Università di Torino

How to Reference a Digital Game

Gualeni, Fassone, and Linderoth's paper "How to Reference a Digital Game" argues that the absence of shared academic standards for citing video games is a neglected problem, one closely tied to the unsettled question of what games are.

• Citation practices for video games lack shared academic standards, and Olsson's (2013) survey of game studies journals, conferences, and books found that referencing guidelines were rarely enforced.
• The authors argue that citation decisions are political acts: they shape how games are conceptualized, valued, and regulated, so citation methods should be treated as constitutive rather than neutral.
• The authors contend that the traditional concept of authorship is increasingly ill-suited to large commercial games, where production is distributed across teams, though it remains meaningful for independent works with a distinct creative vision.