The Game Studies Crisis: What Are the Rules of Play?

Ouellette and Conway argue that Game Studies is a "pre-paradigmatic" field whose scholars work in isolated echo chambers, lacking the shared goals, tools, and theories needed for productive dialogue and cumulative knowledge. Their central thesis is that the discipline must cooperate to establish common paradigms, definitions, and methodological rules before its findings can be taken seriously by scholars and by external actors. They support this claim by pointing to unresolved debates over whether games are "real," whether immersion and catharsis exist and how they should be understood, and how conflicting moral and ontological frameworks have produced fragmentation rather than consensus.

The authors contend that the field's problems extend beyond disagreement into habitual patterns of argument. Key concepts such as "the real," exemplified by Jesper Juul's Half-Real, are at times used tautologically, while the discipline repeatedly cites the same foundational works and circles back to familiar claims such as "games are fun" and "games are maturing." They characterize this as a "refusal to learn" that stalls progress, and they call on scholars to define the objects of study, clarify the field's purposes, and build shared frameworks rather than restating existing positions.

The argument carries a sense of urgency because external institutions, including financial firms and the U.S. Air Force, have already treated games as consequential tools despite the absence of settled scholarly understanding. The authors note this gap as a reason the field's internal disarray matters beyond academia. Their framing draws on Kuhn's account of paradigms, alongside work by Frye, McLuhan, and Deterding, and situates the crisis as a question of disciplinary structure and interdisciplinarity.

The concluding section reinforces these themes and urges collective self-definition, including a critique of the field's reliance on indie games and deterministic readings. The authors offer no new empirical data; their contribution is normative, aimed at prompting the discipline to set its own methodological and disciplinary rules.