Ten Years of GAME: Games as Art, Media, Entertainment

GAME (Games as Art, Media, Entertainment) marks its tenth anniversary as an independent academic journal, operating without commercial publisher or single-institution affiliation. Founded in 2012 by early-career researchers largely rooted in Italian academic traditions, the journal positioned itself as a bridge between the emerging international field of game studies and established disciplines such as semiotics, film and media studies, and media archaeology. Its interdisciplinary, multilingual, and polycentric orientation has resisted ludological purism, while its reliance on the unpaid labour of editors, authors, and reviewers has preserved editorial independence at the cost of considerable strain on its founders.

Over the decade, the journal has produced theme-based issues addressing gamification, spatial aesthetics, play subcultures, transmedia relationships, accessibility, feminist and queer perspectives, and normativity in games. These issues trace the field's broader evolution through semiotic, phenomenological, and poststructuralist approaches. To mark the anniversary, the journal has introduced a two-track publication system combining guest-edited thematic issues with rolling open-call issues, aiming to serve scholars across national and disciplinary boundaries.

The current issue exemplifies this transnational, transdisciplinary scope. Contributions examine critical play, the historical turn in game studies and games' role in cultural memory, the underrepresentation of Global South games in postcolonial scholarship (with a focus on South Asia), European Union cultural policy toward digital games, the construction of "Japanese" games as an object of study, Quebec game preservation, Italian specialist magazines from the 1980s, and the relationship between video games and avant-garde art. Together they offer a snapshot of games research's movement from academic periphery toward a central concern across many disciplines.

The issue also commemorates Patrick John Coppock, a psychologist, linguist, and semiotician whose work on corporeality and Peircean semiotics helped found several game philosophy initiatives and whose steadfast support was instrumental to GAME's early development.