Digital Games
Company
Documents about Digital Games
The Street Fighter Lady: Invisibility and Gender in Game Composition
Andy Lemon and Hillegonda C Rietveld's article, published in the Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (December 2019), examines the invisibility of Yoko Shimomura, the female composer of the music for the 1991 arcade game Street Fighter II (Capcom).
- Shimomura's authorship was obscured because credit was often to a composition team in which its members remain anonymous, and she used abstract pseudonyms in the credits.
- On successive releases of both game soundtracks and in-game ROM data for Street Fighter, rather than its individual composers the Capcom Sound Team is credited as a whole.
- The authors state that Shimomura's arcade compositions were mainly ported to home computers by male music arrangers and coders, so players often knew the cover artist rather than the original composer.
Horizon Zero Dawn: The Educational Influence of Video Games in Counteracting Gender Stereotypes
Dalila Forni's article, published in the Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (December 2019, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp.
- The author cites Behm-Morawitz and Mastro (2009) as finding that playing games with sexualized or objectified women negatively affects women's feelings of self-efficacy and their judgement of female physical capabilities.
- The author argues that the damsel in distress and the moving body were the two main female character models that resulted from a male-dominated video game perspective.
- The author describes Aloy as physically pleasant but not objectified or sexualized, with clothing and armor that are quite realistic and rarely show her body.
Mafia and the Representation of Italians
This academic essay by Giulio Pitroso, published in the Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (December 2019, Vol. 5 No 1, pp. 45-76), analyzes how video games represent Italians and the Italian Mafia.
- The author describes The Godfather (US Gold, 1991) as the archetypal model for Mafia games and lists five elements that characterize it as a prototype of the genre.
- The essay states that the Sicilian Mafia has always had a hegemonic role in representing the Italian Mafia, and that most Italian Mob games centre on American and Sicilian versions.
- The author notes that the Italian Mob games analysed are almost all set in American or fictional American cities, which the author links to an American perspective on Sicily.
Hardware Design and Representation of Graphics in Videogames: A Case Study, the Sega Saturn
Marco Liboà's article, published in the Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association (December 2019, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp.
- The Saturn's VDP2 could simulate a 3D space with 2D planes, using parallax scrolling and rotated backgrounds to stand in for the arcade's 3D elements.
- The surface of the Virtua Fighter Remix ring was rendered as a rotated bitmap on RBG0 instead of sprites, reducing the number of polygons drawn on the screen and freeing some VDP1 resources for more detailed characters.
- Texture mapping in Virtua Fighter Remix came at the cost of dynamic lighting, which the original port had included.
Can Digital Games Serve as Potential Intervention or Suicide Risk?
Digital games and mobile applications represent a promising, cost-effective frontier for mental health intervention, particularly for addressing the global crisis of suicide.
- Digital games offer a scalable, low-cost intervention for the 800,000 annual global suicide-related deaths, helping to bypass traditional barriers like high costs and social stigma.
- Cognitive training tasks, such as Attention Bias Modification (ABM), are effective in retraining focus away from negative stimuli to help manage depressive symptoms and emotional distress.
- User adherence remains a critical failure point for mental health applications, with engagement typically dropping significantly after the first month of use.
It’s About Fate, Among Other Things: Digital Games, Dialogical Teaching, and Ethics
This paper presents preliminary findings from a study of how teachers use digital games as tools for dialogical teaching of ethics.
- Digital games do not automatically produce ethical learning; their educational value depends on teachers talking students' gameplay experiences into meaning and linking them to curricular goals.
- The study uses two qualitative case studies observing seven teachers and their classes, plus semi-structured retrospective interviews, focusing on teachers as an underrepresented group in game-based learning research.
- The game The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2012) was used in classrooms: teachers paused at moral dilemmas and had students apply consequentialist, duty-based, and virtue-based ethical theories before discussing competing solutions.
Cultural Heritage and Environmental Communication Through Digital Games
The PAC-PAC research project at the University of Cagliari investigates whether digital games can promote and communicate cultural heritage, particularly lesser-known sites, and whether such experiences can stimulate tourism and knowledge of local traditions.
- The PAC-PAC project at the University of Cagliari tests whether digital games can promote lesser-known cultural heritage sites and stimulate tourism and interest in local traditions, premised on player-driven narratives creating emotional bonds with places.
- The project uses photographs, videos, and 360-degree views rather than conventional rendered graphics to strengthen players' connection to real environments, and it built a custom authoring tool for point-and-click adventures.
- Production follows a structured pipeline: site selection and game design documentation, location scouting with local authorities, onsite filming with a specialist crew, and post-production editing.
Play with Money: The Role of Digital Games in Promoting Financial Literacy
This paper explores the potential of mainstream digital games to enhance financial literacy, addressing the persistent low levels of financial understanding despite traditional educational interventions.
- Financial literacy remains weak among adults, and low literacy is linked to poor retirement preparation, high-interest debt, and overindebtedness, a problem the authors frame as more pressing amid economic instability and shifting social security systems.
- The authors propose digital games as an informal learning environment that could complement formal financial education programs, whose effectiveness they note has been contested.
- The study compiled a database of nearly 100,000 commercially released digital games (1963–2017, excluding mobile titles) and identified 1,295 'economic games' that simulate elements such as supply, demand, and scarcity.
Using Transformative Learning Theory to Frame and Observe Learning Processes in Digital Games
This extended abstract explores the applicability of Illeris' comprehensive learning theory, particularly its transformative learning aspects, as an analytical framework for observing and evaluating learning processes within digital computer games.
- The study proposes Illeris' Transformative Learning Theory as an analytical framework for observing learning during digital play, organised around three dimensions (content, incentive, interaction) and four internalization processes (cumulation, assimilation, accommodation, transformation) rooted in Piagetian mental schemes.
- The empirical base is blind playthroughs by five Twitch streamers and YouTube creators of World of Warcraft Classic and Undertale, two titles chosen so that the three learning dimensions differ substantially between them.
- Preliminary findings show assimilation occurs nearly constantly, often below conscious awareness, while accommodation appears intermittently, cumulation is rare (attributed to players' existing game expertise), and transformative change is difficult to identify.
Flow It, Show It, Play It: Hair in Digital Games
This paper by Andra Ivănescu of Brunel University London, presented as a Proceedings of DiGRA 2020 paper, uses digital hair as a lens on culture and representation in videogames.
- Dietrich's analysis of 65 RPGs and MMORPGs found that fewer than 10% of MMORPGs and only 20% of offline RPGs offered three or more "African" hairstyle options.
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas offers as many as 14 hairstyle options at different barbers, not counting colour and facial hair options.
- In Grand Theft Auto V, the Black protagonist Franklin has 20 head hair options, compared with 5 each for his caucasian counterparts Michael and Trevor.
Digital Games and Leisure Ecosystems
This document presents preliminary findings from an online survey investigating the relationship between digital games and leisure activities among adults in the United States.
- A preliminary DiGRA 2020 study based on an October 2019 online survey of 1,334 U.S. adults found that current gamers' play is embedded within a broader leisure ecosystem rather than displacing other pursuits.
- Current, former, and non-players showed notable similarities in participation in activities such as exercise, cooking, music, and watching television, which the authors read as evidence against the stereotype of the all-consuming gamer.
- The study deliberately oversampled women and former and non-players, reflecting prior research linking women's exit from gaming to constraints on leisure time, and the sample included 927 women and 382 men.
Gender Asymmetries in the Digital Games Sector in Portugal
Luciana Lima and Patrícia Gouveia, of the Interactive Technologies Institute and Lisbon University's Faculty of Fine Arts, present an exploratory, in-progress mixed-methods study of gender asymmetries in Portugal's digital games sector.
- Girls accounted for 14% of enrolments in Portuguese digital games degrees in both 2016/2017 and 2017/2018. The total rose from 651 to 741 enrolments over that period.
- Of the 17 Portuguese games analysed, six have no female main or secondary characters. Only five games have female main characters.
- The authors found that female characters in these games are predominantly sexualized, a pattern not seen as often in male characters.