Canons of Games Research: An Analysis of the Most Cited Publications

This study by Karhulahti and Koskimaa maps the most-cited publications in play and games research, aiming to test and extend Paul Martin's earlier work on the most-cited authors in the field. The authors searched Google Scholar, CiteSeer, and Microsoft Academic using a set of play- and game-related keywords, excluding mathematical game theory, and retained all works with at least 2,000 citations, yielding a list of 35 publications: 16 articles and 19 monographs, ten of which had a woman author. The sample is limited by the search engines and keyword choices, a limitation the authors acknowledge explicitly.

The analysis yields three main findings. First, several highly influential early digital game studies, including Laurel's Computers as Theatre, Aarseth's Cybertext, and Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck, do not appear in the results, suggesting that early videogame research used terminology that is not algorithmically connected to the broader play and games vocabulary. Second, the canon reflects the institutional emergence of game studies: where only one to three canonical works appeared per decade from the 1930s through the 1990s, the 2000s produced fifteen and the 2010s already six, and these recent works are predominantly oriented toward games and play themselves rather than metaphorically.

Third, the thematic composition shifted over time. Cultural and sociological works, along with psychological and computer science contributions, remain prominent across both eras, while education/learning and gamification emerged as new canonical areas in the second millennium, and health, a field identified in Martin's mapping, is largely absent from the top-citation listing.