Game Studies Academic Webjournal Debuts New Issue

The latest issue of Game Studies, described as "a crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research", has debuted online at its official website, and this latest issue includes freely readable academic papers on subjects including Star Wars Galaxies, game testing, and Wario Ware. The introduction to the issue, by video game academic Jesper Juul, suggests: "Game design research is one of the current frontiers of game studies, a place where we can quickly lay to rest any prejudices that researchers are locked in their ivory towers or that game developers never spend the time to think above a specific game." Some of the specific in-depth articles for this latest issue of Game Studios, for which this is the seventh online iteration, and for which archives are available, include an article discussing "The consumer playtest in game design", from several senior members of Microsoft Game Studios, as well as a detailed analysis of ways of multiplayer communication in EA's Battlefield 2, conducted by members of the Department of Information Processing Science at the University of Oulu, Finland. Other notable articles readable in this latest issue of Game Studies include 'What Wario Ware can teach us about Game Design' by Chaim Gingold, 'Can A Table Stand On One Leg? Critical and Ludological Thoughts on Star Wars: Galaxies' by Timothy Burke, and 'Player-Centred Game Design: Experiences in Using Scenario Study to Inform Mobile Game Design' by Laura Ermi and Frans Mäyrä.