Genette (1997a ) coined the term paratext to draw attention to overlooked elements of book publishing, such as the title, preface, or notes. As such, I also consider relevant contributions from screen studies, media studies, and literary theory. While the main focus of this article lies in the field of game studies, the often emphasized interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary nature of game studies (Aarseth, 2001 Martin, 2018 Mäyrä, 2009 Quandt et al., 2015) necessarily broadens the scope of the presented discussion about paratextuality. The quantitative citation analysis is an original contribution, which is inspired by Fredrik Åström’s (2014) general bibliometric study of paratext and Genette’s other texts, but provides a more focused exploration of a singular scholarly field. The theoretical part of this article draws partly from my doctoral thesis (Švelch, 2017b), but presents a streamlined and updated review of the three aforementioned frameworks. The goal of this article is to address the theoretical foundations of the concept, highlight the differences among its three main frameworks (original, expanded, and reduced), and track their use in game studies publications. As a field that has been widely using paratextuality since 2011, game studies can therefore benefit from a critical meta-review of the existing frameworks and a methodological intervention. An unorthodox use of terminology can nevertheless lead to general confusion, misinterpretation, and misattribution of new versions of the concept to scholars who envisioned it differently, leading some scholars to question the concept’s analytical value (e.g. This process of appropriation and redefinition is logical due to the underlying bias of Genette’s conceptualization of paratext towards the codex book medium - specifically related to commercial book publishing between 18th and 20th century (cf. It has also been widely used in game studies - but often in ways that have departed from the original framework as conceived by Gérard Genette in 1982, as others have noted before (Arsenault, 2017 Backe, 2017 Rockenberger, 2014 Švelch, 2016, 2017b). Over its 38 years long history, the concept of paratext has been adopted by many fields and applied to various phenomena across different cultural and media industries. Keywords: paratext, paratextuality, transtextuality, intertextuality, cultural epiphenomena, literary theory, citation analysis Introduction Instead I recommend treating paratextuality as a link between a text and the surrounding socio-historical reality, emphasizing that paratextuality is often accompanied by other (trans)textual qualities. Additionally, I propose a methodological intervention by suggesting to avoid the reductive term “paratext” in the sense of a category of texts, which implies a rigid textual hierarchy. In the article, I highlight the differences between the three frameworks and track the frequency of their use in game studies scholarship. In particular, the expanded framework, which is, according to the analysis, usually attributed to Consalvo, tends to be too all-encompassing by stripping away the original limitation on authorship of paratextual elements and instead resembles the screen studies term cultural epiphenomena. This article provides a critical theoretical review of current paratextual scholarship and uses citation analysis to quantify the existence and impact of three different approaches to paratext: original, expanded, and reduced. However, it is not Gérard Genette’s original definition from 1982, but rather the expanded version proposed by Mia Consalvo in 2007 that is used in 70 percent of the 235 analyzed academic texts written in English and published between 19. Paratext is a frequently used concept in game studies, mentioned approximately 300 times in the 2010s alone. Paratextuality in Game Studies: A Theoretical Review and Citation Analysis by Jan Švelch Abstract
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