Introduction: Analog Games, material culture, and structural Metaphors

For many researchers, the year 2001 marked a turning point in the self-proclaimed discipline of modern game studies. Still, the academic approach to games as a research object was not new. The works of Huizinga (1938), Caillois (1958), and Levi Strauss (1964), among others, had already seen in ludic experiences different ways of dealing with the tribal ritual, social relations, or spaces of experimentation outside everyday reality. In the new century, however, the increasingly notable presence of digital games has led to a renewed interest in games, at least from university circles. In the editorial of the new magazine Game Studies launched in 2001 (emphatically called ‘Year One’) Espen Aarseth asked a question: ‘Do we want a separate field named computer game studies, or do we want to claim the field for our old discipline?’ According to Aarseth, this uncertainty emerges with the appearance of a new field of study, as, for example, happened with the arrival of digital cultural studies. In this specific case, the extension of the digital in almost all aspects of knowledge does not seem to justify the need for an independent and autonomous discipline. On the other hand, for Aarseth, the old discipline of game studies (the one forged, as is often said, by scholars such as Huizinga) hardly exists today and, moreover, it ‘seems in no shape to give the computer game scholars a safe haven’. Thus, game studies was conceived as a new autonomous discipline focused on digital and, especially, on ‘computer’ games.