In 2015, fourteen years after declaring ‘year one’ for game studies as a specialized area of scholarly research, Espen Aarseth (2015: n.p.) made an equally bold declaration in an editorial for the open-access web journal Game Studies: ‘game studies is a success. We did it’. For Aarseth (2015: n.p.), the proof of game studies’ success is in the proverbial pudding: there are, now, numerous international conferences, research centres, and publication venues dedicated to the study of videogames. Furthermore, claims Aarseth, videogames are now ‘accepted’ as a viable area of research in disciplines where they were previously shunned. Meanwhile, orthodox game studies conferences such as DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) are not nearly as widely attended as they were in the early 2000s—a good sign, according to Aarseth, because it indicates that the field's early exponents have found homes in neighbouring disciplines.

For Aarseth, game studies is a ‘success’ because it has become successfully standardized, no longer defined by its difference within the academy but instead by its normality. Few would argue that this is a bad thing—after all, it implies that videogames are no longer cordoned off into their own special domain, their own ‘magic circle’. It also implies that the field has shed its preoccupations with formalism; that the medium can be brought into contact with a diverse range of perspectives, frameworks, and methodologies from other research areas.