ITH - Centrum för studier av IT ur ett
humanvetenskapligt perspektiv och
Center for Collaborative Innovation vid Högskolan i Borås
9:3
Games and Action 1
- Editorial
- Jonas Linderoth
Guest editorial: Games and Action
- Herbert Rosenstingl & Michael Wagner
Towards a Positive Assessment Policy for Computer and Console Games
[Open section]
- Konstantin Mitgutsch
Digital Play-Based Learning
A Philosophical-Pedagogical Perspective on Learning and Playing in Computer Games
[Refereed section]
- Lars-Erik Berg
Aspects of Identification in Computer Gaming
[Open section]
- Jo Helle-Valle & Ardis Storm-Mathisen
Playing Computer Games in the Family Context
[Refereed section]
- Jana Rambusch & Tarja Susi
The Challenge of Managing Affordances in Computer Game Play
[Refereed section]
- Ulf Wilhelmsson
Roger Caillois ur en narratologs perspektiv
[People & opinions]
- Björn Sjöblom
Gaming as a Situated Collaborative Practice
[Refereed section]
Dear readers,
Last year the editors of Human IT were pleasantly approached by the organizers of the international
Game in Action conference (held in June 2007 at the University of Gothenburg). Would we be interested
in producing a Human IT thematic issue on the conference topic? Would we indeed! We immediately embraced
the idea, with Jonas Linderoth, one of the conference organizers, graciously acting as guest editor. The
result of the call for journal articles from the conference paper authors was somewhat overwhelming, and
after the peer review process was over and done with, we ended up with no less than 13 full manuscripts
from both Swedish and international acknowledged scholars in the field! This was the largest thematic
issue material Human IT has faced up to date. To make the editorial and publishing process more manageable
we decided to split the issue in two. So what you are reading now is the first of two consecutive Games
and action issues (and in parallel to the second issue, we will also launch another Human IT issue of
articles we have received when working with the twin issue of Games and action). The issue will be further
presented by Jonas Linderoth’s theme editorial immediately following this one. For us editors it has been
great fun and highly interesting to read, work with and learn from the many articles, to benefit from the
skilled and inspiring guest editorial work of Jonas Linderoth, and to be aided by a very fine peer review
work in the editing process. We hope you will equally enjoy and learn from the articles presented in
Games and action.
From 1999 and onwards, Helena Francke has acted as editor of Human IT. As of 2008 however, Helena has
taken on new education and research tasks at SSLIS (The Swedish School of Library and Information Science)
in Borås, and consequently could no longer find the time to run the journal. I can’t even begin to paint
a thorough picture of the importance Helena has had for the development of Human IT. Very few of the
journal’s major quality improvement measures taken in the 2000’s would have been possible without Helena’s
firm stewardship: peer review implementation and development; redesign of the journal; a more pronounced
web (and eventually web-only) presence; collaboration with database producers, institutional repositories
and content providers; financing affairs; statistical data analysis; the multisection division of the
journal; metadata improvement and harvesting using the OAI-MPH protocol; author instructions and house
reference style, and much more. In short, she is chief responsible for turning Human IT into a fully
fledged peer reviewed scholarly journal online within the Digital Humanities of the 2000’s. Those of you
who have had the opportunity of working with or having contact with Helena as editor will also, no doubt,
testify to her speed, diligence, creativity and friendliness. Her distinct readings and critical eye
combined with her always constructive, substantive and intelligent comments, suggestions and help, is
matched I believe by quite few journal editors in the international field. To me as co-editor, it has
been wonderful – and great fun! – working with Helena within Human IT.
During her Human IT years, she parallelly worked on her Ph.D. thesis on the topic of – you guessed right
– scholarly journals online. The thesis, (Re)creations of Scholarly Journals: Document and Information
Architecture in Open Access Journals, was defended in 2008, and was a large success (fulltext
at <http://hdl.handle.net/2320/1815>). I highly recommend it for anyone interested in matters
of electronic publishing, open access, scholarly journals and editing. So it is safe to say that not
only has Helena played a crucial role for Human IT, but I think her experience from working with Human IT
also played an important role for forming her Ph.D. project and final thesis. A benefit for all, it
would seem.
Sad as we are to see Helena move on to other engagements, we are equally glad to be able to benefit
from the skills of new editors in Helena’s place. Early in 2008, Jonas Söderholm (a doctoral student
at SSLIS) temporarily stepped in as editor and contributed with substantial work, in particular with
the manuscripts for the Games and action twin issues. Jonas’s trained eye for both technical, graphical
and linguistic improvements have proven valuable for Human IT. As of summer 2008, we are happy to welcome
Veronica Johansson (equally a doctoral student at SSLIS) as Human IT editor. We are quite fortunate to
have Veronica with us – she has the rare combination of technical, aesthetic, literary, linguistic and
most of all critical skills that make for a remarked editor. I am personally looking much forward to
working with Veronica on issues to come. Some of you will be familiar with the work of Veronica through
e.g. her article in Human IT 7.2 on electronic documents and information policy
(<http://etjanst.hb.se/bhs/ith//2-7/vj.pdf>),
which I know has been appreciated by many.
I should also mention that we will slowly but firmly during the winter and early spring of 2009 be
moving into a new technical infrastructure for both managing and publishing Human IT: Open Journal
Systems (OJS, <http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/>). We have for long been
on the lookout for an open source
platform for managing, editing and publishing the journal and we now believe we have found it in OJS.
OJS automates and keeps track of quite a few editorial work routines that now have to depend on manual
labor and memory. A substantial amount of international scholarly journals have already “gone OJS” and
we feel confident the move will be fortunate while also making sure the archival record of the journal
will stay intact for years to come. We are collaborating with the UC library in Borås to make sure the
move to OJS will work as smoothly and with as few technical glitches as possible.
Finally, we are happy to tell you Human IT recently received a very nice diploma award from Svenska
Språkförsvaret
(<http://www.sprakforsvaret.se/sf/>),
a non-profit organization that i.a. works to establish
and strengthen the status of Swedish as an academic language. In academe in general, and in digital
humanities in particular, English is increasingly dominating to the point where other vernaculars
are in fact threatened to be extinct as academic languages. Human IT has since its beginnings had
an explicit policy to publish new Scandinavian research while making sure the researchers have the
opportunity to write in their native language, alongside the usual avenue in English, and we are
proud and happy to be acknowledged by Svenska Språkförsvaret for this policy. It might seem ironic
to mention this diploma award in an editorial and issue that is with one exception wholly in English.
But chance just had it that the award coincided with a thematic issue where all authors but one
chose English. As you will see however from the issue outside of the Games and action theme and
soon to be launched on the web, Swedish and Scandinavian languages continue to be an important
prioritization for us.
I wish you the best of winters and hope you enjoy the reading of this large issue!
Borås in December 2008
Mats Dahlström, editor-in-chief
The first computer game in the world was developed in 1958 when the engineer Willy Higinbotham
converted an oscilloscope into a sort of pinball game called Tennis for two. Computer games
did not become an industry until the mid-seventies and it took until the first game consoles in the
eighties before a computer game culture started to take its form. As artefacts, computer games have
a very short history. In descriptions of mankind’s socio-cultural development specific technologies
that made the development take a “leap” forward are often mentioned. Technological landmarks such as
cave paintings, cuneiform, hieroglyphs, the printing press, photography, moving images and
information technology are said to be of great importance for historical development. The
importance of computer games might well be underestimated when drawing these timelines. The first
computer games changes the conditions for media radically; for the first time in history we can
interact with a screen image - technology that today is crucial for computer interfaces in general.
The fact that images in computer games are interactive gives the consumer of games a new potential
dimension of meaning. Unlike the reader of a book or the audience of a movie, players must ask
themselves how to use the different features presented for them at the screen. They must
make distinctions in the graphical world between what things you can interact with, things that
have impact on the rules of the game, and what is purely decoration or simply
fiction adding aesthetic value.
This tension between rules and fiction, between games as formal systems and the narrative/representational
level in games, is a recurring theme in the literature on computer games. Games challenge our classical
notions of media, since the representations we face in games are structured by a system of rules. Within
the field of Game Studies there has been a struggle about whether rules or fiction should be the point
of departure for game analysis. Should computer games be considered as a new form of storytelling media,
or are they more related to traditional games and understood as sets of rules? Even though this so called
ludology – narratology dispute has been intense, lately there seems to be a rather shared view within
the game studies field that the player’s gaming experience has to do with both.
To some extent this might have to do with the fact that games studies as an academic community
has grown and therefore started to develop into different branches making room for diverse and
contradictory theories within the same field. At least the study of games for education, the so called
Serious Games movement and the study of MMO games like World of Warcraft has developed
into sub-communities in game research. While the field of Game Studies in the late nineties mainly had
its roots in the humanities, the development of online games has meant an incensed influence in the
field from sociology. Methods such as ethnography and interaction analysis have proven suitable
for understanding game culture and gaming as a situated activity.
In June 2007, LearnIT, the Swedish Knowledge foundation’s research programme about issues surrounding
technology, learning and interaction hosted a Game Studies conference in Gothenburg. This conference
was named Game in action and mainly addressed the study of gaming as an activity. This
ambition was a deliberate attempt to support a shift in focus from games to gaming as a
unit of analysis in the field. With prominent keynotes from the game studies field, e.g. Henry Jenkins,
James Paul Gee, T. L. Taylor, Jonathan Dovey and Helen Kennedy, and over 30 peer-reviewed paper
presentations, the conference was by far the biggest game studies event in Sweden. For three
days issues such as gaming and identity, gaming and socialization of norms and values, online gaming
as social practices, and gaming as a boundary practice between school, work and leisure were discussed.
As the Conference President of Game in action it is my privilege to present the legacy from
these days in two thematic issues of the journal Human IT.
A majority of the articles were first given as papers during the conference and have during this year
been developed to suit the journal. The articles present a variety of the issues that are central to
the game studies community and they comprise examples of a young research community that very likely
will keep on growing.
May 2008
Dr. Jonas Linderoth
LearnIT and University of Gothenburg
E-mail: <jonas.linderoth@ped.gu.se>
