Here's a little curio which might be more interesting than useful...

The Digiplay games research bibliography contains a broad collection of keywords from journal and other papers relating to digital games. What we've started to do here at Digiplay is copy all those keywords into a database and look at what a tag cloud made from them might look like.

So far we've only gone back as far as the beginning on 2006 but already you can see that digital games research is a broader field that some might have you believe. (The positive advantages of games research are discussed in the introduction to the book 'Understanding Digital Games' which is available online for free.)

What is interesting is not how things like 'children', 'computer games', 'video games' and 'media' or are the most common tags/keywords but 'gender', 'physical-activity', 'television' and our old friend 'Agressive-behavior' are getting up there too. But where are 'narratology' and 'ludology'?

If your area of expertise doesn't get the weight you think it deserves, perhaps it is because you haven't registered on the Digiplay site and added your references to the games research bibliography or made sure your keywords are complete.

You can take a look at the Games Research Tag Cloud as it develops.