Video Games: A New Research Area

First, it is worth stressing that “the recognition of video games as an academic discipline is new” (O’Hagan, 2009a, p. 230). Indeed, according to Espen Aarseth, the Editor-in-chief of the journal Game Studies, recognition came with the turn of the century, with 2001 being “Year One of Computer Game Studies as an emerging, viable, international, academic field”

(2001:1). This affirmation rests on several inaugural events like the first international scholarly conference on computer games and the introduction of regular university programs on the topic (ibid.). Aarseth defines video games as “a cultural field whose value is hard to overestimate”

(ibid.) and encourages scholars to focus both on big proprietary productions and on open source communities in order to get the best of what the area has to offer. Despite these tentative beginnings and the long struggle for recognition, video games have now become a full-fledged and valid area of studies for many disciplines.

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3.1.1.1 A Multidisciplinary Object of Study

With the advent of game studies, many disciplines have taken interest in this

“polysemiotic and multimodal environment” (O’Hagan, 2009a, p. 213). Indeed, its diversity of form and content makes it an interesting object of studies in a wide array of disciplines. Among these, one can obviously quote computer sciences and engineering, for example with Fagerholt and Lorentzon focusing on UI design in FPS (2009).

Just browsing the online catalogue of resources available in libraries in Geneva¹⁰ using the keyword “video game”, one can get a good idea of the wide array of disciplines that study this subject nowadays. Here are a few areas that illustrate this variety.

In the health and medicine areas, studies were made on the positive and negative effects of video games on individuals, on their health but also on their social and intellectual skills.

One can thus quote the studies: “Physiological Indicators of Pathologic Video Game Use in Adolescence” (Coyne et al., 2015), “Memory abilities in action video game players”

(McDermott et al., 2014) and “Video game play, attention, and learning” (Cardoso et al., 2014).

Because of the interactive component of video games, they may also constitute the basis for therapies, an area in which medicine pioneers. The paper “Video Game Therapy for Emotional Regulation and Impulsivity Control in a Series of Treated Cases with Bulimia Nervosa” (Konstantas et al., 2013) apparently exemplifies this new area of research. Usually, games used to a therapeutic end belong to the genre called serious games. These type of games may also be relevant to pedagogy on a theoretical and practical level, given that they aim at enhancing learning strategies and content through gameplay. For instance, the University of Geneva’s Master of Learning and Teaching Technologies (MALTT) lays emphasis on the educational applications of such games, encouraging students to design purpose-specific games. One can quote the game Sortez sorcières created by Félicie Scherre in 2016 to help children conjugate verbs¹¹. Serious games are thus increasingly regarded as a powerful tool both in medicinal and educational technologies.

10 http://explore.rero.ch [accessed 11 Sep. 2017]. Please note that the aforementioned articles are not directly connected to this thesis. Thus, only their titles (not their content) were taken into consideration when browsing the catalogue and defining the areas of study. Therefore, they are only meant to serve as instances of the richness and variety of topics that can stem from the study of video games.

11 Here you can access Sortez Sorcières: http://tecfaetu.unige.ch/etu-maltt/tetris/scherfa0/Sortez_sorcieres/index.html [accessed 11 Sep. 2017].

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Furthermore, as an art form, video games have even started arousing the interest of Music Studies. One can thus note the example of a book called Game sound: an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of video game music and sound design (Collins, 2008). Other disciplines studying video games relate to social sciences, for example Gender Studies, with papers like “What is a True Gamer? The Male Gamer Stereotype and the Marginalization of Women in Video Game Culture” by Paaßen et al., 2017.

In a similar way, one may quote the public speaker Anita Sarkeesian, who graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies and a Master’s degree on Social and Political Thought. She is known for analysing pop culture pieces like movies and video games from a feminist perspective, grounding her allegations on a theoretical framework, in a perspective that aims at being as academic as possible without becoming inaccessible.

Sarkeesian made two series of videos on her YouTube channel “Feminist frequency”¹². The series, entitled Tropes vs Women and Tropes vs Women in Video Games, examine tropes in the way female video game characters are depicted. She defines her object of study, tropes, as

“common pattern[s] […] or recognizable attribute[s] in a character that convey[s] information to the audience”. Coming back to the fields of study related to the game world, Sarkeesian’s academic background truly shows that video games stand at a crossroads and remain a relevant topic for many areas of knowledge.

Please note that this review is not exhaustive but aims at showing the diversity of papers and disciplines that have explored this multi-faceted media, in so doing asserting its legitimacy as an area of study. Last but not least, we shall move on to other academics who have started examining video games: translation specialists.

3.1.1.2 Video Game Research from the Perspective of Translation Studies

Within the field of Translation Studies, research on video games alone has taken off and has been oriented, among other topics, towards accessibility (Mangiron 2011 and 2016) and the very active gaming communities in the form of user-generated translations (O’Hagan, 2009b), mod generation, crowdsourcing and open source (Sánchez Espinoza, 2015).

12 Here is a link to the first season of the Tropes vs Women series:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn4ob_5_ttEaA_vc8F3fjzE62esf9yP61 [accessed 04 Sep. 2017].

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More particularly, game localisation has become a new area in Translation Studies, with most research focusing on “practical dimensions to highlight translation issues specific to this genre” (O’Hagan, 2009a, p. 214) i.e. emphasizing the multimedia nature of this form of entertainment and the new challenges this very nature poses (for instance, research by Bernal Merino, 2007), elements we have seen in chapter 2. In particular, some articles tackled the issue of culturalisation (or domestication) versus foreignization (O’Hagan 2009 for instance), a concern that becomes even more relevant in video games considering many of them are still developed in Japan, where the cultural references and preferences vary greatly from the Western ones.

In keeping with this evolution of the job of translator, some researchers focused more on professional aspects of the game translation and localisation industry, also questioning the skills necessary to be a good localiser (Gouadec, 2003) and, in so doing, laying emphasis on the necessity for translator formations/trainings to be adapted accordingly (Bernal Merino, 2015). Another research trend in the fields of literary and audiovisual translation that have been taken up in localisation papers is product-oriented research, which means analysing a certain part or aspect of a video game to highlight patterns.