Library Science Filter: Video game citations?

Interesting question. Yeah, you can cite the video game itself, but citing a specific place/time/interaction within the game poses all sorts of complexities. The visual aspects that are not interactive should be pretty simple like the "silver castle's moat", but if you were trying to cite something more complex maybe you could give it an arbitrary name that links to a screenshot or video clip? A major purpose of citation is to make sure an interested reader can get to the source if she or he is interested. Serious scholars tend to care little about the placement of periods and all the nitpicky details lesser scholars enforce on their students.

Can you cite a level? That's like a book chapter or DVD scene.

In-text it varies from style to style, but most citations are just the title of the game in italics or quotes, with a date next to it. APA is usually the title of the game with the publisher in parentheses. As far as I know there's no standard for citing a specific chunk of time within a game. James Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach us About Literacy and Learning doesn't use anything like that, and he cites specific moments in games heavily throughout the text.

This is an unsolved problem in current academic writing about games — it's easy to cite an entire game, but often very hard to figure out how to cite a specific sub-part in a way that would make it easily accessible to the reader. (After all, most games don't allow instant access to an arbbitrary part of their content; and sometimes, even worse, one might want to cite an event or object that appeared only in one's own instance of play.) The best practice is clearly to give enough of a description of the specific thing being cited, in the article text or a footnote, that it'd be apparent to any player what thing was being described and/or how to find or duplicate it within the larger game, but there are many obvious possible problems with that approach in any given case. Almost all existing academic game writing just ignores this problem entirely and gives only citations that are totally inadequate compared to the expectations of textual scholarship.