Getting the GISST: a toolkit for the creation, analysis and reference of game studies resources

Scholars who study games lack many resources and abilities taken for granted by scholars of other forms such as literature. To begin to address this deficiency, this paper presents a basic formalization for different classes of resources associated with game critical practices, and ties those resources to a prototypical system for their reference, generation, and use in game studies arguments. The formalization is focused on three forms of reference: objective reference to game objects, enacted reference to game performances, and internal reference to sub-structures within both. We operationalize our formalization with the Game and Interactive Software Scholarship Toolkit (GISST), a custom suite of tools that manage the reference and creation of game executable data, game performance video recordings, and game executable state from emulated programs. GISST provides tools for ingesting each class of reference and for the easy creation and citation of game play videos and emulated system states. For the last case, GISST allows for embedding citations to running game programs --- in emulation --- inside web browsers, and for their retrieval through URLs from a stable citation database. The goal is to point toward a new class of scholarly support tool for arguments about games and other interactive software that would benefit from the inclusion of audiovisual and executable references.