Digital Games
Company
Documents about Digital Games
Article
Of Discs, Boxes and Cartridges: The Material Life of Digital Games
Toivonen and Sotamaa's 2011 DiGRA study examines why some gamers continue to favor physical game copies even as digital distribution expands.
- Physical game copies carry meanings that digital distribution does not easily replace: players value the tactile presence and reliable sense of ownership that physical media provide.
- Respondents associated downloads with service closures, revoked access, and dependence on internet connectivity, while physical copies offered a sense of permanence.
- Digital distribution accounted for under 10 percent of game sales at the time, and the authors judge it unlikely to eliminate physical copies quickly.
DiGRAJan 2011
Article
Playing with One's Self: Notions of Subjectivity and Agency in Digital Games
Alec Charles argues that the sense of agency in digital games is largely an illusion, and that games function as instruments through which capital, military, and state interests construct and position their players.
- Charles argues that digital games create an illusion of player agency that functions as ideological interpellation, drawing on Althusser to explain how games shape player subjectivity through reactive, preset choices.
- The essay contends that the boundary between material history and its electronic mediation has largely collapsed, so the virtual is increasingly treated as the primary 'real' version of events, illustrated by the Gulf War, 9/11, and the America's Army recruitment tools.
- Using Barthes and the concept of the 'faux-scriptible' text, the author concludes that multiplayer games fragment authorship into parallel, solipsistic experiences rather than realizing Barthes's ideal of the reader as producer.
Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game CultureOct 2009
Article
Reproducing the Machine
Mia Consalvo's 2009 editorial reflects on the first decade of game studies as an academic field and argues that its success has come with the unexamined construction of disciplinary structures that deserve critical scrutiny.
- Consalvo's editorial traces the institutional growth of game studies from the founding of the Digital Games Research Association in 2002 through the proliferation of journals, presses, degree programs, and conferences over roughly its first decade.
- The author argues the field has gained legitimacy, but the quality-assurance structures that enabled this (peer-reviewed venues, conventions) have also produced hierarchies and routines that may be going unexamined.
- Establishing peer-reviewed venues and international conferences helped legitimize games as a serious object of inquiry, and efforts to move beyond the psychology-dominated focus on game effects broadened the field's questions and methods.
Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game CultureFeb 2009
Article
Translating Narrative into Code: Thoughts on a Technology-Centric Model of Digital Games as Programmable Media
Werning argues that digital games should be understood as programmable media whose meaning is shaped by the computer code and technology beneath their surface.
- Stefan Werning's 2007 article argues that digital game analysis has been fragmented by importing film and literary theory frameworks that fail to account for games' interactive nature, and proposes program code as a common foundation for understanding games.
- Werning's central proposal is an "object-oriented narrative" paradigm that borrows from object-oriented programming, treating environments, non-player characters, quests, and props as autonomous objects grouped into object classes, with recursive, symmetrical, and hierarchical structures of interactivity.
- The model aims to move beyond the long-standing ludology/narratology divide and is oriented toward interpretation, in contrast to Eladhari and Lindley's neo-structuralist tree-diagram methods, which prioritize production efficiency and avoiding narrative dead ends.
Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game CultureMay 2007
Article
Playing With Non-Humans: Digital Games as Techno-Cultural Form
Seth Giddings's "Playing With Non-Humans: Digital Games as Techno-Cultural Form" argues that game studies needs a serious debate about the digitality of digital games.
- Seth Giddings argues that game studies needs a serious debate about the digitality of digital games, holding that understanding gameplay requires recognising non-human technological agency rather than treating technologies as merely socially constructed.
- Drawing on Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network Theory, the work critiques the social constructivist and textual models dominant in media studies, contending that technologies exert material effects that cannot be reduced to their social consumption and that humans and non-humans form symmetrical networks.
- Using the strategy game Advance Wars 2 as its primary case study, the work proposes conceptualising gameplay as a cybernetic circuit rather than an extended cyborg body, shifting attention from games as passive texts to the active role of software systems.
DiGRAJan 2005
Article
Ireland's Video Games Opportunity
Ireland has an opening to strengthen its position as a high-value European hub for game development, gametech, publishing and live operations, but capturing a larger share of global growth depends on resolving constraints around talent, scale, finance and visibility through a coordinated national approach.
- Ireland has a significant opportunity to become a high-value European hub for game development, gametech, publishing, and live operations, leveraging its existing strengths in technology and creative industries.
- The Irish games sector is an integrated value chain, with firms participating across development, gametech, QA/testing/localisation, publishing, distribution/promotion, post-launch operations, monetisation, and player engagement.
- Key players active in Ireland include Black Shamrock, Larian Studios (game development), Havok, Unity Technologies (gametech), Keywords Studios, Electronic Arts Galway (QA/testing/localisation), 2K Games, Activision Publishing (publishing), and Riot Games (distribution/promotion, post-launch operations, player engagement).
KPMG