ABSTRACT
This introduction discusses the need to analyze games in the humanities and social sciences, as well as how textual analysis can help us understand games. Game analysis is comprised of different building blocks, grouped into three areas: context, game overview, and formal elements. Videogame fans talk about games by borrowing terms from game reviews, which at the same time cover the talking points provided by marketing: fantastic graphics, immersive gameplay, and Hollywood-like stories. There is so much more that game analysis can talk about beyond the quality of the graphics or the difficulty curve. Game analysis is also relevant to practice-driven schools, or computer science departments, because they need to be familiar with pre-existing works and what they have done in order to understand them as well as create innovative games. At the end of the 1990s, scholars like Espen Aarseth or Jesper Juul started calling attention to games as their focus of study; the first issue of the academic journal Game Studies was published in July 2001. There is a space for videogame reviews as consumer reports; the problem is that those reviews are often skewed by economic interests.
