Vol. 2, No. 2: Videogames and narratives

Research around videogames is an emergent area of study within social sciences. The number of games published annually keeps growing exponentially, with an enormous diversity in content, spanning all areas, from education to entertainment.

Several international organizations – in particular The Europan League of Institutes of the Arts (ELIA) and the Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEGVA) – seek to organize the debate around the academic training of researchers, programmers and artists in the video game area, to forestall a growing confusion in how they integrate curricula. In Portugal, the Portuguese Society for Videogame Sciences (SPCV) seeks to promote and develop videogame sciences and congregate all those involved in them to foster knowledge and scientific interchange.

On SPCV’s behest, the coordination of the degree in Multimedia Applications and Videogames of the Lusophone University of Humanities and Sciences organized the International Videogames 2017 conference, under the title “Videogames as a form of art”, in order to promote debate, scientific culture, research and the videogame industry in Portugal. Likewise, the International Journal of Film and Media Arts has partnered up with this initiative, by hosting this special issue on gaming studies, thus furthering the scientific contribution into contemporary challenges around gaming research in academia.

This special issue has four papers in it, all somehow addressing the connection between videogames and media arts, especially cinema. Drawing 

from a multitude of scientific areas and discourses, this special issue demonstrates clearly how interdisciplinarity is fundamental to advance the study and teaching of videogames within Communication Sciences, Computer Sciences, and Arts Studies.

Number editors

Daniel S. Cardoso, Filipe C. Luz

Table of contents

• EDITORIAL__
• Daniel S. Cardoso, Filipe C. Luz
• _Full Papers_
• Games Can Plays Us: The power of disempowerment in “emotional engineering”
• Eva R. Filipe
• Curating The Arcade:Strategies for the exhibition of videogames
• Sofia Romualdo
• Suspense Mechanics In Narrative Video Games
• Lluís Sayol, Àngel Colom Pons
• A DEBT REPAID: Shout-out to videogame adaptations
• Jacopo Wassermann

About the journal

The International Journal of Film and Media Arts is an online semiannual publication, written in English and Portuguese, promoted by the Center for Research in Applied Communication, Culture and New Technologies (CICANT / CIC.Digital) and the Department of Film and Media Arts (DCAM) from ECATI, Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias (Lisbon, Portugal). The IJFMA focuses on all areas of film and media arts research and critique, namely animation, television, media arts, videogames, fine arts, sound and their varied social and cultural forms of expression and materialization.