Game Studies at Scale: Towards Facilitating Exploration of Game Corpora

Abstract

Critically playing a game, and performing a close reading of a specific aspect of a game, are valid game analysis techniques. But these types of analyses don’t scale to the plethora of games available, and also neglect implementation aspects of the games which themselves are texts that can be analyzed. We argue that appropriate software tools can support research in game studies, allowing individual games to be read at the level of gameplay as well as the implementation level. Moreover, these tools permit analysis to scale in a similar fashion as distant reading allows for traditional texts, and be applied to an entire corpus of games. We illustrate these ideas using a corpus of games created using the Graphic Adventure Creator, a program first released in 1985 for a number of computing platforms. As a proof of concept, we have built a system called GrACIAS – the Graphic Adventure Creator Internal Analysis System – that we have used for both static and dynamic analysis of this corpus of games, effectively allowing them to be internally explored and “read.” Furthermore, our system is able to look for game solutions automatically and has solved over 60 game images to date, making the games accessible to researchers, but also people who may not be expert players or even able to understand the language the game uses.