Eludamos

About Eludamos

Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture — A Complete Profile

Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture is an international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the academic study of videogames, game culture and play. Its sole ISSN is 1866-6124. It is published by Septentrio Academic Publishing at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, in Tromsø, under a CC BY 4.0 diamond open access licence — diamond meaning that neither readers nor authors pay: no subscription, no article processing charge. The journal is owned by the Department of Language and Culture at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, with support from the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. It is one of the founding venues of game studies as a field: OpenAlex records its works from 2007, the journal's current volume numbering reached Volume 17 in 2026, and its editors-in-chief, Holger Pötzsch and Kristine Jørgensen, describe a journal in deliberate growth — moving from one to two issues a year in 2025, with a rejection rate of roughly 70 percent of incoming manuscripts. This profile covers its identity, scope, review and submission rules, open-access model, indexing and metrics, with each figure attributed to its source.

Identity and Quick Facts

The older JournalsWorld template stored the publisher as a bare numeric code; the publisher taxonomy term resolves to Septentrio Academic Publishing, the publisher named by the journal itself and by DOAJ. The template also described the journal as focusing on “Q2”. Q2 is a quartile band in a Scopus subject category, not a subject: the journal's subjects, in its own and DOAJ's terms, are computer games, game studies, videogames, game culture, play and digital culture, classified in the Library of Congress scheme under computer software (QA76.75–76.765). The distinction matters for authors searching by topic: search “game studies”, not a quartile.

History and Position in Game Studies

Eludamos belongs to the first generation of game studies journals — the venues that converted the study of digital games from a conference conversation into a citable scholarly literature. OpenAlex's record begins its works in 2007, and the journal's own numbering, reaching Volume 17 with its first 2026 issue, is consistent with an origin in that founding period. For most of its life it appeared annually; the editors' 2025 editorial announced the move from one to two issues a year, with a line-up of submissions and special issues suggesting that a year with three issues might not be far off, and the journal's site already presents Volume 17, Number 1 (2026), a special issue titled “Party Studies in Games Studies”, guest edited by Leland Masek and Jaakko Stenros. Growth at a diamond open access journal is a logistical achievement, not a commercial one: the same editorial argues that institutional embedding and strategic logistical and financial support are crucial to the success of any diamond open access publishing project, and credits systematic work by the editorial board and Septentrio Academic Publishing to create permanent structures around the journal, citing the university library at UiT as the supporting institution. Recent structural markers the editors list include checking all incoming submissions via Crossref, assigning DOIs to all published articles, maintaining research-ethics procedures, and adopting AI guidelines for authors and reviewers.

That institutional story is also the journal's answer to the field's recurring crisis talk. A widely discussed Eludamos article, “The Game Studies Crisis: What Are the Rules of Play?”, diagnosed game studies as a pre-paradigmatic field whose founding debates recur cyclically; the journal's own practice — special issues on fictional games, on playfulness across media, on esports, on games and climate, and doctoral consortium work at the Central and Eastern European Game Studies conference (CEEGS) to develop doctoral manuscripts toward publication — is its constructive reply: build the field's infrastructure, train its newcomers, and curate its debates in themed issues rather than merely refereeing its fragments. The fictional games special issue, for example, solicited short, focused contributions of at most 5,000 words on imaginary games within stories — what roles fictional games play in storytelling, why authors outline rules for games audiences will never play — showing how the journal uses calls to open sub-fields, not only to fill pages.

Scope: What Eludamos Publishes

The journal's own formulation, carried on its site, is an international, interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the critical academic study of games and play across media — and, in the fuller DOAJ-indexed description, to videogames, game culture and play. In practice its contents span the humanities and social-science wings of game studies: game ontology and aesthetics, narrative and fiction in and around games, player and audience studies, game cultures and communities, esports, games and politics, games and climate, production and industry studies, and methodological reflection on the field itself. Recent contributions illustrate the range concretely: an introduction to fictional games and fictional game studies by Stefano Gualeni, Riccardo Fassone and Dom Ford; a study of gaming and seriality in interactive digital environments working through Espen Aarseth's notion of ergodic literature; an examination of game design epistemologies through a Wittgensteinian lens on language games; and an editorial line — “Time to stop playing: No game studies on a dead planet” — pressing the field on its ecological conditions. The word “critical” in the journal's self-description should be taken seriously: purely technical computer-science work with no cultural, aesthetic or social question, and purely descriptive industry reporting with no analytical claim, sit outside the centre of this journal even when their topic is games.

DOAJ's record adds the formal scope metadata: keywords computer games, game studies, videogames, game culture, play and digital culture; language English; article identifiers by DOI; plagiarism detection in place; authors retain copyright; and a stated publication time of 26 weeks in the DOAJ record — a directory figure, useful for planning, that authors should treat as an indicator rather than a promise. The journal accepts original articles of up to 8,000 words excluding references, notes and tables, and only one submission per author at any given time, per its author guidelines.

Peer Review, Ethics and Submission Rules

Eludamos operates double-blind peer review — DOAJ records the review process as double anonymous peer review, and the journal tells authors their work will be subjected to a rigid double-blind peer-review process. A rejection rate of roughly 70 percent of incoming manuscripts, stated by the editors in their 2025 editorial, means the review system is genuinely selective: about three in ten submissions survive. Non-compliance is the most avoidable cause of failure, because the journal returns manuscripts that do not comply with its stated requirements. Those requirements, from the author guidelines, are exact: the manuscript must not have been published and must not be under consideration with any other publisher; it must be fully anonymised, including both the metadata settings within the journal system and the metadata of the document itself — the guidelines warn, pointedly, that they notice a lot of authors ignoring this; it must be formatted according to the Eludamos styleguide, with consistent and correct references including DOIs for referenced work; it must be carefully proofread; the author must hold the rights and permissions for all copyrighted material included; applicable ethical rules for acquiring and processing research data must have been followed; funding sources must be named; and conflicts of interest must be stated. Submission is a two-part upload: a title page with author names, titles, affiliations and full contact details, the manuscript title, abstract and up to eight keywords, plus the anonymised manuscript itself.

Two further rules shape strategy. First, the journal accepts only one submission per author at any given time, so an author cannot hedge by sending two papers at once — choose the stronger fit. Second, the journal does not accept unsolicited reviews or commentaries: if you have an idea for a commentary or a work you want to review, you email the review editor with the rationale and its fit to the journal's scope; reviews and commentaries go through an editorial review process and should not exceed 3,000 words. Around the process sit the journal's published apparatus — submission guidelines, review policies, a privacy statement, an ethics and malpractice statement, publishing policies, author rights and permissions, and an AI policy, all linked from its Information for Authors page — and authors using generative tools, player data or community material should read the AI policy and the ethics statement before, not after, submission, since the journal has research-ethical procedures in place and checks submissions through Crossref on arrival.

The Diamond Open Access Model

Eludamos is published under a CC BY 4.0 diamond open access licence, per the journal; DOAJ's record confirms the licence as CC BY, confirms that the journal has no article processing charge and no other charges, records that authors retain copyright, and notes the journal's preservation in the PKP Preservation Network — the journal also states inclusion in the PKP Private LOCKSS Network. Diamond open access is the model in which the costs of publishing are carried by institutions — here, a university library publishing service, Septentrio Academic Publishing at UiT, whose parent service is affiliated with OASPA and AEUP — rather than by readers or authors. For authors, the consequences are practical as well as principled: no invoice at acceptance, no embargo logic to negotiate, a licence (CC BY) that satisfies essentially every funder open-access mandate, and copyright retained. For readers and librarians, the consequences are permanence mechanisms (LOCKSS preservation, DOIs, Crossref plumbing) of the kind usually associated with commercial platforms. DOAJ records the journal's open access start, for its current listing, from 2022, with its last full DOAJ review in February 2024; OpenAlex records an open access flip year of 2021 for the source and flags all 256 of its recorded works as open access — together reflecting the journal's consolidation into its present Septentrio diamond form, after an earlier open history dating back to its founding period.

Indexing and Metrics

The journal states its indexing plainly: it is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Scopus and ERIH PLUS — a claim this profile verified for DOAJ by a direct foreground DOAJ search, which returned the journal's full record for ISSN 1866-6124 (publisher Septentrio Academic Publishing, country Norway, double anonymous review, CC BY, no charges). OpenAlex additionally lists the source in DOAJ and ERIH PLUS among its listings and marks it as a core source. Scopus indexing is the formally consequential fact for most authors' evaluation systems, and the JournalsWorld stored record gave Scopus coverage of 2020–2025 with an h-index of 5 on that basis, alongside a Q2 category label — figures that represent the Scopus window, not the journal's whole life.

OpenAlex's direct source record (S2764957028, fetched directly for this profile) shows the longer view: 256 works, all recorded as open access, 2,215 citations, an h-index of 22, an i10-index of 52, a two-year mean citedness of about 0.41, and works running from 2007 to 2025. Its topic mapping is led, unsurprisingly, by digital games and media (224 works), followed by educational games and gamification, artificial intelligence in games, cultural studies, and narrative theory — a reasonable map of where Eludamos papers are taken up. The gap between the Scopus-based h-index of 5 in the stored record and the OpenAlex h-index of 22 is not an error in either: Scopus counts a shorter coverage window and a narrower citing universe, while OpenAlex counts the journal's full run and citations from a far wider set of sources, in a field where much citing happens in conference papers, books and journals outside Scopus. Quote either figure only with its database and window attached, and expect the journal's influence — as a founding game studies venue whose articles are standard syllabus material — to exceed what either number, honestly read, suggests.

Who Should — and Should Not — Submit

Strong fits: critical, humanities- or social-science-led studies of digital and analogue games and play; work on game culture, communities and platforms; fictional and imaginary games; playfulness across media; esports as culture; games and ecology; and field-building methodological or theoretical pieces — in each case written to the 8,000-word article format, fully anonymised, with complete DOI-bearing references. Doctoral researchers should note the journal's consortium activity at CEEGS, where drafts are workshopped with peer and senior opponents and selected authors are invited to develop papers for review at the journal: it is a genuine pipeline into this venue. Weaker fits: engineering or computer-science contributions whose contribution is a system or algorithm rather than an argument about games and play; market and industry reports without scholarly framing; and any second simultaneous submission, which the one-submission rule forbids. Authors should also weigh the calendar: two issues a year, themed special issues competing for slots, a roughly 70 percent rejection rate and a DOAJ-recorded publication time of 26 weeks make this a journal to choose for fit and permanence, and to schedule with patience.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Eludamos?
1866-6124. It is an online journal with a single registered ISSN.

Who publishes and owns it?
Septentrio Academic Publishing at UiT The Arctic University of Norway publishes it; the journal is owned by UiT's Department of Language and Culture, with support from the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen. A numeric code in older directory records is a database artefact, not the publisher.

Does it charge authors or readers?
No. It is diamond open access under CC BY 4.0; DOAJ records no APC and no other charges, and authors retain copyright.

How does peer review work, and how selective is it?
Double-blind (double anonymous) review. The editors state a rejection rate of roughly 70 percent of incoming manuscripts. Manuscripts that breach the anonymisation, formatting or originality rules are returned.

How long can an article be, and how many submissions can I have running?
Articles up to 8,000 words excluding references, notes and tables; one submission per author at any given time. Reviews and commentaries (maximum 3,000 words) are not accepted unsolicited — pitch the review editor first.

Where is it indexed?
DOAJ (verified by direct search for this profile), Scopus and ERIH PLUS, per the journal; preserved in the PKP networks; member of the Radical Open Access Collective.

What are its metrics?
Database-dependent: the stored Scopus-based record gives an h-index of 5 for its 2020–2025 window, while OpenAlex's direct record gives 256 works, 2,215 citations and an h-index of 22 across 2007–2025. State the database whenever you quote a figure.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is grounded in the journal's own site (aims, ownership, publisher, licensing, preservation, indexing, current issue), its author guidelines and Information for Authors pages (length limits, anonymisation, one-submission rule, review and commentary policy), its editors' 2025 editorial (two issues a year, roughly 70 percent rejection, Crossref checking, DOI assignment, AI guidelines), a direct foreground DOAJ search-API record for ISSN 1866-6124 (review model, licence, charges, preservation, publication-time indicator), a direct OpenAlex source fetch for S2764957028 (works, citations, h-index, topics), and the journal's published articles and calls as visible on its platform. Where directory figures and journal statements could diverge over time — frequency, timelines, editorial personnel — the journal's live pages are authoritative, and authors should re-check them at submission.

Reading Eludamos as a Newcomer

If you are new to game studies, an efficient way to learn this journal's standards is to read one open issue and one special issue side by side: the open issue shows the breadth the editors will defend in review, while the special issue shows how they frame a debate and what a guest editor's introduction does to position contributions. Notice how articles build their objects — a game, a mechanic, a community, a fictional game inside another medium — out of close description before theory is applied, and how references reach across the field's founding texts and its newest work alike. Mirror that architecture in your own submission, and the fit conversation with reviewers starts from shared ground.