2015
Company
Documents about 2015
Virtual Memories of Displacement: A Narrative Game in VR Exploring Refugee Stories through Symbolic Interaction
"Breaking Off" is a virtual reality narrative game that explores the emotional and moral dimensions of refugee displacement through symbolic interaction and branching storytelling.
- "Breaking Off" is a VR narrative game on refugee displacement that uses symbolic interaction, where objects like a backpack or family photograph carry personal meaning, paired with branching decisions that create personal responsibility without clear moral resolution.
- The game draws its narrative from migrant testimonies and oral histories, presenting a fragmented storyline meant to mirror the disordered nature of migration and move beyond the linear, passive formats of earlier VR refugee projects.
- Built in Unity for the Meta Quest 3 with custom Blender assets, the game uses a deliberately minimalist environment with sparse textures and restrained color, controller-based selection, proximity-triggered interaction, and adjustable accessibility settings.
Folklore-Driven Representations of Femininity in Slavic-Coded Video Games: The Figure of Baba Yaga
This paper examines how Baba Yaga, the ambiguous figure of Slavic folklore, is represented in a selection of Slavic-coded video games published or announced between 2015 and 2025.
- The study analyses eight Slavic-coded games released or announced between 2015 and 2025, including Eventide, Yaga, Black Book, Blacktail, Reka, Scarlett Deer Inn, Night is Coming, and The End of the Sun, some assessed via paratext or demos because they remain in production.
- Across the sample, old age is rarely foregrounded even when Baba Yaga appears as a helper; she is often rendered youthful or simply young.
- Where her aged features do appear, they are treated comically or designed to evoke sympathy through frailty.
Assassin's Creed Syndicate and the Depiction of Female "Britishness" in Victorian London
This paper examines how Assassin's Creed Syndicate (Ubisoft Quebec, 2015), a French-owned, Canadian-developed action-adventure game set in Victorian London, depicts female "Britishness," meaning the traditional cultural and social values associated with women in nineteenth-century Britain.
- The paper examines how Assassin's Creed Syndicate (Ubisoft Quebec, 2015), a French-owned, Canadian-developed game set in Victorian London, constructs gendered notions of female "Britishness" through its characters and setting, rather than approaching British identity from a national-representation standpoint.
- Its central focus is the dual protagonists Evie Frye and her antagonist counterpart Lucy Thorne, whom the analysis presents as embodying independence, ambition, and engagement with education and enterprise, in contrast to the subservient, domestic image of Victorian women.
- The wider game world features female leaders within gangs and organized crime, which the authors argue are not wholly anachronistic because female-led criminal groups and reported female involvement in violence existed in the period, though such portrayals may be read as tokenistic given the franchise's earlier criticism over female representation.
Playfully Conservative: Reinventing Nintendo's Platform Games through Materiality in Yoshi's Crafted World
This paper by Josef Tichý, presented at DiGRA 2025, argues that Nintendo's Yoshi's Crafted World (2019) reinvents the platform genre through physical, material-based textures such as cardboard, paper, and packaging, and that this aesthetic choice is best understood as a conservative production strategy.
- Tichý's DiGRA 2025 paper argues that Yoshi's Crafted World (2019) reinvents the platform genre through material textures like cardboard, paper, and packaging, and that this is best understood as a conservative production strategy.
- The game blends traditional Japanese forms, including mingei folk crafts, shinden-zukuri architecture, and Heian-period imagery, with modern consumer materials, creating a landscape that reads either as a dreamlike space or a modern wasteland.
- The paper frames Nintendo's design philosophy as nostalgia-driven, cautious, and resistant to innovation since the 1983–1984 video game crash, with Yoshi's Crafted World recycling familiar gameplay while updating its surface aesthetics.
Understanding Transmedia Character-Centric Discourse in Gacha Games: A Social Semiotic Analysis of Genshin Impact
This paper proposes a social semiotic framework for analysing how gacha games, using Genshin Impact as its primary case, deploy characters as organising principles that operate both semiotically and commercially across transmedia contexts.
- The paper proposes a social semiotic framework, grounded in Halliday's systemic functional linguistics and Kress and van Leeuwen's multimodal frameworks, for analysing how gacha games use characters as organising principles across transmedia contexts, with Genshin Impact as the primary case.
- The authors argue that existing multimodal research has examined single media in isolation, leaving transmedia character discourse underexplored.
- The method combines Kress's (2010) layout model, attending to spatial positioning and text-image relations, with Adami's (2015) framework treating website interface elements as both representational signs and actionable nodes, applied to character-centric visual hierarchies.
Designing Anthrogames: Theory, Methods, and AI Integration in Cultural Gaming
Designing Anthrogames examines purpose-built games that merge anthropological knowledge with interactive design, arguing that these works represent a distinct category from educational or documentary games because they are grounded in ethnographic methodology.
- Anthrogames are framed as a distinct category from educational or documentary games because they are grounded in ethnographic methodology, with the field tracing a progression from virtual ethnography (2000–2008) through game production studies (2009–2015) to recognized practice (2016–2024).
- The central argument is that large language models and participatory design could substantially reshape how anthrogames are developed, but the work is primarily conceptual and literature-based, offering no quantitative findings.
- Never Alone (developed with the Cook Inlet Tribal Council and Iñupiaq community input) is presented as a model of cultural insight integrated into cooperative mechanics, while The Long Day of Young Peng translates Andrea Pia's fieldwork on rural-urban labor migration in China into playable experience.
The Romanian Video Games Development Industry
Romania's video game development industry has grown substantially over the past decade, according to a ten-year retrospective covering 2015 through 2024.
- The Romanian video game industry has nearly tripled its turnover in the last decade, growing from approximately €119 million in 2015 to over €340 million in 2024.
- The sector’s workforce has expanded at an annual rate of 12%, with total headcount projected to reach 343,160 employees by 2024.
- Market dominance is held by major multinational publishers like Electronic Arts in Bucharest and Ubisoft in Cluj-Napoca, while mid-size studios such as Amber, Green Horse Games, and Playtika contribute between 5% and 15% of total earnings.
Japan Market Report 2025
Newzoo's Japan market report, prepared for UKIE's Virtual Trade Mission: Japan, helps game businesses of all sizes understand and navigate one of the world's most distinctive and competitive markets.
- Japan generates 9.1% of global games revenue from only 2.2% of the global player base, with an average revenue per user of $223 compared to $145 in the UK.
- International stakeholders have a $2.5 to $3.0 billion market opportunity when excluding mobile and Nintendo platforms, which currently command 70% of console hardware dominance.
- Japanese gamers prioritize narrative depth, character design, and solo play, contrasting with Western preferences for open worlds, high-end graphics, and competitive multiplayer.
Souls‑likes: From Niche to Mainstay
Souls-likes have moved from a niche subgenre to a mainstream pillar of game design, and this Video Game Insights analysis examines how developer class, region and player geography shape commercial success.
- The souls-like genre has shifted from indie-dominated to AAA-led, with AAA and AA publishers now accounting for over 70% of estimated units sold on Steam.
- Chinese gamers represent approximately 47% of the global souls-like audience, significantly outpacing the United States at 15% and Germany at 5%.
- APAC developers have surged to control roughly 80% of the genre's development share as of 2025, building on a foundation established by Japanese studios.
Championing the 25 Retailers and Digital Services Who Connect Music, Video and Games Creators with UK Fans Yearbook
The United Kingdom’s entertainment market reached a historic milestone in 2024, achieving a record valuation of £12.0 billion.
- The UK entertainment market reached a record £12.0 billion valuation in 2024, marking twelve consecutive years of growth and a 50% increase since 2019.
- Digital services and streaming now dominate the industry, accounting for 93% of total revenue, with subscription models driving over 75% of consumer spending.
- Video is the largest sector at £5.0 billion, fueled by an 8.3% rise in Subscription Video on Demand (SVoD) to £4.46 billion, which successfully offset the decline in physical media.
Renewing Systems Analysis: The Impact of Game-Based Learning on Repeating Students
A South African study examines whether a game-based, inverted-classroom intervention can improve outcomes for students repeating a Systems Analysis and Design course.
- Repeating students in a game-based, inverted-classroom intervention (2015–2018) outperformed prior cohorts and their peers, with average final marks rising roughly 8–12% over earlier years.
- Pass rates for the intervention group ranged from 65.9% to 76.9%, exceeding the combined class pass rates, and course satisfaction reached 89.5% in 2015 versus 78.3% for the comparison group.
- The intervention separated repeating students from first-time students and used quiz games, a "Happy Hour" review format, and court-style expert-witness sessions carried out within project groups.
Fringe Game Craft: An Exploration of Fantasy Consoles and Exotic Game Tools
This experimental web-journal submission, authored by independent designer Cuauhtemoc Moreno for DiGRA 2024, explores fantasy consoles and unconventional game engines and the hobbyist, artist, and modder communities that sustain them.
- The report argues that fantasy consoles and unconventional game engines deserve recognition as legitimate sites of game creation, positioned outside commercial production and sustained by hobbyist, artist, and modder communities.
- The author, independent designer Cuauhtemoc Moreno, grounds the work in roughly twenty years of personal game design and development experience rather than systematic data collection.
- The submission contains no survey sample, quantitative statistics, or formal empirical methodology; its method is reflective and practice-based, drawing on personal portfolio work and hands-on tinkering.