Perth.
The second session here at PerthDAC starts with Torill Mortensen, who is also the leader of the World of Warcraft Research Guild and begins with an overview of games studies itself - an area which has experienced considerable turf wars in the past decade. She outlines a number of approaches: immersive studies (ethnological and anthropological studies of games and gamers), structuralist studies (including the bitter battle between ludologists and narratologists), and contextual studies (examining for example the economic and legal aspects of gaming). Immersive studies mean that researchers also need to play the game they study, resulting potentially in a loss of critical distance; structuralists examine the structure of the game and its rules; contextual studies also point towards the wider impact of gaming, especially also examining the rise of 'serious gaming'. There are also some other research approaches, of course - data mining and quantitative research, psychologically inflected studies, and many others.
