MISSION STATEMENT
In the last few decades, video games have reached audiences that rival the size of other mass media audiences, establishing themselves as having genuine cultural impact along with television and film. On one hand, the impetus to treat them as such is still in its infancy, but, on the other hand, video games studies have an expanding presence online in the form of blogs.
The Journal of Games Criticism (JGC) is a non-profit, peer-reviewed, open-access journal which aims to respond to these cultural artifacts by extending the range of authors to include both traditional academics and popular game critics. The journal strives to be a producer of feed-forward approaches to video games criticism with a focus on influencing gamer culture, the design and writing of video games, and the social understanding of video games and video games criticism.
JGC publishes original articles and reviews. Articles that identify trends across multiple video games or video game-related objects are preferred. Reviews of texts about video games and of video games are also welcome. Please see the submission guidelines for more details on how to submit articles and/or reviews.
ABOUT THE JOURNAL OF GAMES CRITICISM
The Journal of Games Criticism grew out of lively conversations among graduate students and faculty from the Department of Communication and Media (C&M) and the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Starting in 2012, several C&M students identified the need for critical tools for reflection about and useful for the design of video games. From these conversations, it is apparent that, while there are a handful of established journals within the field of games studies, additional space was needed to join together the communities at work within gaming culture. This space would call on all corners of the community, from developers and writers to bloggers and academics, to be a dynamic, current, and multifaceted journal. It continues the hallmark of peer-review from academic journals while opting for total inclusion.
We take video games as our impetus and our enterprise. With multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity as our tools, we look to the past of video gaming in order to orchestrate and build its future. Looking to rhetoric, media studies, and cultural studies, many apparatuses of analysis are present, but they all must be brought into these media and reborn.
ISSUE RELEASE SCHEDULE
The Journal of Games Criticism has a rolling release schedule. New articles are published on the ‘Online First’ page as soon as they are fully processed. Once sufficient articles are available under Online First, they are collated into the journal’s next issue.
Journal of Games Criticism 