Paper long abstract:

Along with the growth of the video game industry, Game Studies have been developed as a research field of its own in the early 2000s. From the start, the field has been and remain strongly anchored in communication and media studies, that gather 30% of the authors of the two main Game Studies journals. Early works were especially focused on online games, and they appeared as an epistemic culture (KnorrCetina) aiming at providing answers to what was then a puzzling phenomenon associated with that new media : "virtual worlds" (Mayra). From then on, the major debates in the field both had to do with the opposition between game and play: internalism vs. externalism, formalism vs. culturalism (Lowood). In the last 5 years, the ability of STS to articulate the technical and social dimensions of games (Taylor, Kerr, Nardi) was instrumental in the search for a way out of this gap between games and culture (Dovey&Kennedy).

We propose here a scientometric study of the foundationnal moment of Game Studies' field through the analysis of all articles published in its two main journals, *Games & Culture* (2006-) and *Game Studies* (2001-). From the perspective of a sociology of science, we study the birth of a discipline through the evolution of its objects (its original focus on online games) and its themes. We then investigate how the disciplinary origins of scholars shaped their approach of videogames. We finally show how the influence of STS on Game Studies was meditated through anthropological studies of players communities.