The editorial board for the Journal of Games Criticism (JGC) is pleased to announce its inaugural issue, available now at http://gamescriticism.org. As a non-profit, peer-reviewed, open-access journal, JGC aims to respond to video games as cultural artifacts in their own right and produce feed-forward approaches to video games criticism.
Issue 1 features a series of exciting articles from game developers, game critics, and game studies scholars. Brendan Keogh offers a phenomenological methodology for the future of games criticism, and Aaron Trammell and Aram Sinnreich discuss new ways to visualize the disciplinary genealogy of game studies. Next, Kent Aardse tackles the importance of Freud’s theories of the uncanny and masochism for understanding video games. Amanda Lange, in an empirical work, surveys the decisions and motivations of gamers within moral choice systems. Then, David Heineman analyzes retrogaming as an instance of rhetorically constructed public memory. Punctuating the journal is Qihao Ji’s book review of Jane McCongigal’s Reality is Broken from a media psychology perspective. JGC’s Nicholas Hanford offers an editorial situating the journal within the second generation of games criticism.
About the Journal
The Journal of Games Criticism was founded by graduate students and faculty from the Department of Communication & Media and the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute during the summer of 2013. As part of JGC’s feed-forward approach, the journal showcases articles from academics as well as bloggers, critics, developers, journalists, and designers to bring academic attention to the excellent video games writing that exists outside of traditional academic publications.
Contact
To join the conversation, please visit us on twitter @GamesCriticsm. General inquiries may be sent through http://gamescriticism.org/contact Potential contributors can view submission guidelines at http://gamescriticism.org/submissions/ and are welcome to submit pieces to gamescriticism@gmail.com.