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“There’s Nothing Written about It”: Disciplinarity, Regionality, and the Ghosts Haunting Game Studies

Chapter of: Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be(pp. 717–734)

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Metadata
Title“There’s Nothing Written about It”
SubtitleDisciplinarity, Regionality, and the Ghosts Haunting Game Studies
ContributorAlison Harvey(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0441.1.32
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/historiographies-of-game-studies-what-it-has-been-what-it-could-be/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightAlison Harvey
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2025-07-25
Long abstract2005-2007 was a unique moment in games studies in that it represented a flourishing of specific venues for research in the area, including the launch of the journals Games and Culture and Loading…. The Canadian Journal of Game Studies as well as the Canadian Games Game Studies Association conference. But despite the spike in scholarly and public attention on games in the last decade and a half, we still see moments where researchers seek game studies and proclaim that ‘there’s nothing written about it’. In this article I consider the role of Canadian game studies and its relative lack of citation. The disciplinary ghosts of game studies, I argue, play a key role in entrenching some approaches, questions, and methods as more legitimate, ‘ghosting’ others from the ‘canon’. Troublingly, this continues to include critical race studies, feminist approaches, and queer theory, despite their key role in both historical and contemporary game studies. I therefore conclude this essay with a provocation inspired by Harrison (2018) to ‘fuck the canon’ in games.
Page rangepp. 717–734
Print length18 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Alison Harvey

(author)
Associate Professor in the Communications program at York University
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6978-5622

Alison Harvey (she/her) is Associate Professor in the Communications program at Glendon College, York University, Canada. Her research and teaching focuses on issues of inclusivity and accessibility in digital culture, with an emphasis on gender and labor in digital games. She is the author of Gender, Age, and Digital Games in the Domestic Context (Routledge, 2015) and Feminist Media Studies (Polity, 2019). Her work has also appeared in a range of interdisciplinary journals, including in Diversity & Inclusion Research, Global Media & China, and New Media & Society. She served as the president of the Canadian Game Studies Association from 2023–2025.