Reproducing the Machine

Mia Consalvo's editorial traces the institutional development of game studies over roughly its first decade, from the founding of the Digital Games Research Association in 2002 to the proliferation of journals, presses, degree programs, and conferences that followed. She argues that the field has achieved legitimacy and growth, but that the structures built to ensure quality and credibility have also produced hierarchies and routines that may be becoming unexamined. The piece is an essay rather than an empirical study, so it offers no survey data or sample statistics; its evidence consists of observed institutional milestones and the author's reflections on them.

The essay notes several purposes served by this expansion. Establishing peer-reviewed venues and international conferences helped legitimize games as a serious object of inquiry, and efforts to move beyond the psychology-dominated focus on game effects broadened the questions and methods the field would consider. The author also recalls an early norm that researchers should play the games they study, which she regards as now seemingly antiquated but once important for avoiding flawed research. Increasing specialization is visible in the emergence of distinct literatures around virtual worlds, MMOGs, serious games, and industry studies, with serious games further dividing into health, change, and educational strands.

Consalvo's central critique concerns the conventionality of the field's formal practices. Conferences largely retain paper readings and PowerPoint presentations, and journals mirror the linear, peer-reviewed formats common to other disciplines. She cites a few experimental exceptions, such as Ted Castronova's Ludium gatherings and the alternative formats at the Games, Learning and Society conferences, while observing that these remain isolated. The essay closes by urging the community to explicitly define what counts as quality research and to consciously decide what game studies should become, rather than letting its routines accumulate passively.