Game Studies

Games Scholarship Before Digital Games

Before the popular emergence of digital games, games-related scholarship was much less common, and the relatively few notable examples of prominent scholarship related to games were produced primarily in disciplines other than communication. Until the late 20th century, only a small group of noteworthy historians and scholars across the academic disciplines viewed games as an important tool to document and understand cultural practices among their contemporary scholars who were primarily interested in other, more “serious” historical and culture artifacts. (A related exception is “serious” competitive sport and related media coverage, which have long received much attention from scholars in communication and related fields, but which have for the most part traditionally been treated as distinct from the more leisurely, less “serious” games and pastimes that have been the focus of games-related scholarship in the literature.) That said, some of the earliest prominent scholars interested in games established concepts that continue to guide games-related research across a broad range of disciplinary fields and methodological approaches.

One early example of a high-profile scholar with an interest in games was Stewart Culin, a self-trained U.S. ethnographer. While Culin earned no university degree, he was involved with professional societies, museums, and the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair during a celebrated anthropological career in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With a focus on collecting and extensively researching everyday physical objects as part of the study of what he called “the language of things,” Culin studied games as important cultural artifacts that were often neglected by others in his field, along with other ostensibly trivial objects such as toys and medicines. Culin published work on games in [Page 604]Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Hawaiian, and Native American cultures, among others.

Another prominent scholar interested in games before the arrival of digital games was Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian. Huizinga was an early pioneer in the field of cultural history, which might be described in brief as the study of history that is informed by cultural theory from other fields in the social sciences and humanities. Huizinga published the influential book Homo Ludens in 1938. Among the key points of Homo Ludens was the importance of play as a primary element of humanity and a fundamental influence on human culture, and therefore at the root of much of the history of human cultural practices ranging from religion to technology to war. Among the concepts introduced by Huizinga that have endured in games research is his idea of the “magic circle,” or a game’s space within which rules, conventions, and goals exist that are meaningless or invalid outside of the boundaries of the game’s context.

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