The Long Decade of Game Studies: Case of Finland

This study examines 34 games-related doctoral dissertations completed in Finland between 1998 and 2012, offering a metareview of how game studies took shape as an academic field within a single national context. Its central finding is that Finnish game research does not constitute a unified "Finnish school." Instead, the works engage primarily with international debates in game studies, and the citation networks reveal a loose core of scholars, largely tied to the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and the University of Tampere Game Research Lab, who most heavily reference the field's canon, with Frans Mäyrä prominent among them.

The dissertations show clear growth over the period, with annual output rising steadily, a shift toward English-language publication, and greater gender balance among authors. Computer science and cultural and media studies dominate the disciplinary landscape, and funding came largely from the Academy of Finland and Tekes. Notably, the field resists simple chronological narratives of development. Pioneering, celebratory, and critical stances appear side by side rather than succeeding one another, a pattern that complicates established models of how academic fields mature.

The study also documents the role of personal reflection on gaming, which appears in roughly half the dissertations and becomes slightly more common over time, varying by discipline and subject. Alongside this, a trend toward autonomous theory-making and greater acknowledgment of play as part of research emerges, though the authors describe this shift as smaller than anticipated. Authors fall into three broad groups: those working primarily within other disciplines, those identifying with game studies, and a middle group bridging the two.

The authors caution against generalizing from Finland's particular institutional and national context, and they call for comparable dissertation studies in other countries. Such work, they note, is currently hampered by the absence of comprehensive national dissertation lists.