Introduction to party studies

This special issue expands upon a past research seminar and article to support the value of creating a subfield of ‘party studies’ in game studies. All together six articles compose this special issue with various lenses for how analyzing parties supports the analysis of games and vice versa. Parties are important as a framing within game narratives, as a part of game production history, for how they generate playful communities related to games, and finally how they expand our understanding for analyzing games. We furthermore argue that this kind of subfield endeavor helps us as scholars come together to expand our expertise across the ever more diverse pools of knowledge we study.