This past year, our librarians updated our research guide to games and gaming, added several new titles in tabletop role-playing games, and cataloged our Magic: The Gathering research collection.
Games Studies
Though IU has no program solely dedicated to games studies, this interdisciplinary field welcomes research from computer scientists, psychologists, social scientists, historians, and more. Our recently updated research guide to games and gaming includes foundational texts, common research topics, and plenty of IU and Open Access resources for anyone interested in studying games or the communities that play them.
Wells Library owns several game collections, including board games and digital games. Follow the link to our LibGuide to learn more about our titles and their circulation policies.
New Arrivals: Magic The Gathering
The study of trading card games can draw on expertise from subjects ranging from economics to art. In these games, players build custom decks from cards which they may specially purchase or source from booster packs. Magic: The Gathering is one such game, and our research collection was recently cataloged. You can read the complete card list on Deckbox. This set features over a thousand cards currently, pulled from a number of expansion sets.
This set hasn’t yet been added to IUCAT, but you can study these cards by reaching out to media services (libmedia@iu.edu) to schedule an appointment.
This research set isn’t for play, but the library’s game collection includes several starter decks which can be opened. You can find these decks by searching IUCAT. Cards must remain in the Media Services room, however.
New Arrivals: Role-Playing Games
IU Bloomington welcomed several new tabletop role-playing games into the collection this past year. In a TTRPG, each player typically take on the role of a single character, making choices and rolling dice to determine the outcome. This collaborative form of storytelling has been of interest to scholars since the 1980s, and several histories of the genre have been published in recent years.
We surveyed websites to see which games were rising in popularity and studied games journals to learn what scholars were researching. The titles below represent a few of the collection’s latest additions. A major trend of the last five years has seen more tables branching out and exploring titles other than Dungeons & Dragons.
Pictured:
- Daggerheart
- Alice is Missing
- Monster of the Week
- Fate
- Mutants & Masterminds
- Star Wars: Edge of the Empire
We also noticed a renewed interest in horror games, which have long been a popular alternative to traditional fantasy games.
Pictured:
- Call of Cthulhu: Starter Set
- Call of Cthulhu: Investigator’s Handbook
- Werewolf: The Apocalypse
- Vampire: The Masquerade
About the author: Elizabeth-Marie Helms is a graduate student in Library Science and the History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine. A former middle school history teacher, she now studies the public understanding of science and works as an assistant in both Scholarly Communications and the Arts & Humanities subject collections at IU Libraries.
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