From the Presupposition of Doom to the Manifestation of Code: Using Emulated Citation in the Study of Games and Cultural Software
For the field of game history to mature, and for game studies more broadly to function in a scholarly manner in the coming decades, one necessity will be improvement of game citation practices. Current practices have some obvious problems, such as a lack of standardization even within the same journal or book series. But a more pressing problem is disguised by the field’s youth: Common citation practices depend on the play experiences and cultural knowledge of a generation of game studies scholars and readers who are largely old enough to have lived through the eras they are discussing. More sustainable and precise alternatives cannot fall back on the tools available for fixed media — such as the direct quotations and page numbers used for books or the screenshots (of images that appear to all viewers) and timecode used for video. Instead, this essay imagines an alternative approach, working in the digital humanities traditions of speculative collections and tool-based argumentation. In the speculative future we present, there are scholarly collections of software, as well as tools available for citing software states and integrating these citations into scholarly arguments. A working prototype of such a tool is presented, together with examples of scholarly use and the results of an evaluation of the concept with game scholars.