Loading… The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association Vol 10(17): 93-111 http://loading.gamestudies.ca Game Studies at Scale: Towards Facilitating Exploration of Game Corpora John Aycock Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary
[email protected] 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, the level of computer code. Moreover, these tools permit analysis to scale in a similar fashion as the “distant reading” of digital humanities allows for traditional texts, and can be applied to an entire corpus of games. We illustrate these ideas within 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 to people who may not be expert players or even able to understand the language the game uses.