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Formal Constraints and Creativity: Connecting Game Jams, Dogma ’95, the Demo Scene, OuBaPo, and Renga poets Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Gorm Lai, Ilaria Vecchi
In a fast-paced world of ever-changing trends, connecting historical roots by linking new movements to existing traditions can be a challenge. Similarly to how Mary Flanagan’s book “Critical Play” situates and contextualizes play in history, we propose and start similar work on game jams. While we don’t have as much room for self-expression in a paper, we focus on two main contributions. The first
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Player Experience of Minimalist Video Game Design: Case Study of Indie Horror Iron Lung Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Mienke Fouché
Player experiences of minimalist video games are not well documented. This article addresses this gap by exploring players’ experiences of the minimalist horror video game Iron Lung. This game is identified as employing unique methods of gameplay toward affecting players. A case study design was framed using Caroux et al.’s player–video game interactions and Nealen et al.’s minimalist video game design
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“The Sense of Wonder”: Gaming Capital and Nostalgia for Inexperience in Magic: The Gathering Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Kyle W. Medlock
Popular culture media is a potent wellspring of nostalgia. From remakes and revivifications to perpetual production, aesthetics of nostalgia are commonplace among fan communities who continually encounter and experience both collective and personal pasts during engagement. Existing research has overlooked the role that fans’ gaming capital holds in the emergence of nostalgia, especially in leisure
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Mapping Game Biopolitics Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-02-28 Michał Kłosiński
This article advances a framework for the analysis of digital game biopolitics that addresses 1) how games represent the governance of life, 2) how games, themselves, govern life, and 3) how games enable forms of player-driven biopolitics. I define two concepts — biopolitical markers and biopolitical paradigms — and provide a set of research questions to help identify and classify various game elements
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Games for the Pluriverse: Exploring the Use, Opportunities, and Problems of Drawing from Local Cultural Heritage in Video Games Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Lina Eklund, Renard Gluzman, Kristine Jørgensen, Fares Kayali, Elina Roinioti, Vered Pnueli
In this paper, we explore the growing trend of European game developers embracing their cultural heritage with greater dedication. Taking a bottom-up approach, we showcase various successful examples of games that engage with local cultural canons. Additionally, we investigate how games can evolve into creators of cultural heritage by examining those that have already achieved such status. Furthermore
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Enjoying the Uncertainty. How Dark Souls Performs Incompleteness Through Narrative, Level Design and Gameplay Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Angelo Maria Andriano
The application of the Theory of Information to the works of art can show why incompleteness and ambiguity offer a more engaging experience to readers and users. But when ambiguity becomes a deliberate strategy of the work, it becomes difficult to understand how to interpret it: in this article I argue that the correct way to interpret a work that makes incompleteness the rule of its poetics is to
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Polish History up to 1795 in Polish Games and Game Studies Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Michał Mochocki, Stanisław Krawczyk, Aleksandra Mochocka
Situated within historical and regional (CEE) game studies, this article is an overview of games made in Poland after 1989 about Polish history up to the eighteenth century. It also outlines research made on those games, and it comments on changing cultural and political factors shaping the development of Polish history/heritage-themed games over the last three decades. We group the games in thematic-chronological
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Gamification is not Working: Why? Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-01-31 John Dah, Norhayati Hussin, Muhamad Khairulnizam Zaini, Linda Isaac Helda, Divine Senanu Ametefe, Abdulmalik Adozuka Aliu
Gamification is a trending topic in the scientific community. It is the art of incorporating game elements and game design principles into non-game context. The phenomenon has garnered tremendous attention especially in the field of education and academics. Yet, since it appeared a decade ago, its ascension both in education and other domains hasn’t been uniform, with several failed and inconclusive
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“As if Possessed by a Demon”: Subjectivity, Possession, and Undeadness in Metal Gear Solid Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-01-19 Steven Kielich, Chris Hall
Engaging with psychoanalysis and philosophy, this essay maps the collapse of human sovereignty in Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid video game series by pursuing the figure of the liquid hand that moves between characters, undercutting identity and selfhood. A unique theoretical intervention in the discourses of posthumanism and deconstruction, this essay carves out a coenesthetic intervention into the
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War and Esport: The Russian Invasions Impact on the Performance of Ukrainian and Russian Professional Players Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-01-18 Cornel Nesseler, Viktor Shtrum
Understanding and assessing worker performance is of major sociological and economic interest. This importance is mirrored in the extent of research that analyzes incentives and behavioral traits influencing worker performance. Most of this research focuses on workers in a peaceful or stable environment. However, a large share of the global population works in a country that is at war. To examine the
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Blockchain Potentials for the Game Industry: A Review Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-01-11 Golshid Jaferian, Darya Ramezani, Michael G. Wagner
In the past few years, there has been a significant increase in the adoption and recognition of blockchain technology. The increasing demand for blockchain technology has led to its swift development and widespread adoption across various sectors, including the gaming industry. The potential implications of this nascent technology in the realm of digital games are considerable, yet it is crucial to
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The Ground Floor Approach to Video Game Accessibility: Identifying Design Features Prioritized by Accessibility Reviews Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-01-05 Sky LaRell Anderson
This article describes the priorities for accessibility found in video game accessibility reviews. Through an analysis of 20 articles published by the accessibility review websites DAGERSystem.com and CanIPlayThat.com, this study categorizes the accessibility features in those articles in order to discover which accessibility features are the most important to reviewers, gauged by how many words are
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Profiles, Perceptions, and Experiences of Video Game Translators Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-01-05 Amir Arsalan Zoraqi, Mohsen Kafi
The nuances involved in game localization call for an expert workforce, well-versed in dealing with the challenges involved. Yet, the prospect of game localization is still a blue-water area of research and not much is known regarding the profiles and the current industry practices. Thus, the present study seeks to throw light on the profiles, perceptions, and experiences of game translators. A total
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Video Games Interventions to Reduce Radicalization and Violent Extremism in Young People: A Systematic Review Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Fatima Lopez Naranjo, Miguel A. Maldonado, Esther Cuadrado, Manuel Moyano
The development and consumption of video games have experienced a significant boom in recent decades. Recently, attention has been paid to the impact they can have on young people and how extremist and radical groups are using them to recruit and reinforce hateful ideas and behaviors. It would be innovative to use this powerful tool to prevent and educate on values and rights, thereby reducing prejudices
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Introduction: Reconsidering Paratext as a Received Concept. Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-09-06 Alan Galey
It is now 40 years since Gérard Genette's work introduced the term paratexts into literary studies, giving a unifying name to the many kinds of texts that serve as thresholds to other texts. The term and concept have migrated into the study of several other media forms, including video game studies, thanks principally to Mia Consalvo in Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games (2007) and Steven Jones
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Broken Promises Marketing. Relations, Communication Strategies, and Ethics of Video Game Journalists and Developers: The Case of Cyberpunk 2077 Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-05-09 Piotr Siuda, Dariusz Reguła, Jakub Majewski, Anna Kwapiszewska
Cyberpunk 2077's negative reception stood in striking contrast to the pre-release hype around the video game built by the producer's marketing campaign and the gaming press. This study examines a s...
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A Transfiguration Paradigm for Quest Design Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-05-07 Steven Harris, Nicholas Caldwell
Quest design is an important design aspect of video games. The current approach to quest design is dominated by a task-orientated paradigm in which a quest is viewed as a series of tasks to be comp...
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Meaningful Place: A Phenomenological Approach to the Design of Spatial Experience in Open-world Games Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-05-01 Bo Wang, Zhenlin Gao, Mohammad Shidujaman
With the development of game engines and graphics technology, open-world games have gained popularity all over the world recently. One of the key features of this genre is a realistic open world sp...
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Gaming for Ecological Activism: A Multidimensional Model for Networks Articulated Through Video Games Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-04-20 Gaia Amadori
In the past 2 decades, reflections on video games’ ideological and political aspects—and their overarching media ecosystems—have grown. Despite this, few contributions focus on environmental issues...
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Video Game Accessibility Defined Through Advocacy: How the Websites AbleGamers.org and CanIPlayThat.com Use the Word Accessibility Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Sky LaRell Anderson
This study investigates how the word “accessibility” is used in online news articles published by two video game-based disability advocacy organizations. AbleGamers is an accessibility and disabili...
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Rescripting of the Genre Through Greek Mythology in Hades Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Jaswanth Arthimalla
Hades is a 2018 video game by Supergiant Games that sees the player take control of Zagreus, an obscure son of Hades. Hades offers the player freedom to shape, order, and alter its narrative throug...
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To the Center of Nowhere: Deep Mapping Digital Games’ Paratextual Geographies Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-04-18 Jon Saklofske
Games are possibility spaces and the experiential circumstances generated by the execution of digital game code are paratextual thresholds of transition and transaction. If games are paratexts, gam...
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Survey on Localization From the Development Perspective Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Itziar Zorrakin-Goikoetxea
Localization is the adaptation of a video game at multiple levels to make it appealing for a new market and it greatly contributes to its success. Research regarding localization has been increasin...
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Right-Wing Extremism in Mainstream Games: A Review of the Literature Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Garrison Wells, Agnes Romhanyi, Jason G. Reitman, Reginald Gardner, Kurt Squire, Constance Steinkuehler
Hate speech, harassment, and an increasing prevalence of right-wing extremism in online game spaces are of growing concern in the United States. Understanding trends in how and to what extent extre...
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“You Took That From Me”: Conspiracism and Online Harassment in the Alt-Fandom of The Last of Us Part II Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Robert Letizi, Callan Norman
The reception to 2020's The Last of Us Part II was a maelstrom of misleading marketing, unprecedented leaks, and a vicious fallout characterized by prejudiced online harassment and sprawling conspi...
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“Never Good Enough”: Player Identities, Experiences, and Coping Strategies of Women in Czech Video Game Journalism Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-04-09 Tereza Fousek Krobová, Jan Švelch
In this article, we examine the position of women in Czech video game journalism and the strategies they use to cope with sexism. To this end, we conducted eight in-depth interviews with currently ...
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Failing to See a Difference: Closing a Gender Gap in a Challenging Video Game Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-04-09 Craig G. Anderson, Amanda L. L. Cullen
How players react to failure remains an understudied area of games research. Previous work has shown that mastery orientation can effectively gauge how players will behave in response to failure in...
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“We're All Mad Here!”: Becoming God in Bloodborne Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-04-02 Aabir Sen
This paper engages with Slavoj Žižek's notion of the ‘vanishing mediator,’ by taking a closer look at his study of the Hegelian ‘night of the world.’ It specifically probes into the notion of the d...
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The Ones Who Walk Away from Hallownest: Hollow Knight's Radical Response to the Omelas Dilemma Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-03-28 Alex Grunberg
In Ursula K. Le Guin's short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a society's happiness depends on the suffering of a child and the reader is presented as culpable this contract. In the vide...
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Esports as a Cultural Microcosm for Studying Psycholinguistics Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-03-20 Jeff Coon, Alexander Etz, Gregory Scontras, Barbara W. Sarnecka
Esports have become increasingly popular as naturalistic experimental settings. In large part, this popularity is due to esports helping researchers balance ecological validity and experimental con...
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Machphrasis: Towards a Poetics of Video Games in Contemporary Literary Culture Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-03-20 Francis Butterworth-Parr
This article develops Kawika Guillermo's ‘machphrasis’ (2016) as a theoretical contribution to discourse considering the deployment of video games in contemporary literary culture. After presenting...
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Rethinking Remakes: Value and Culture in Video Game Temporalization Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Logan Brown
As previous generations of players have aged and new generations with new tastes and expectations have emerged, the game industry has increasingly turned to high-profile remasters and remakes to re...
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Gamification in Education: Why, Where, When, and How?—A Systematic Review Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-03-16 Nilüfer Zeybek, Elif Saygı
Defined as the utilization of game elements in nongame environments, gamification has been frequently used in education in recent years. The aim of the present study is to summarize the studies pre...
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“You’ve Been Living Here For as Long as You Can Remember”: Trauma in OMORI's Environmental Design Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-03-15 Aya Younis, Jana Fedtke
Developed by Omocat and released in December 2020, OMORI is a surreal psychological horror role-playing game. The game follows the titular protagonist Omori as it examines such sensitive topics as ...
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It's Not a Game! Rules of Notice and Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Contemporary FMV Games Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-03-14 Inge van de Ven
This article reflects on the resurgence of Full Motion Video (FMV) games, focusing on Her Story (2015), The Infectious Madness of Dr Dekker (2017), Telling Lies (2019), Contradiction (2015), and Th...
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Animating a Plausible Past: Perceived Realism and Sense of Place Influence Entertainment of and Tourism Intentions From Historical Video Games Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-03-14 Nicholas David Bowman, Alexander Vandewalle, Rowan Daneels, Yoon Lee, Siyang Chen
Historical video games set in famous places in the world history have grown in popularity. The current study extends prior work in analyzing how social realism (a dimension of perceived realism foc...
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Chippin’ In: An Analysis of the Criminological Concepts Within Cyberpunk 2077 Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-03-07 Morgan James Steele
The cyberpunk genre dominates much of our popular culture, from how we think of cyber- and white-collar crime, to our understanding of how technology influences the criminal justice system. This ar...
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Replaying Wartime Résistance? Studying Ludic Memory-Making in the Open World Game The Saboteur Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-03-07 Pieter J.B.J. Van den Heede
Ever since the emergence of digital gaming as a popular pastime, the Second World War has been one of its major sources of inspiration. This article contributes to the study of the memory-making po...
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Interpreting Dwarf Fortress: Finitude, Absurdity, and Narrative Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-03-07 James Cartlidge
This article interprets the influential colony management simulator “Dwarf Fortress” existentially, in terms of finitude, absurdity, and narrative. It applies Aarseth/Möring's proposed method of ga...
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Dates, Carpets, and Pearl Necklaces: The Case of Anno 1404s Exotic Orientalism Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-02-28 Ömer Kemal Buhari
Since a few decades, digital games have become an area deemed worthy of studying for academics of multifarious fields. Numerous articles and books are being written on the topic of games and cultur...
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“Fear the Old Blood”: The Gothicism of Bloodborne Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-02-12 Hiranya Mukherjee
Gothic studies and Game studies are beginning to be explored in connection with each other to find various configurations of Gothic elements in the cybertext of games. In this article, I explore va...
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Angel Anxiety: Alice Angel as the Uncanny Presence in Bendy and the Ink Machine Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-02-09 Ashley P. Jones
Exploring the roles of gender performance through the experience of digital gaming provides an arena for discussing the power of fear and anxiety as cultural tools for counterhegemonic forces. The ...
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Professional Gaming and Pro-Gamers: What Do We Know So Far? A Systematic Review Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 Isha Bihari, Debashis Pattanaik
Professional gaming is organized competitive digital gameplay supported by advertisers and businesses. With its rising popularity and spectatorship, virtual gaming as a profession is now a reality....
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How Accessible is This Video Game? An Analysis Tool in Two Steps Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-02-07 María Eugenia Larreina-Morales
Game accessibility aims to ensure that every player has a chance to interact with a video game and overcome its challenges. This paper presents a game analysis tool in two steps that identify acces...
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The ‘First Person Shooter’ Perspective: A Different View on First Person Shooters, Gamification, and First Person Terrorist Propaganda Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Sam Andrews
During the 2019 Christchurch attack, the perpetrator livestreamed footage from a helmet-mounted camera. The aesthetic similarity of the attack footage to first-person shooter (FPS) videogames has l...
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Thought Experiments in Video Games: Exploring the (Un)Ethics of Motherhood in Frictional Games’ Amnesia: Rebirth Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-02-03 Atėnė Mendelytė
The essay explores the philosophical potential of Frictional Games’ Amnesia: Rebirth (2020), a survival science-fiction horror game, which heavily focuses on story elements and deeply explores the ...
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Becoming Bayek: Blackness, Egypt, and Identity in Assassin's Creed: Origins Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-01-29 Katrina HB Keefer
This article is an exploration of one of the bestselling single player RPGs from the Assassin's Creed series, 2017's Origins, as understood through a framework of cultural race and identity theory....
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Reshaping the Battlefield: The International Committee of the Red Cross, Video Games, and Public Relations Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-01-19 Jolene Fisher
Although the use of video games to achieve public relations (PR) goals is not new, there is limited extant research that analyzes such projects using PR theory or that takes into account organizati...
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Space Rednecks, Robot Butlers, and Feline Foreigners: Language Attitudes Toward Varieties of English in Videogames Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-01-17 Simon David Stein
Speakers hold evaluative attitudes toward different varieties of language (e.g., toward accents, dialects, or sociolects). Individual linguistic markers, like a particular sound, can point to a who...
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Desert Bus: Abusive Game Design, The Martyrdom Effect, and Fan Activism on Twitch.tv Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-01-17 Megan Condis
Desert Bus began as vaporware. A decade after it was initially shelved, it was rediscovered and became a way for gamers to show off their insider knowledge of rare and hard-to-find bits of gaming h...
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Geek Cuisine: Extending the Narrative of a Junk Food Gamer Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Tapani N. Joelsson, Henna Syrjälä, Harri Luomala, Tuomas Mäkilä
In this article, we argue that the pervading hegemonic narrative on gamers’ eating culture emphasizing hedonistic and fast foods is a one-sided storyline that highlights a potentially harmful gamer...
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The Beautiful Rule: Thinking the Aesthetics of Game Rules Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Miguel Sicart
This paper introduces a model for analyzing the aesthetic value of game rules. Drawing on Nguyen's theory of agential aesthetics, this paper argues that the aesthetic value of a rule is related to ...
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Background Checks: Disentangling Class, Race, and Gender in CRPG Character Creators Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-01-05 Michael Iantorno, Mia Consalvo
Character backgrounds are one of many elements players use to customize their protagonists in fantasy computer role-playing games. By documenting the narrative trappings, mechanical benefits, and h...
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Share the Experience, Don’t Take it: Toward Attunement With Neurodiversity in Videogames Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-01-04 Lisanne E. Meinen
Videogames increasingly focus on marginalized experiences such as neurodivergence. Specifically, the immersive and embodied aspects of videogames allow neurodivergent people to better explain their...
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“Community” in Video Game Communities Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-01-03 Lucinda Saldanha, Sofia Marques da Silva, Pedro D. Ferreira
The concept and experience of community have been changing in contemporary societies, from a traditional concept in an idealistic, homogeneous context, characterized by union, to the exploration an...
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The Future of Games Scholarship: An Interview With James Paul Gee Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2023-01-03 Luis E. Pérez Cortés, Taylor M. Kessner
James Gee's work at the intersection of literacy, education, and game studies has explored how videogame affinity spaces are examples of how good teaching and learning often occur outside of school...
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The Orc—Playing the “Wholly Other”: Investigations of Kant's Sublime and The Technological Sublime in Blizzard Entertainment's Massive Multiplayer Online Game World of Warcraft Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2022-12-05 Bo Kampmann Walther, Lasse Juel Larsen
While the complicated scheme of the philosophical sublime may at first hand seem mere platitude when brought to life in computer games, this article claims that the action/adventure game World of W...
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Level Design Processes and Challenges: A Cross Section of Game Development Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2022-11-20 Tobias Karlsson, Jenny Brusk, Henrik Engström
This article examines level design processes and challenges at professional game studios. Thematic analysis of data, recorded through field studies and semi-structured interviews, identify four key...
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Designing the Future? The Metaverse, NFTs, & the Future as Defined by Unity Users Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2022-11-15 Ryan Scheiding
The “metaverse” and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), though not necessarily “new” terms or technologies, have risen to mainstream prominence post-2020. This paper, based on survey data obtained from Uni...
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“Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II Games and Culture (IF 2.18) Pub Date : 2022-11-14 Stephen Michael Johnson
The Last of Us Part II is an unrelenting examination of the effects of trauma and violent cycles of revenge. The game's complex narrative structure, its use of the player-character (PC) relationshi...