Here are some peer-reviewed journals whose main focus center around video games and virtual reality:
EAI Endorsed Transactions on Serious Games
"...is an open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal focused on serious game applications, serious games technology, serious games analytics, user experience design and more."
Eludamos : Journal for Computer Game Culture
"...is an international, interdisciplinary, diamond open access, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the academic study of videogames, game culture, and play published at Septentrio Academic Publishing at UiT The Arctic University of Norway."
Entertainment Computing
"...publishes original, peer-reviewed research articles and serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating innovative research ideas, emerging technologies, empirical investigations, state-of-the-art methods and tools in all aspects of digital entertainment, new media, entertainment computing, gaming, robotics, toys and applications among researchers, engineers, social scientists, artists and practitioners."
Games and Culture
"...peer-reviewed and published quarterly, is an internal journal that promotes innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within interactive media"
Game Studies
"...a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussion on games and gaming."
Interactive Entertainment Law Review
"...is to serve as a peer-reviewed hub for legal analysis of interactive entertainment, video games, virtual / augmented / mixed realities, social media, and all related and emergent forms of digital interactive entertainment."
JMIR Serious Games
"...a multidisciplinary journal devoted to computer, web, virtual reality, mobile applications, and other emerging technologies that incorporate elements of gaming, gamification or novel hardware platforms such as virtual reality devices or wearables...While JSG maintains a strong focus on health, the journal also aims to highlight research exploring serious games in health-adjacent and other interdisciplinary contexts, including but not limited to military, education, industry, and workplace applications."
Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds
"The peer reviewed... explores the cultural effects of gaming and virtual worlds across platforms and genre, as their increasing popularity begins to affect culture as a whole."
Loading... : Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association
"...is a forum for publishing original and interdisciplinary academic research on video games. We accept work from a variety of perspectives: from research on video game cultures and industries to educational approaches to the study and development of digital games, and from computer science driven papers on designing and testing games to psychological research on video games and their effects."
Simulation and Gaming
"For more than five decades ... An International Journal of Theory, Practice and Research has served as a leading international forum for the exploration and development of simulation/gaming methodologies used in education, training, consultation, and research."
Here are some examples of video game research which was published in non-gaming journals:
American Historical Review
https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/128/4/1755/7458524
History & Theory
http://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12280
International Journal of Heritage Studies
https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2022.2091638
International Studies Perspectives
https://doi.org/10.1093/isp/ekw002
Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice
https://doi.org/10.1080/13642529.2016.1256638
Russian Literature
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ruslit.2022.02.001
