The Publishing Game: An Analysis of "Game" Related Academic Publishing Patterns

Abstract

Growth in the electronic games industry is evidenced by numerous reports citing an increasing proportion of "gamers" in the general population. Of particular interest is the shift in the conceptualization of the "typical gamer" from a very narrow stereotypical player to those meeting a much broader set of demographic characteristics. This has perhaps occurred in synergy with expansion in the types of games available. Similarly, we hypothesize that diversification has also occurred in academic research on games, primarily as a result of a simultaneous increase in interest in the use of electronic games for purposes beyond entertainment. In this research we extract 7842 distinct academic publications from major publishing databases to explore temporal patterns in the number of publications in the area of computer games. We also consider changes in disciplinary diversity over time. Our results show that computer game related research has undergone three development periods: the hibernation period from 1957 to 1980, the emergence period from 1981 to 2003, and the active period from 2004 to 2013. The broad domain of 'science technology' received the highest level of research interest among the three research domains: 'science technology,' 'social sciences', and 'arts humanities'. Interestingly, 'learning', in the context of computer games, has become a popular research topic from 2004. We also propose future work to extend our analysis to author collaboration and country of origin to inform understanding of the spatial-temporal patterns in game-related research.