LudoScience

Evolution and influences of the key-words “gameplay”, “ludic” and “fun” in the writings produced by English-speaking and French-speaking journalist’s communities related to video games between 1977 and 2019

 

This paper aims to study whether the community of English-speaking journalists related to video games influences French-speaking community in the same field in terms of vocabulary. The French-speaking keywords analyzed are “jouabilité”, “ludique” and “amusant” in order to measure whether they are neglected in favor of the English words “gameplay”, “ludic” and “fun” over time. To verify this, a lexicometric analysis based on a corpus of 1520 English-speaking journals and 1075 French-speaking journals dealing with the theme of video games and published between 1976 and 2019 have been built. Statistical processing is carried out to check the validity of the data and to highlight the matches between the occurrence rates associated with the different keywords. With the results in hand, we will try to understand them by formulating hypotheses in relation to the issues and contexts linked to English-speaking and French-speaking journalist’s communities.