Two Decades of Game Studies
Aarseth, E. (2021). Two Decades of Game Studies. Game Studies, 21(1).
This issue of Game Studies marks the 20 th anniversary of the journal. Game Studies was conceived on a rainy evening fjord cruise during the third Digital Art and Culture (DAC) conference, in Bergen in August 2000, when Susana Tosca and I agreed that an academic journal dedicated to the study of computer games was needed. We then learned that Lisbeth Klastrup and Jesper Juul from the IT University of Copenhagen had similar plans, and so we banded together with them and seven other colleagues, in all five men and six women, from seven different countries and speaking seven different native languages. We spent the next half year planning the journal.
This was a time and a world quite different from today. The industrial world was still riding the relatively peaceful and prosperous “long boom” wave of the post-cold war period, with the dot com crash and 9/11 yet to happen. Disastrous climate change was not yet firmly on the global agenda, and Twitter and Facebook did not yet exist. Blogging was just starting to become a thing. And digital game culture had finally gathered enough momentum to appear interesting to academic institutions.