Call for OLHJ Special Collection Articles: Language Diversity in Game Studies
Posted by Dr Stanisław Krawczyk on 2025-04-16
Game scholars do not only examine games; they also examine game studies. For instance, feminist game researchers have rightly discussed gender inequality within their own academic field. However, another matter of diversity in game studies – language diversity – has not yet been investigated in depth. Hence, this special issue focuses on the languages we use in scholarly communication on games.
The dominant language of global game studies is English. It provides an important common ground for game scholars worldwide, but at the same time it favours certain countries and cultures over others. Some scholars need to put in extra effort to become proficient in English, and research traditions from many languages require translation for broad accessibility. Still, these traditions are valuable: first, in their own right (including the aspects that may be difficult to translate), and second, in how they can challenge the established ways of thinking in English-language game studies.
The first aim of this issue is to increase our knowledge of language diversity in game studies. We would like to explore the dominant role of English in our field (e.g., the ubiquity of English game studies terms), just as the national and international uses of other languages (e.g., the use of Spanish in Ibero-America). We are interested in the benefits and disadvantages of the current language hierarchy in game studies, as well as its underlying systemic conditions (e.g., the centre–periphery relations in the world system, the intersection of linguistic inequalities and geographic distances, or the dependence of foreign language skills on the academics’ upbringing and social class). All this may also involve a reflection on how game studies is similar or different to other areas of knowledge.
Further, we wish to recognise the diversity within the English language itself. Concepts such as “English as a lingua franca” or “Euro-English” point to the fact that non-native speakers can successfully use English to communicate, creating international versions of this language that are different to national ones (e.g., to US English or British English). There is a certain symmetry in this kind of communication, as opposed to asymmetrical exchanges between a native speaker and a non-native speaker. And not all uses of English necessarily reinforce centro-peripheral hierarchies (Coleman, 2006). For example, if more publications in Central and Eastern Europe were available in English, this might strengthen scholarly communication in game studies within that region (Mochocki, Schreiber, Majewski, Kot, 2024). Hence, we would like the issue to describe various uses and types of English, and to include some of the differences between countries in which English is an official language – from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom to Nigeria, Kenya, India, New Zealand, and Australia to name a few.
The second aim of the special issue is practical. Not only do we encourage analyses of the problems with language diversity in game studies, but we also hope that the authors will consider some possible solutions. We welcome discussions of large-scale dilemmas (e.g., is there a viable alternative to having a single dominant language? Should the efforts be focused on alternative modes of circulation and collaboration or on “bursting the bubble”? What chances and risks come with machine translation?) and of the nuts and bolts of scholarly work (e.g., journal policies concerning linguistic correctness or the use of English and non-English references).
For now, the game scholars interested in these matters are dispersed. However, thanks to the global proliferation of game studies and to the increasing use of remote communication technologies, scholars hailing from different linguistic traditions can come into contact with each other much more easily than before. Bilingual conferences are being organized, such as the Replaying Japan series (using Japanese and English), The In-Betweenness of Play (in English and Portuguese), or the Congress of Ludic-Critic Studies (in Spanish and English). The Program Chairs of the main conferences of the Digital Games Research Association in 2023 and 2024 asked reviewers to refrain from commenting on the linguistic quality of submissions – unless the language rendered them illegible – and to pay attention to the diversity in references. Both conferences also included papers and panels focused openly on the study of games in particular nation-states and regions (e.g., Latin American or Francophone studies).
This trend is significant to us, just as the work – admittedly scarce – already published by game scholars, who have challenged the English-language distinction between game and play (Trammell, 2022), examined the role of language in regional DiGRA chapters (Wirman, 2018), noted the Anglocentrism of game studies (Chakraborti et al., 2015; Mejeur et al., 2021), discussed the use of the terms “game studies” and “estudio de juegos” in Spanish (Navarro-Remesal, 2020), or commented on linguistic problems in the context of Japanese game studies (Hutchinson, 2019, Introduction; Picard & Pelletier-Gagnon, 2015; Wolf & Perron, 2003). Other diversity-oriented work in game studies and beyond can provide methodological inspirations, as in the analysis of citation politics with regard to gender (Gray, 2015; Phillips, 2020). And we can draw from reviews of game studies – or video game studies – in German, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Spanish, and Japanese (Biermann et al., 2023; Fragoso, 2018; Garda & Krawczyk, 2017; Rossi, 2018; Yoshida, 2023), as well as from the work on regional game studies (Anh, 2021; Martin & Liboriussen, 2016).
Similar questions are being asked outside of game studies, too. It has been shown that the use of English in scholarly communication has had complex and often unintended consequences (Okano & Sugimoto, 2018), and reference materials and practical guidelines have been developed to support academic multilingualism (Bowker et al., 2024). Helpful work has been published about the Englishisation of the social sciences and humanities (or SSH; Rodriguez Medina, 2019; Suzina, 2021), the responses of SSH scholars to the focus on English in national research evaluation systems (Krawczyk & Kulczycki, 2021; Moldashev & Tleuov, 2022), multilingualism in SSH (Curry & Lillis, 2024; Steigerwald et al., 2022), or colonialism and decolonisation (Dawson, 2019; Guzmán-Valenzuela, 2023). We invite our authors to draw from this body of work as well, just as from various national and international traditions in game studies.
We are accepting submissions in English and Spanish. If you are interested, please send the abstract of your intended paper – 300-500 words plus references – to stanislaw.krawczyk@uwr.edu.pl by 30 May 2025. By 21 June selected authors will be invited to submit full papers for external peer review (about 8,000 words including references); the deadline for these papers will be 31 October. For the references, please follow the APA 7 style.
The special collection, edited by Stanisław Krawczyk, Mary Anne Argo Chávez, Antonia Hargreaves Bueno, Zahra Rizvi, and Rachael Hutchinson, is to be published in the Open Library of Humanities journal (OLHJ) (ISSN 2056-6700). The OLHJ is an internationally recognized open-access journal with a strong emphasis on quality peer review and a prestigious academic steering board. Unlike some open-access publications, the OLHJ has no author-facing charges and is instead financially supported by an international consortium of libraries.
To learn more about the Open Library of Humanities please visit:
References
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