Analysis of Russian and global game studies: ludology vs. narratology

Abstract

The author reviews the past-to-present academic literature on game studies from the perspective of ludology and narratology. The academic study of video games has grown substantially since 2001 - the year Game Studies started publishing its first articles. Yet both ludology and narratology remain a particularly new field, especially in the Russian academic field, and many of its discussed themes have yet to attain widespread recognition. The academic articles published between 2017 and 2022 were reviewed to provide understanding of the current state of the research on ludology and narratology in various research areas. The corpus was gathered by searching publications in international database Scopus. Each article was categorized according to the type of database, period of time, the country of publication, the field of study and the frequency of citations. The applied method of quantitative research allows tracking the development of research within five years in the field of game studies. Several proposals for further research in this field were put forward. The main hypothesis of this work is that one type of methodology is more applicable than the other, considering the background. The author concludes that one type of methodology can prevail in research - depending on the region of the published article.