A Discipline is Always Born Twice: Is There Room for Interdisciplinary Humanities Methods in Game Studies Scholarship Today?

This paper, presented at DiGRA 2020 by Caroline Bem of the Université Saint-Paul, argues that game studies has grown distant from humanities disciplines such as literature, film, and art history, and that this distance limits the field's theoretical and methodological range. Written as a deliberately provocative extended abstract, it aims to spark debate about why interdisciplinarity has declined within the field and whether, and how, the discipline should become more open to humanities-based methods. The author situates this question within a broader critique of game studies' founding narratology-versus-ludology debate, drawing on feminist, queer, and decolonial scholarship that identifies the debate as reflecting a racially and sexually privileged viewpoint.

The central contribution is the proposed concept of a "humanistic sensibility," an analytic stance with three components: contextualizing individual objects within long lineages of artistic, cultural, and theoretical writing that cross disciplinary and medial boundaries; treating aesthetics and form as the primary means by which a work communicates its philosophical and affective positions; and acknowledging an interpretive element, drawing on Derridean "supplement," that resists quantification. The author argues this approach is particularly valuable for addressing the field's perceived overreliance on empirical methods, its treatment of historicization, and the consolidation of a canon of games and scholarship.

The paper is a theoretical provocation rather than an empirical study, and it offers no survey data or quantitative sample. Its argument rests on a survey of humanities interdisciplinarity across film, literature, art history, and architecture, and on a reading of the field's historical development. The author notes that detailed case studies demonstrating close-reading methods on contemporary games are planned for future work.