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The Stupid, the Ridiculous, the Camp: How Goat Simulator's “Messy” Design Facilitates Queer Play Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-09-14 Hollie Wistow
This article identifies the queer potentialities of Goat Simulator by exploring how the gameplay mechanics can be understood as “stupid” and “Camp.” Moving away from representational notions of queerness, I argue that queering a game requires an alternative way to create and play. Often, the normative method of designing a videogame prioritizes technological precision and purposeful gameplay experiences
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In Defense of Imagination: Canadian Youth Culture and the Dungeons & Dragons Panic in Canada, 1980–1995 Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-09-10 Alex Gagné
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the iconic tabletop role-playing game released in 1974, sparked controversy from its early inception. This article examines the emergence of moral panic around D&D, particularly in the United States and Canada during the early 1980s. It explores how concerned groups, such as Bothered Against Dungeons & Dragons, portrayed the game as a corrupting influence on American youth
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The Inverted Cryptoeconomy: The Search for Endogenous Value in No Man’s Sky Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-30 Daniel Nielsen
The Galactic Hub Project is a player response to a dehumanizing trend in video game culture. Players adopt blockchain technology to capture and retain the value of player labor, which suggests that players do not necessarily take issue with the reproducibility and aesthetics of procedurally generated content in No Man’ s Sky. This research identifies attempts to safeguard against alienation of play
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Nature Playing: On the Experience of Contemplating Technologically Mediated Nature within the Game World of Riders Republic Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-29 Sonia Fizek
This contribution explores the practice of contemplative play or what the author proposes to call “nature playing”. This concept marks a continuity between the literary genre of “nature writing” and the way nature may be contemplatively experienced in video games, especially those with open-world natural landscapes. The author will discuss modes of nature playing within the mediated environments of
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‘It's Just Not Safe’: Gender-Based Harassment and Toxicity Experiences of Women in Esports Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-23 Heather Crothers, Kenneth C. Scott-Brown, Sheila J. Cunningham
Women remain underrepresented across most roles in the esports industry, which has long been associated with gender-based harassment and toxicity. While research has tended to focus on the experiences of women in professional esports careers, the current study investigated the nature and impact of harassment and toxicity on amateur players. Through interviews with eight women experienced in esports
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Streamers as Arts Educators: Exploring Their Streaming Approaches as Pedagogical Practices Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-22 Ahu Yolac, Laura J. Hetrick
In this paper, we focus on video game streaming and content creation as educationist or pedagogical practices where viewers can learn through the streamers’ unintentional approaches of constructivism, the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), and emergent curriculum. We posit that online gaming streaming services create and support informal learning spaces within virtual communities as communities of
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Transculturation in Latin American Video Game Production: Between Regionalism and Cosmopolitanism Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-21 Carlos Ramírez-Moreno, Luis Navarrete-Cardero
This research explores the manifestation of transculturation, a literary paradigm designed to situate Latin American production in the context of globalization, in video game production, evaluating its applicability to the study of cultural representation. Embracing a documentary research and content analysis methodology, the study analyzes 29 video games from nine Latin American countries, classifying
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“You Can’t Work for Somebody Who Doesn’t Exist”: The Decline of Games Journalism and the Rise of Independent Gaming News Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-21 Ryan Stanton, Mark R Johnson
Despite the continued growth of the gaming sector, media conglomerates have recently begun a disturbing trend of downsizing their gaming-oriented publications, leading many journalists to pivot towards independence. This paper analyses the current moment in games journalism, highlighting how search engine optimization (SEO), artificial intelligence (AI), and guide-based content have motivated this
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“You Feel Like You’ve Found a Place Where You Belong”: Symbolic Interactionism and Online Social Video Games in the Age of COVID-19 Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-21 Caitlin Veal, Matt Coward-Gibbs, Jack Denham, Matthew Spokes
This paper investigates how players perceive and understand the sociality afforded by online social video games (OSGs), framed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Utilizing data from semi-structured interviews ( n = 20), we apply Blumer’s concept of symbolic interactionism to explore the ways in which video games take on new meanings in co-constructed, collaborative and contributory digital spaces. We argue
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The Rise of Gaming Nations Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-19 Leonardo Synmbios
The article illuminates a paradigm shift in the digital landscape, where blockchain technology, Web 3.0, and gaming communities converge to redefine socio-economic dynamics. By examining the emergence of “Gaming Nations,” this article explores how virtual environments have transcended mere leisure, evolving into thriving economic ecosystems. Through case studies, including the transformative impact
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“Take the Keys to the Happy Hob Hotel”: Live-Streaming, Yingyeo Culture, and Affective Support Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-16 William Dunkel
Material conditions under global neoliberalism have increased youth precarity, and live-streaming has emerged as a form of “gig work” for young people as they broadcast their lives and social activities onto digital platforms. Studies have demonstrated that live-streaming often acts as a site of exploitation by corporate interests and self-commodification via platform capitalism where streamers adjust
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Stochastic Process Approaches for Modeling of Games Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-16 Kandukuri Kumaraswamy
The article detailed how stochastic process models are used to analyze game progression and included examples to illustrate the process. The issue was examined using the idea of a game; stochastic models were built, and transition matrix probabilities were estimated using the results obtained. As a result, win and loss can be used to indicate the states. The models that have been provided make it possible
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Taxonomy of Studies on the Use of Video Games in Entrepreneurship Education: A Systematic Literature Review with a Textometric Analysis Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-16 Esteban Crespo-Martinez, Salvador Bueno, M. Dolores Gallego
In the last decades, serious games, as a category of video games, have become a valuable tool in learning, demonstrating that it is possible to learn while playing. This work aims to identify a taxonomy of research in this domain, exploring serious games’ interactive and immersive aspects with educational and practical situations, which make them a powerful tool for entrepreneurship learning. For this
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Educational Games of Museums: A Literature Review Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-08-07 Jingwen Zhang, Tong Zhu, Xinyi Chang
On the basis of theoretical verification and case support of gamified learning effects, educational games have been widely valued by museum education providers for their advantages in enhancing users’ intrinsic motivation, building interactive experiences, and creating social situations. This paper attempts to analyze the learning theories, game elements, and positive effects of specific educational
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I Play, Therefore I Think: Procedural Philosophy in Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake 2 (2023) Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-07-21 Atėnė Mendelytė
Regarding video games as loci of philosophical thinking, not simply illustrations of preexisting philosophical concepts and positions, is far too rare in gamic thought studies. Yet due to the conceptually complex nature of the critically acclaimed Alan Wake 2 (Remedy Entertainment, 2023) such a perspective becomes necessary in order to fully understand the philosophical, gamic, and aesthetic complexity
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Addressing Toxicity and Extremism in Games: Conversations with the Video Game Industry Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-07-21 Elizabeth D. Kilmer, Zeynep Aslan, Rachel Kowert
There has been an increased focus on reducing hate, harassment, and extremist exploitation in digital games through solutions from community management, trust and safety, and design perspectives. Despite this attention, the industry lacks basic standards around these issues and efforts in this area are stymied by the ubiquity of “toxic gamer culture” and fears in the industry about discussing extremism
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From the Ontology of Video Games to the Epistemology of Digital Movements. Towards a Semiotics of Virtual Practices Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-07-21 Enzo D’Armenio
In this paper, we intend to construct an original integration between the ontology and hermeneutics of video games proposed in the field of game studies and the post-structuralist approach of contemporary semiotics. The aim is to propose a new epistemology of video game and virtual reality experiences grounded in the concept of movement. These media will be reconceptualized as image-movements: expressive
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The Show, the Game, and the Old Gods: On the Ontological Reframing and the Fiction/Real Boundary Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-07-21 Agata Waszkiewicz
The recent decade brought increasing interest in metareferentiality in video games. The article builds upon the body of research regarding metaleptic transgression in games by discussing examples of specific occurrences in which a text or a character seemingly escapes from within the boundaries of their primary, fictional world in a way that resembles ontological metalepsis. Acknowledging that such
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Twitch's Second Phase of Development: Analyzing Streamer Profiles and Content Trends That Boost Its Evolution into a Mass Media Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-24 José Gamir-Ríos, Lorena Cano-Orón, David García-Casas
Twitch is one of the leading platforms for live streaming audiovisual content, with a broad audience among the Gen Z population. Its growth in recent years has solidified a large Spanish-speaking streamer community that goes beyond gaming or eSports. The objective of this research is to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the activity of the most popular Spanish-language channels on Twitch, the demographic
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Just Fun and Games? A Sociological Consideration of Fun in Video Games Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-23 Garry Crawford, Tom Brock
The concept of “fun” is widely used within the game design and game studies literature, and is frequently highlighted as a key component of good game design, as well as a key factor in why people play games. However, it is a term rarely unpacked, and fun in video games remains relatively underresearched, certainly in comparison to other associated terms such as “play.” This article therefore provides
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The Development of Video Game Representations of the Middle East Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-20 Ahmed Al-Rawi
This article critically explores the historical representation of the Middle East in video games until 2002 and following the 9/11 event. Using thematic analysis, we identify four main themes and discuss how this representation shifts with time, offering a brief overview of the broader context. I argue that there is a clear association between political developments and this western representation
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“The Devil in the Mirror: Projections of Desire from Folk Tales to Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt” Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-16 Can Özgü
Dealing with the Devil is one of most prominent cultural motifs across the history of recorded folk tales. From ancient folk tales to contemporary cultural products, the Devil has appeared as an illicitly desirable being. The focal point of dealing with the Devil is that it is instigated by a pre-existent desire to exceed one's capacity determined by their temporal circumstances. In the Christian narrative
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Cultural Imperialism and Video Game Localization: A Case Study of Revelations: Persona Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 William Helmke
With increasing focus on global markets for media, video game localization continues to be an essential process for the industry. However, video game localization only sometimes effectively handles the unique cultural elements of video games. In some cases, these localizations intentionally erase such elements to make the game more marketable or remove controversial content in an American cultural
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Don't Flip the Table Yet: A Framework for the Analysis of Visual and Cognitive Ergonomics in Board Games Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-05-01 Marcello Passarelli, Michele Masini, Tommaso Francesco Piccinno, Alessandro Rizzi
Board games provide immersive and enjoyable experiences for players, but they can also pose usability challenges. This article presents a comprehensive framework for analyzing board game design, focusing on identifying the elements that make play inadvertently difficult or fatiguing. The proposed framework analyses board games as a user interface between the players and the board game mechanics, thereby
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Times They Are A-Changin’? Evolving Representations of Women in the Assassin's Creed Franchise Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-25 Lina Eklund, Andrei Zanescu
This study analyzes representations of women—protagonists and NPCs—in Assassińs Creed games between 2007 and 2024, to explore the impact of the last decades’ work for gender rights on the English language AAA game industry. Through close playing, we explore game bodies with attention to the surface level of narrative, graphics, sound, and underlying mechanics of actions and reactions. Through netnography
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Uses and Gratifications of Biophilic Simulation Games Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-24 Yu-Leung Ng
Biophilic simulation games designed to simulate natural environments could have the potential to promote eco-friendly attitudes and behaviors. By adopting the uses and gratifications approach, this study investigated gaming gratifications of a biophilic simulation game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and associated pro-animal attitudes and pro-environmental behaviors. Results showed that individuals
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The Game-Like Experience of Virtual Reality Art: Sensational Players and Critical Audiences Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Xinyang Zhao
This article delves into why audiences perceive virtual reality (VR) art as a game-like experience and how it impacts audiences’ reception of culture by examining two VR art pieces and their respective audience responses in focus group discussions. Through qualitative analysis, two factors are identified: the cognitive association of VR with gaming due to audiences’ preconceptions about VR, and the
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A Meta-Ethnography of Player Motivation in Digital Games: The 28 Dimensions of Play Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-13 Corey T. McKechnie-Martin, Andrew Cunningham, James Baumeister, G. Stewart Von Itzstein
Video games have become a significant component of popular culture, with the reasons why players pursue particular gaming experiences being a heavily explored topic within games research. Player motivations toward games have seen classification in many motivation models, resulting in diverse outcomes covering a variety of scopes within games media. We performed a meta-ethnography to explore the findings
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Institutionalized Aesthetics: Video Games and the Contemporary Art Gallery Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-11 Paul Atkinson, Farzad Parsayi
The art museum or gallery is not a neutral space for housing works. As much as it accepts new types of media, they have to adapt to suit the context of viewing and the conventions of an art-historical discourse. This type of institutionalized aesthetic underpins the evaluation of art objects and even imposes a definition on what art is. Working critically through this discourse, this article examines
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Gatekeeping the Gatekeepers: An Exploratory Study of Transformative Games Fandom & TikTok Algorithms Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-10 Jessica E. Tompkins, Ashley ML Guajardo (née Brown)
Within fandoms, gatekeeping practices such as delineating authentic from fake fans filter out certain identities. While the types of fans excluded vary by fandom, mainstream digital games culture–and the hegemonic, masculine groups within it–frequently leverage gatekeeping tactics like harassment to silence or churn others (i.e., women) from participating. While there has been considerable scholarship
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Languages of Power, Languages of Protest: Exploring the Rhetorics of Game Maps Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-03 Ben S. Bunting
In his book The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography, J.B. Harley writes that “Maps are preeminently a language of power, not of protest.” Harley was writing about maps of the physical world, but most game maps also speak in “languages of power,” and for similar reasons; however, this is not always the case. In this paper, I discuss how and why Harley's rubric also applies to game
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Adaptation, Violence, and Storytelling in The Last of Us Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Steve Spence
A focus on the work of adaptation illuminates narrative innovations in Naughty Dog's PlayStation 3 game The Last of Us, its sequel, The Last of Us Part II, and the original game's transcoding as a nine-episode season of “quality television” by the American cable network Home Box Office (HBO). HBO's showrunners employed the distinct affordances of television to adapt core game themes regarding both
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Desire and Delusion: Fetish of Brazilian Favela in Videogame (Mis)representation Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Ricardo Martins
Video games have emerged as one of the most ubiquitous forms of media globally, exerting a considerable influence on our perceptions of other cultures. However, contemporary video games have perpetuated negative stereotypes about Brazilian favelas and their residents, prioritizing aesthetics and themes that fetishize poverty, precarity, and violence. This essay critically examines the (mis)representations
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Playing Through the Pandemic: Gaming Usage as a Buffer During COVID-19 Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Dmitri Williams, Mingxuan Liu, Sukyoung Choi, Nicholas Bowman, Sonia Jawaid Shaikh
Amidst the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, video games were used heavily, presumably to help cope with negative moods and social isolation. This study sought to understand the implications of such play on well-being within a particular sample. Drawing on uses and gratifications and self-determination theories, the study adopted a longitudinal perspective incorporating data from one game, both
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FORGE: A Framework for Organizing Rewards in Gamified Environments Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-04-01 Rogerio de Leon Pereira, Olivier Tremblay-Savard
Rewards are prevalent game design elements in gamified environments. Rewards are helpful tools to keep players engaged and encouraged to perform tasks. However, implementing a reward system from scratch in every gamified environment, such as citizen science games or educational applications, can be time-consuming. This article presents FORGE, a Framework for Organizing Rewards in Gamified Environments
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Perceived Foolishness: How Does the Saltybet Community Construct AI vs AI Spectatorship? Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-27 Rory Summerley, Brian McDonald
The spectatorship of games has become a topic of growing interest with the parallel rise of esports and livestreaming platforms. Taking Saltybet.com as its primary case study, this paper examines cases where zero-player games played by artificial intelligence-controlled characters are the focus of spectatorship. A discourse analysis identifies trends and themes in the recorded chat transcripts of 15
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Bridge Babies and Rebuilding America: Reproductive Commodification in Death Stranding Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-20 Audrey Michelle Curry
Hideo Kojima's 2019 video game Death Stranding has sold over 10 million copies since 2022. The game's plot features a post-apocalyptic United States where female bodies become commodities to produce babies, which the government utilizes as equipment to rebuild the country. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the government's, the terrorists’, and the player character's words and actions reinforce
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Disco Pinball: Declining Games and Depression in Disco Elysium Games and Culture (IF 2.4) Pub Date : 2024-03-20 Ryan Banfi
This essay examines the influence of the pinball industry's late twentieth-century decline on Disco Elysium's (ZA/UM, 2019) narrative. Reference points to pinball must be sought out in Disco Elysium as they are hidden, but once found they implore the player to consider the downfall of games. Gleaning from academic work on ZA/UM's text, archival research, pinball history, and by using formal narrative
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Formal Constraints and Creativity: Connecting Game Jams, Dogma ’95, the Demo Scene, OuBaPo, and Renga poets Games and Culture (IF 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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 2.4) 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...