Other than Text: Media Used in Game Studies Publications

This study examines twenty years of publications in the Game Studies journal (2001–2021) to ask what non-text media researchers use to communicate game scholarship. Its central argument is that visual and design-based media, which are common in game design practice, remain underexplored in formal game studies, and that this gap points toward a stronger role for research through design. The analysis covers 279 entries across 41 issues, and it situates the journal within a broader comparison of submission guidelines across game studies venues, finding that multimedia is permitted but explicitly provisioned only for figures and tables under tight size constraints.

The findings are striking in their uniformity. Most publications are text-only: 61% contain no images and 55% contain no media at all. Where images do appear, videogame screenshots dominate, accounting for 44% of 659 images. Other forms of rich media are rare, with a single embedded iframe, one animated GIF, one sound file, and 93 video links spread across 29 entries. The most frequently referenced websites are the journal itself, DOI links, and YouTube. Taken together, these data indicate that the typical article is text-centric, and the author suggests this limited use of media does not necessarily reflect a deep engagement with media culture or media-rich art.

The study attributes this conservatism partly to the field's early effort to establish scientific legitimacy, which encouraged conventional academic forms. It also observes that design, though central to game studies, has been historically underrepresented as a research method. Drawing on Frayling's distinction among research into, through, and for design, the analysis finds that the latter two categories remain scattered and marginal, constrained by limited publication venues and by the lack of formal accreditation for game-form contributions.

The study concludes that design-based and artifact-construction scholarship, such as playable essays and research prototypes, is already present in the field and is likely to be formalized over time. It presents such work as a complement to analytical methods and advocates treating design as a unifying nexus for a field entering its third decade. The authors acknowledge an open question about how interdisciplinary researchers can establish mutual trust when they do not share methods, and they note practical concerns about archiving and format, including that nearly all entries could be reproduced in a conventional template without loss.