Digital Games
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Documents about Digital Games
Digital Games, Cultural Memory, & Hegemony
This extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2018, argues that digital games function as designed objects that shape cultural memory and historical understanding, with particular attention to how marginalized and dominant identities intersect in these processes.
- The central hypothesis is that digital games function as designed objects that shape cultural memory and historical understanding, with that influence moderated by player agency, particularly regarding marginalized intersecting identities.
- Preliminary findings draw on close analysis of two mainstream titles, Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry (its treatment of the eighteenth-century transatlantic slave trade and contemporary White supremacy) and Mafia 3, examined through the concepts of identity tourism and prosthetic memory.
- The methodology contrasts encoding contexts (production by developers) with decoding contexts (play), combining semi-structured interviews with developers, critics, and players alongside documentary research of online articles, videos, and audio.
Paper-Made Digital Games: The Poetic of Cardboard from Crayon Physics Deluxe to Nintendo Labo
The paper argues that the cardboard interfaces of Nintendo Labo, released in 2018, represent the culmination of a broader aesthetic movement in digital games that Mattia Thibault calls "paper-made digital games."
- Mattia Thibault's paper argues that Nintendo Labo (2018) is the culmination of a broader aesthetic movement he calls "paper-made digital games," in which the material presence of cardboard is deliberately poetic rather than merely practical.
- The author draws on the post-digital paradigm, which describes contemporary disenchantment with digital systems and renewed appreciation for analogue media, to explain the appeal of paper and cardboard in games.
- The paper proposes a three-part typology of paper-made games by depth of material relationship: imitation (e.g., Crayon Physics Deluxe, Tearaway), digitization (e.g., Cuphead, The Banner Saga, Lumino City), and hybridization, where cardboard becomes part of the interface (e.g., Google Cardboard, Nintendo Labo).
PC and Console Games: Purchasing Digital Games via Download Becomes Popular Alternative
Buying PC and console games via download has become an established alternative to physical media in Germany, though growth in its share slowed markedly in 2015 after strong gains in prior years.
- The German market for computer and video games grew by 4.5% in 2015, reaching a total value of 2.81 billion euros.
- Digital downloads accounted for 33% of all PC and console game purchases in 2015, up from 32% in 2014.
- Revenue from digital downloads rose to 21% of total PC and console game spending in 2015, a 2 percentage point increase from the previous year.
Post-Digital Games: The Influence of Nostalgia in Indie Games' Graphic Regimes
Frank Bosman argues that Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series reinterprets Christian mythology through a rationalistic-reductionist lens, recasting biblical miracles and events as effects of advanced technological artifacts, the "Pieces of Eden," left by an extinct First Civilization, the Isu.
- The article analyzes how the Assassin's Creed series reinterprets Christian mythology through a rationalistic-reductionist lens, treating the games as "playable texts" and applying cultural theology and reception-history methods rather than commercial or industry analysis.
- The franchise recasts miracles and sacred relics as products of an extinct advanced civilization, the Isu, within an "Ancient Astronauts" meta-narrative in which Templars and Assassins contend over Pieces of Eden.
- The series inverts Genesis by reading Adam and Eve's expulsion as liberation and locating the origins of the Templar-Assassin conflict in Cain, drawing on Gnostic traditions such as Marcionism.
Post-Digital Games: The Influence of Nostalgia in Indie Games' Graphic Regimes
Thibault argues that the growing indie reliance on pixelated, hand-drawn, and otherwise analogue-looking graphics reflects a post-digital shift, in which saturation with digital media prompts a nostalgic revival of older media and aesthetics.
- Mattia Thibault argues that indie games' turn toward retro, pixel, hand-drawn, and analogue aesthetics is a post-digital reaction against AAA photorealism, forming a heterogeneous alternative within digital game design rather than a simple replacement for it.
- Three forces drive the shift: budget and technological constraints that make photorealistic rendering unaffordable for small studios, nostalgia for the perceived Golden Age of gaming, and a wider cultural desire for experiences that slow down or enhance the passage of time.
- Drawing on non-photorealistic rendering research and Lauteren's application of Barthes and Caillois, the paper argues that stylized graphics can heighten believability and immersion rather than diminish them.
Charismatic Leadership and Digital Games
Digital games have long cast players as commanders who act decisively on critical problems or managers who organise processes toward known ends.
- The paper argues that the media through which audiences encounter leadership shape how they understand it, rather than studying skills players gain from games.
- Its central thesis is that different media formats support different models of charismatic leadership, based on Max Weber's theory: early twentieth-century cinema centres the charismatic individual with little role for followers, while serialised comics, television and digital games give the inner circle a much larger part.
- Digital games, especially role-playing titles, let players occupy a leader whose authority rests on normative compliance, drawing on Etzioni's typology of coercive, calculative and normative compliance.
The Long Decade of Game Studies: Case of Finland
This study examines 34 games-related doctoral dissertations completed in Finland between 1998 and 2012, offering a metareview of how game studies took shape as an academic field within a single national context.
- The study analyses 34 games-related doctoral dissertations completed in Finland between 1998 and 2012, and finds no unified "Finnish school" of game research: the works mainly engage with international debates in game studies.
- Citation networks reveal a loose core of scholars, largely tied to DiGRA and the University of Tampere Game Research Lab, with Frans Mäyrä prominent among them, who most heavily reference the field's canon.
- Dissertation output rose steadily over the period, with a shift toward English-language publication and greater gender balance among authors.
The Role of Micronarrative in the Design and Experience of Digital Games
Micronarrative, defined as a small, self-contained unit of narrative progression and coherence, offers game designers a flexible means of reconciling authorial control with player interactivity.
- Micronarrative is proposed as a design tool: game narrative nests hierarchically in layers, from small arcs (a single hockey possession or stealth encounter) to medium units (periods or missions) to meta-arcs (a hockey season or franchise).
- The authors ground their analysis in close readings of two commercial titles released around 2011 to 2012, NHL 12 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution, spanning the sports and action-RPG segments of the console and PC market.
- NHL 12 relies largely on emergent, player-generated micronarratives with limited connection to the ongoing season, so its smaller units emphasize winning, losing, and moment-to-moment competitive drama.
Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games
Denson and Jahn-Sudmann argue that seriality is a central yet understudied dimension of digital games, and that understanding it requires bridging game studies with media-based seriality research.
- Seriality (repetition, variation, and continuation) is argued to be a central but neglected dimension of digital games, spanning franchises, level structures, transmedia narratives, and hardware generations.
- The authors propose a three-level framework of intra-ludic, inter-ludic, and para-ludic seriality, plus analytical approaches of 'serial interfacing' and 'collective serialization.'
- Digital seriality is framed as both a continuation of modern media history and a partial rupture from it, with digitization and convergence enabling non-linear consumption such as binge play and on-demand access.
Digital Games and the Communication of Health Problems: A Review of Games Against the Concept of Procedural Rhetoric
Serious digital games can help a regional Italian Public Health Body communicate health issues such as alcohol, smoking, and sexually transmitted diseases to teenagers, but only when their mechanics meaningfully embody the behavior or process being addressed.
- The review uses Ian Bogost's procedural rhetoric theory to argue that games persuade through their rules and processes rather than through narrative or content alone.
- Effective health-communication games must align winning conditions and mechanics directly with the understanding or behavior they target, since mismatched mechanics fail to persuade.
- Faithful simulations of off-game processes and oversimplified models can both undermine persuasion, so designers should build rhetorically persuasive models of unhealthy behaviors instead.
Skin Games: Fragrant Play, Scented Media and the Stench of Digital Games
Niedenthal argues that smell is an underexplored but promising element of game design, and that designers should treat scent as a distinct sensory mode rather than a gimmick for sensory realism.
- Christopher Niedenthal's 2012 study argues that smell is an underexplored dimension of play design, with strong associative and emotional power but significant technical, cultural, and perceptual obstacles.
- Scent is hard to digitize and standardize because olfaction lacks the universal notation systems and mature simulation technologies that exist for sight and sound.
- Historical attempts to bring scent into media, including Smell-O-Vision, AromaRama, iSmell, Kojima's scented floppy disk, and scratch-and-sniff cards in Leather Goddesses of Phobos and Leisure Suit Larry 7, are largely characterized as failures due to distribution, synchronization, residue, and cultural dismissal of smell.
Replacing Preconceived Accounts of Digital Games with Experience of Play: When Parents Went Native in GTA IV
Public and regulatory perceptions of digital games, the authors argue, rest on cautionary frameworks and non-interactive viewing rather than on actual play.
- Schott and van Vught argue that public and policy debates about digital games rely too heavily on preconceived assumptions, and that understanding should instead come from direct experience of play.
- The study observed 20 parents (7 men and 13 women) playing roughly an hour of Grand Theft Auto IV in a structured session that included the "Ivan the Not So Terrible" moral-dilemma mission and support from an expert gamer.
- Participants often found GTA IV easier and more enjoyable than expected, frequently rejected its violence, and recognized its satire, irony, and moral complexity, though not all deliberately avoided violent encounters.