ENG 2770 - Piero: Game Studies Resources & Conferences

The individuals who comprise the PCA are a group of scholars and enthusiasts who study popular culture. The Popular Culture Association (formally the Popular Culture Association / American Culture Association) is a 501c3 which offers a venue to come together and share ideas and interests about the field or about a particular subject within the field. It also provides publication opportunities and sponsors the PCA Endowment.

The mission of the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association (SWPACA) is to promote an innovative and nontraditional academic movement in Humanities and Social Sciences celebrating America’s cultural heritages. To provide an outlet for scholars, writers, and others interested in popular/American culture, to share ideas in a professional atmosphere, and to increase awareness and improve public perceptions of America’s cultural traditions and diverse populations.

The first link on the resources page of Indigenous Game Devs, a network supporting Indigenous game designers, is the “Indigenous Interactive Digital Media and Video Game Database,” a rich database of scholarly articles and books along with recorded talks, blogs, and games related to Indigenous video games, that is, either games featuring Indigenous content or games made by Indigenous developers.

Organized by renowned game studies scholar Adrienne Shaw, the LGBTQ Video Game Archive documents the history of LGBTQ content in video games. Searchable by game, game time period, or types of content, this archive hosts a rich array of resources on the representation of lesbian, gay, bi, transgender, and queer game content.

Designed around the concept of "preservation through use," LGIRA makes accessible to researchers all over the world and of all ages, a constantly expanding collection of computer games, systems, peripherals, memorabilia, scholarship, and a plethora of other game-related materials.

"The RMGD offers a centralized repository for researching [mobile] games [from 1975-2008]. Prior to this point, it was often very difficult to find information about specific mobile games or to understand how they related to one another, since several early mobile games lacked consistent documentation and were experimental, ephemeral, or small-scale in nature. The RMGD fills this gap by allowing users to search using a wide range of criteria, such as title, time frame, genre, type of connectivity, number of players, place of development, authors, hardware, as well as popular press and scholarly articles written about them. By combining and establishing search criteria, users will be able to trace new correlations among games that otherwise might not be evident. The database also provides a map that shows the geographic locations of where searched games were developed and a list of games with similar features.” —Dr. de Souza e Silva, Professor of Communication, NC State University

he UT Videogame Archive seeks to preserve and protect the work of videogame developers, publishers and artists for use by a wide array of researchers. We are eager to meet or correspond with anyone interested in donating game software and hardware, documents, art, digital records, promotional materials, and business records related to all things videogame. The archive seeks not only materials from game designers and producers, but also documentation on gamers, gameplay, and advocacy organizations related to the videogame industry.