Game Studies at Scale: Towards Facilitating Exploration of Game Corpora

Traditional gameplay-based analysis often fails to capture the structural complexities of large game collections, necessitating a shift toward computational methods that prioritize the underlying software architecture. By applying the principles of distant reading to game corpora, researchers can bypass the limitations of manual play-throughs and language barriers. This approach centers on the Graphic Adventure Creator Internal Analysis System, a specialized framework designed to facilitate both static and dynamic exploration of software internals. By automating the conversion of memory images into structured modules, this methodology enables a rigorous, scalable examination of game design patterns and logic across diverse titles.

The technical implementation relies on a custom compiler that translates proprietary game code into optimized C, which significantly enhances the efficiency of state-space searching. By integrating heuristic-based priority queues and static analysis to prune redundant input combinations, the system successfully automates the discovery of solutions for a significant portion of the Graphic Adventure Creator corpus. This capability demonstrates that large-scale game collections can be analyzed effectively at the implementation level, providing a robust alternative to traditional, labor-intensive qualitative methods.

This research encompasses the analysis of 130 games developed with the Graphic Adventure Creator, focusing on the intersection of digital library science, game preservation, and computational analysis. By establishing a framework for automated code exploration, the findings underscore the necessity of metadata standards and technical accessibility in archival practices. Ultimately, the transition toward software-centric analysis provides a scalable foundation for future game studies, allowing researchers to uncover systemic trends and design characteristics that remain obscured when relying solely on surface-level gameplay experiences.