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Start, Select, Continue: The Ludic Anxiety in Video Game Scholarship

Game-studies scholars have adopted the phrase “ludology vs. narratology” to explain a tension in video game scholarship. Ludology is the perspective that video games should be studied with their uniqueness as a medium at the foreground while narratology is the study of games that take that uniqueness for granted in order to ask broader questions. In this essay, I perform a critical literature review in which I trace three modes of rhetorical video game scholarship inspired by the ludology vs. narratology anxiety: (1) ludic scholarship, or work focused on discovering what makes video games different than other media, (2) transitional scholarship, or work that sees video games as different but moves beyond merely targeting those differences and into other arguments, and (3) communicative scholarship, or work that investigates how video games communicate as one would examine any other media, namely by taking the differences between games and other media as granted. Ultimately, I forecast that the ludic anxiety about video games is necessary, but game scholarship is moving towards understanding games with more of a communicative perspective.