constitutive dimensions of gaming work together to procure an fully encompassing experience.

The palimpsestic writing and rewriting of a Biblical apocalypse points out the significance of textuality, literature, oral translation, and fictional sense-making for video games. Studying how video games reconfigure the craft of storytelling in digital and interactive form therefore interpellates literary studies and their methodological and theoretical toolset. Taking literary studies as a point of departure into video games can provide crucial insights into the interpretation and analysis of how storytelling creates digital game experiences. Jon Stone’s Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Video Games[10] and Dom Ford’s Mytholudics: Games and Myth[11] represent two compelling cases proving that video games not only use literary strategies but also provide fresh critical access to canonical literary formations.

Dual Wield considers poetry and video games as mutually generative, from video games reconfiguring the lyrical in suggestive game worlds and poems as word play to hybrid forms that emerge in-between these transmedial relations. Mytholudics looks into the impact of myth and mythology on the development and story arcs that characterize heroes and monsters in video games. Ford thinks with Barthes about myths and folklore as dynamic patterns that continuously naturalize the relation between signs and make sense by relegating the emergence of connections into a mythical past that predates the experiential world, turning video games into myth-making machines that take part in the cyclical reinvention of mythology. In a move away from the generative re-writing of a mythical past toward the building of future possible worlds as gameplay experience, Cameron Kunzelman examines how science fiction, philosophy, and video games intersect in The World is Born from Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games.[12] Kunzelman argues that video games offer opportunities to the player to speculate as they explore futuristic or future-driven worlds in game series such as Metal Gear, Civilization, and The Last of Us. Those examples prove that literary strategies and video game mechanics come together in actualizing ways in which stories are told and fictional worlds manifest and providing ontological playgrounds for the sounding out of philosophical questions along the way.

But the space of video games operates as a playground in more than one way, not all of them (or any of them) inconspicuous. The rise of cybernetics became synonymous with the post-humanist fantasy of relational agency: players interacting with one another within the game’s environment democratically, performing a happy-go-lucky egalitarianism within neutral environments. (David Cronenberg’s work on the calamitous enmeshing of humans with technology has not been enough to dispel the fantasy.) One of the most seemingly innocuous elements of video gaming is indeed the gaming space. The linear representations of video game spatiality strictly as the performance of a code has long been problematized, with critical theory needed to enlighten the role of the video game player as an agent both within and out of the game: “[A]n uncritical conception of spatial phenomenology and the verisimilitude of linear perspective fails to explain how video games operate.”[13] Even though designed, framed, and promoted, the gaming environment claims the role of a natural, transparent, and harmless playground. However, as an observation by Rehak clearly reveals, these assumptions of transparency, the player’s embodied convergence with the screen space remain problematic: “[T]o sit at a computer and handle mouse and keyboard is to be physically positioned; to misrecognize oneself as the addressee of the screen’s discourse is to be interpellated as a subject.”[14]

In short, contemporary game theorists would argue that video games are key players in the completion of subjugation and interpellation: “Ideology is a technology which constitutes individual subjects, linking subjectivity to our technical being-in-the-world.”[15] As Ryan puts it, “we experience what is made of information as material.”[16] This illusion offers sufficient grounds to argue that screen spaces, including interfaces, “are ideological, they work to remove themselves from awareness, seeking transparency—or at least inobtrusiveness—as they channel agency into new forms”.[17]

Certain volumes of the Video Games and the Humanities series grapple critically with the idea of space in gaming. Dietmar Meinel foregrounds the understanding of space as one of the most crucial interactions between gamer and game in Spatiality in American Studies,[18] showing how “games are defined by their spatiality”,[19] but also how gamers are themselves defined by the game’s environment: As Hanne Nijtmans[20] writes in the same volume, through their exposure to and acting in specific spaces, gamers’ identities are ideologically interpellated. Nijtmans reads Skyrim from a Marxist perspective to argue that the material conditions of North Americans since the 1970s rely on the illusion of neoliberal agency, just as in video game worlds. From the illusion of control to the construction of agency through interactive game spaces that connote the virgin, vast, voluminous archetypical landscapes embedded in the North American imaginary, players’ free will merely works as an insidious distraction to promote certain ideologies. Ironically, the design and maintenance of such open-ended gaming spaces where players are free to be as mobile as possible relies on the social immobility, and often work precarity, of the programmers/workers who have actually built the game.

Spatiality in gaming then extends beyond the aesthetic representation of landscapes: The visual, design, and narrative choices that compile any given game are part of a sociopolitical undercurrent that informs any cultural production, from historiography to film and prose. To bring this undercurrent to light, Stefan Aguirre Quiroga has coined the concept of the ‘White Mythic Space’, which includes the unconscious, Eurocentric, exclusionary ideological discourses employed in the remembrance and historiography of the First World War. Quiroga here channels Lefebvre in pointing out the relation of spatial representation to ideology: “What is an ideology without a space to which it refers, a space which it describes, whose vocabulary and links it makes use of, and whose code it embodies?”[21]

Importantly, a critical evaluation of video game spaces reveals that they are not, and have never been, mere imagistic representations, containers, or backdrops for the plot to unfold. In Expressive Space: Embodying Meaning in Video Game Environments,[22] Gregory Whistance‑Smith employs the concept of ‘embodied cognition’ to discuss how meaning is negotiated not simply through the design of exploratory, kinetic, activity or situational kinds of game worlds, but, crucially, through the individual’s material circumstances, creating a “sensation of spatial presence”, which “depends on the tight interactive feedback loop between the player and the computer displaying the virtual space: real-time interactivity transforms a representation of space […] into one that is experienced as space by the player.”[23] Whistance‑Smith’s phenomenological study affords insight into precisely those inconsistencies that, through individual gaming, may change the embodied experience of a spatial environment, thus potentially disrupting the gaming space’s interpellative processes.

Reading video games and their spaces as environmental signs, possibilities, and imaginaries also offers a more hopeful interpretation of video games’ ideological hailing. At their core, games constitute “a dynamic possibility to broach and engage in exploring alternatives to dominant conceptions of human-world relations.”[24] Even though a plethora of games perpetuate environmental ideologies that have been challenged by ecomedia scholars, the contributors of Video Game Ecologies and Culture[25] explore gaming environments that challenge the Anthropocene, encouraging us “to think otherwise, to start imagining life and being in ways that engage non-human lives, mythological narrations, and speculative imagination.”[26] For this to happen though, attention must be paid to existing interpellative structures that reproduce “destructive ecocultural practices.”[27] Such work can only begin by analyzing not only the existing design and ludic choices of game environments, but also the silences, absences, and conventions of each game, understanding that the critical reading of a video game can only begin when it is interpreted against the grain and in spite of the circumstances of its production. As Max José Dreysse Passos De Carvalho writes in that same volume, the subversiveness of games “must emerge despite and against their fundamentally subjugating nature”.[28]

The series has also seen researchers explore the meaning and significance of various spaces around video games as well as within them. A core of edited collections and single-authored monographs have explored video game ‘paratexts’, critically interrogating literary studies approaches to the concept as coined by Gerard Genette[29] and developing its usefulness as already applied to video games.[30] An exemplar of this kind of critical and methodological work is Regina Seiwald and Ed Vollans’ volume of essays (Not) In The Game: History, Paratexts, and Games.[31] As the title suggests, the essays explore sites, sources, and spaces that have long been disregarded as not the game, and therefore often overlooked by researchers. From trailers and marketing materials to fan videos, wikis, and other artifacts of player experiences, these essays draw attention to the historical work of players and developers at the digital and physical margins, in spaces that do not fit within a normative software/hardware binary. Seiwald and Vollans emphasize the ‘connected’ nature of all of these texts, and the way they can support meaningful investigation into games from the contexts of production to reception,[32] perhaps decentering the researcher as the authoritative interpreter of historical meaning based on analysis of a singular (game) text.

It should be of little surprise that many volumes in this series speak to historical game studies as a burgeoning, humanities-centered subfield of game studies, and especially while exploring paratextual spaces and sources. The historical discipline sits at the heart of the most traditional of humanities inquiry and methods, and historical analysis of video games requires us to think beyond the traditional boundaries of ‘the game text’ to understand these individual representations as part of a wider historical culture that existed long before them. Various forms of promotional materials, and their role as spaces for the negotiation of meaning is also the focus on Esther Wright’s volume in the series, Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity.[33] Taking Rockstar Games as a case study, this developer-focused analysis explores the relationship between the representation of 20th Century American Western history in promotional paratexts and games like Red Dead Redemption and L.A. Noire. In doing so, the work explores the way that the developer sought to manage expectations for a particularly narrow view of ‘historical authenticity’ before the games were even released – through blog posts, promotional videos, developer interviews, and more – constructing their own usable canon of American popular culture to support such claims. The work complicates the notion of historical ‘authenticity’ altogether, urging us to see the concept as something actively constructed rather than a static property of any particular video game or form of cultural text.

Ylva Grufstedt’s Shaping the Past: Counterfactual History and Game Design Practice in Digital Strategy Games,[34] is likewise a developer-focused study. The work is based on extensive research of and interviews with developers at Paradox Development Studio, clearly demonstrating that, much like games themselves, game design does not exist in isolation from a wider network of historical reference points and influences, all of which are drawn in to make historical meaning through and around the edges of any video game – with historical subject matter or otherwise. Not only the meaning conveyed by a game, but also the nature of games themselves can benefit from this kind of contextual approach, within a wide humanistic focus.

Looking beyond the historical, Frank G. Bosman and Archibald van Wieringen’s study Video Games as Art: A Communication-Oriented Perspective on the Relationship between Gaming and the Art[35] of how to assess video games as art explores the cultures in which they are legislated for, curated, and discussed by audiences, critics, and developers, to demonstrate the importance of these contexts for understanding the categories in which games can be defined as a major media genre. In doing so, they argue for a range of approaches including the conceptual, the practical, and socio-political, to be used to grapple with the question of whether games can be categorized as art, as much through what exists outside of games as within them.

Jane Draycott’s edited volume on Women in Historical and Archaeological Video Games[36] also speaks clearly to the need to look beyond analysis of games in isolation from contexts of development and play, and with a view to a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds and approaches to examine the ideological lenses operating on and through them. The essays within this book span games that represent diverse historical periods and geographies, addressing a conspicuous absence of concentrated work within historical game studies to analyze the representations of women within them as well as around them. To engage these questions meaningfully, as many chapters show, it is impossible to ignore contexts of game production and player reception, not least because of the visible and ongoing manifestations of toxicity and harassment in game development and culture, typified by #GamerGate over a decade ago.

This book complements both existing and newer work that puts questions of gender into historical context, surveying the gendered history of games, not just those histories written within and by them. The first volume in the series, Anne Ladyem McDivitt’s Hot Tubs and Pac-Man: Gender and the Early Video Game Industry in the United States (1950s–1980s),[37] and the recent publication of Stephanie Harkin’s Girlhood Games: Gender, Identity and Coming of Age in Video Games[38] vividly situate games, play, and gaming culture into their broader historical, cultural, social, industrial, and economic contexts to explore their gendered dimensions.

There are also notably pedagogical works in the series that explore what video games might have to offer in the context of humanities, and specifically, historical education. Robert Houghton’s edited collection of essays on Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games: Using, Modding and Creating Games for Education and Impact[39] draws on the lively intersection of research on medieval history and games (both digital and analog). Erik Champion and Juan Hiriart Vera’s collection of essays on “Assassin’s Creed” in the Classroom: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark?[40] is a similarly vital, critical, academic companion to one of the ur-historical game franchises. Both draw on the experience and expertise of an international range of educators and researchers, across distinct educational contexts and levels (facing primary to university students). Across all of these works, the spaces around the edges of games themselves, game development, and game play take center stage, and the variety of interdisciplinary, humanities-centered approaches to them reveal the richness of possible research that explores games as part of human culture, past and present.

The variety produced by this multidisciplinarity across the series seems to us therefore to demonstrate that the broad definition of ‘humanities’ taken here allows for precisely the kinds of methodological variety which can fully develop the potential of such approaches. To be clear, this still allows for the disciplinary precision of an approach that is firmly rooted in, say, the fields of history or cultural studies that strongly inform the multiplicity that is Game Studies today, but this does not at all assume that these would be in any way sufficient to study games, and we invite these perspectives not to just complement the dominant ones but really to show them as equally relevant. Perhaps this somewhat flippant turn of phrase summarizes our general approach best: To us, Game Studies means the study of games, and our series does not aim to foster a heterogeneous discipline but rather a disciplinary heterogeneity, where the loosest of labels allows for an inclusivity that can be risky and surprising. As this piece has hopefully demonstrated, these humanities-based lenses allow us to draw productive connections between our own and other disciplines and approaches, to reveal and develop some of the common threads between them in our understanding of video games. Even in the short years since the series has started, it has become clear that the humanities, in their broadest sense, have a great deal to do with video games – just as video games have a great deal to do with the humanities.

Bibliography

Aghoro, Nathalie (ed.). Video Game Ecologies and Culture. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2025.

Aghoro, Nathalie. “Video Game Ecologies and Culture: An Introduction”. In: Video Game Ecologies and Culture, ed. by Nathalie Aghoro. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2025, 7–22.

Aguirre Quiroga, Stefan. White Mythic Space Racism, the First World War, andBattlefield 1”. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022.

Bosman, Frank G., and Archibald L.H.M. van Wieringen. Video Games as Art: A Communication-Oriented Perspective on the Relationship between Gaming and the Art. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022.

Champion, Erik, and Juan Hiriart (eds.). “Assassin’s Creed” in the Classroom: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark?. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2024.

Consalvo, Mia. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.

Consalvo, Mia. “When Paratexts Become Texts: De-Centering the Game-as-Text”. Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, Nr. 2 (2017): 177–83.

Copier, Marinka. “The Other Game Researcher: Participating in and Watching the Construction of Boundaries in Game Studies”. In: Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference. Changing Views – Worlds in Play. Digital Games Research Association, 2003, 404–419.

DiTommaso, Lorenzo, James Crossley, Alastair Lockhart and Rachel Wagner (eds.). End-Game: Apocalyptic Video Games, Contemporary Society, and Digital Media Culture. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2024.

DiTommaso, Lorenzo, James Crossley, Alastair Lockhart and Rachel Wagner. “Preface”. In: End-Game: Apocalyptic Video Games, Contemporary Society, and Digital Media Culture, ed. by Lorenzo DiTommaso, James Crossley, Alastair Lockhart and Rachel Wagner. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2024, v–vi.

Draycott, Jane (ed.). Women in Historical and Archaeological Video Games. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022.

Dreysse Passos De Carvalho, Max José. “Subnautica, Flow, and the Shackles of Convention”. In: Video Game Ecologies and Culture, ed. by Nathalie Aghoro. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2025, 71–88.

Ford, Dom. Mytholudics: Games and Myth. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2025.

Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, transl. by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Grufstedt, Ylva. Shaping the Past: Counterfactual History and Game Design Practice in Digital Strategy Games. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022.

Harkin, Stephanie. Girlhood Games: Gender, Identity and Coming of Age in Video Games. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2025.

Houghton, Robert (ed.). Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games: Using, Modding and Creating Games for Education and Impact. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022.

Karabinus, Alisha, Emma Vossen, Cody Mejeur and Carly A. Kocurek. Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be. Santa Barbara, CA: punctum books, 2025.

Keever, Justin. “Videogames and the Technicity of Ideology: The Case for Critique”. Game Studies 22, Nr. 2 (2022). https://gamestudies.org/2202/articles/gap_keever.

Kunzelman, Cameron. The World is Born from Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill,2022.

McDivitt, Anne Ladyem. Hot Tubs and Pac-Man: Gender and the Early Video Game Industry in the United States (1950s–1980s). Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2020.

Meinel, Dietmar (ed.). Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022.

Meinel, Dietmar. “Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies: An Introduction”. In: Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies, ed. by Dietmar Meinel. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022, 1–30.

Nijtmans, Hanne. “The Inevitable Fate of the ‘Dragonborn’: Selling Player Agency in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim”. In: Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies, ed. by Dietmar Meinel. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022, 117–134.

Rehak, Bob. “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar”. In: The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York, NY: Routledge, 2003, 103–128.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Schneider, Nicole. “Gaming Past the Anthropocene: Relationality, Kinship, and Capitalist Ruins in Song of Bloom, Never Alone, and World of Goo”. In: Video Game Ecologies and Culture, ed. by Nathalie Aghoro. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2025, 23–44.

Schoppmeier, Sören. Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2023.

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Seiwald, Regina, and Ed Vollans (eds.). (Not) In the Game: History, Paratexts, Games. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2023.

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Stone, Jon. Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Video Games. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022.

Švelch, Jan. “Paratextuality in Game Studies: A Theoretical Review and Citation Analysis”. Game Studies 20, Nr. 2 (2020). https://gamestudies.org/2002/articles/jan_svelch.

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Waszkiewicz, Agata. Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill,2022.

Whistance‑Smith, Gregory. Expressive Space: Embodying Meaning in Video Game Environments. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill,2022.

Wright, Esther. Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity. Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022.

Ludography

Bethesda Game Studios: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Rockville, MD: Bethesda Softworks, 2011.

DMA Design: Grand Theft Auto. Gütersloh: BMG Interactive, 1997.

Konami: Metal Gear. Tokio: Konami, 1987.

Naughty Dog: The Last of Us. Tokio: Sony Computer Entertainment, 2013.

Rockstar San Diego: Red Dead Redemption. New York, NY: Rockstar Games, 2010.

Sid Meier: Civilization. Taylor Beach: MicroProse, 1991.

Team Bondi: L.A. Noire. New York, NY: Rockstar Games, 2011.


[1] Olli Sotamaa, “Artifact”, in The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2023), 1.

[2] See Marinka Copier, “The Other Game Researcher: Participating in and Watching the Construction of Boundaries in Game Studies”, in Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views – Worlds in Play. Digital Games Research Association (2003), 404–419.

[3] Alisha Karabinus, Emma Vossen, Cody Mejeur and Carly A. Kocurek, Historiographies of Game Studies. What It Has Been, What It Could Be (Santa Barbara: Punctum Books, 2025), 19.

[4] See Sotamaa, “Artifact”.

[5] With regard to the question of interdisciplinarity of and in game studies, also see the contribution by Bauer, Klausner and Unterhuber in this edited volume.

[6] Agata Waszkiewicz, Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill,2022).

[7] Sören Schoppmeier, Playing American: Open-World Videogames and the Reproduction of American Culture (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2023).

[8] Lorenzo DiTommaso, James Crossley, Alastair Lockhart and Rachel Wagner (eds.), End-Game: Apocalyptic Video Games, Contemporary Society, and Digital Media Culture (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2024).

[9] Lorenzo DiTommaso, James Crossley, Alastair Lockhart and Rachel Wagner, “Preface”, in End-Game: Apocalyptic Video Games, Contemporary Society, and Digital Media Culture, ed. Lorenzo DiTommaso, James Crossley, Alastair Lockhart and Rachel Wagner (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Bril, 2024), v.

[10] Jon Stone, Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Video Games (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022).

[11] Dom Ford, Mytholudics: Games and Myth (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2025).

[12] Cameron Kunzelman, The World is Born from Zero: Understanding Speculation and Video Games (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill,2022).

[13] Laurie Taylor, “When Seams Fall Apart: Video Game Space and the Player”, Game Studies 3, Nr. 2 (2003), https://www.gamestudies.org/0302/taylor/.

[14] Bob Rehak, “Playing at Being: Psychoanalysis and the Avatar”, in The Video Game Theory Reader, ed. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron (New York: Routledge, 2003), 122.

[15] Justin Keever, “Videogames and the Technicity of Ideology: The Case for Critique”, Game Studies 22, Nr. 2 (2022), https://gamestudies.org/2202/articles/gap_keever.

[16] Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 68.

[17] Rehak, “Playing at Being”, 122.

[18] Dietmar Meinel (ed.), Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022).

[19] Dietmar Meinel, “Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies: An Introduction”, in Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies, ed. Dietmar Meinel (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022), 1.

[20] Hanne Nijtmans, “The Inevitable Fate of the ‘Dragonborn’: Selling Player Agency in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim”, in Video Games and Spatiality in American Studies, ed. Dietmar Meinel (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022), 117–134.

[21] Stefan Aguirre Quiroga, White Mythic Space: Racism, the First World War, andBattlefield 1” (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022), 40.

[22] Gregory Whistance‑Smith, Expressive Space: Embodying Meaning in Video Game Environments (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill,2022).

[23] Whistance‑Smith, Expressive Space, 24.

[24] Nathalie Aghoro, “Video Game Ecologies and Culture: An Introduction”, in Video Game Ecologies and Culture, ed, Nathalie Aghoro (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2025), 9.

[25] Nathalie Aghoro (ed.), Video Game Ecologies and Culture (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2025).

[26] Nicole Schneider, “Gaming Past the Anthropocene: Relationality, Kinship, and Capitalist Ruins in Song of Bloom, Never Alone, and World of Goo”, in Video Game Ecologies and Culture, ed. Nathalie Aghoro (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2025), 23.

[27] Aghoro, “An Introduction”, 17.

[28] Max José Dreysse Passos De Carvalho, “Subnautica, Flow, and the Shackles of Convention”, in Video Game Ecologies and Culture, ed. Nathalie Aghoro (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2025), 72.

[29] Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, transl. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

[30] E.g. Mia Consalvo, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Mia Consalvo, “When Paratexts Become Texts: De-Centering the Game-as-Text”, Critical Studies in Media Communication 34, Nr. 2 (2017), 177–83; Jan Švelch, “Paratextuality in Game Studies: A Theoretical Review and Citation Analysis”, Game Studies 20, Nr. 2 (2020), https://gamestudies.org/2002/articles/jan_svelch.

[31] Regina Seiwald and Ed Vollans (eds.), (Not) In the Game: History, Paratexts, Games (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2023).

[32] Regina Seiwald and Ed Vollans, “Introduction: Video Games as Networked Texts”, in (Not) In the Game: History, Paratexts, Games, ed. Regina Seiwald and Ed Vollans (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2023), 1.

[33] Esther Wright, Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022).

[34] Ylva Grufstedt, Shaping the Past: Counterfactual History and Game Design Practice in Digital Strategy Games (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022).

[35] Frank G. Bosman and Archibald L.H.M. van Wieringen, Video Games as Art: A Communication-Oriented Perspective on the Relationship between Gaming and the Art (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022).

[36] Jane Draycott (ed.), Women in Historical and Archaeological Video Games (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022).

[37] Anne Ladyem McDivitt, Hot Tubs and Pac-Man: Gender and the Early Video Game Industry in the United States (1950s–1980s) (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2020).

[38] Stephanie Harkin, Girlhood Games: Gender, Identity and Coming of Age in Video Games (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2025).

[39] Robert Houghton (ed.), Teaching the Middle Ages through Modern Games: Using, Modding and Creating Games for Education and Impact (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2022).

[40] Erik Champion and Juan Hiriart (eds.), “Assassin’s Creed” in the Classroom: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark? (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter Brill, 2024).

Nathalie Aghoro
Nathalie Aghoro
Esther MacCallum-Stewart
Esther MacCallum-Stewart
Sascha Pöhlmann
Sascha Pöhlmann

OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Nathalie Aghoro, Kate Cook, Iro Filippaki, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Sascha Pöhlmann, Esther Wright (27. Mai 2026). International Perspectives on Video Games and the Humanities Today. gespielt. Abgerufen am 7. Juni 2026 von https://doi.org/10.58079/16a8r


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