Nomada Studio
Company
3 documents in the library are about Nomada Studio, from writers such as DiGRA. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Nomada Studio, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about Nomada Studio
Preserving Hmong Batik Through Video Games
This paper presents an ongoing research project examining how video games can help safeguard intangible cultural heritage, focusing on Hmong batik, a resist-dyeing craft practiced by the Hmong people of southwestern China.
- The paper argues games can preserve intangible cultural heritage by reaching audiences that traditional documentation may not, using Hmong batik as its case study.
- The central artifact, Batiked, is a Unity-based 2D platformer whose mechanics mirror the batik process of waxing, dyeing, and melting, with level design drawing on Hmong motifs including stone and mythic imagery.
- The work is framed under Research through Design, treating the prototype as an executable argument and game design itself as a research method bridging ethnographic craft study and human-computer interaction.
Encounters with the Self as the Other: Empathy in the Games of Nomada Studio
This paper argues that discussions of empathy in videogames should move beyond the traditional other-oriented model toward self-empathy, a process in which players turn empathic attention inward.
- The paper argues that discussions of empathy in games should shift from the traditional other-oriented model toward self-empathy, in which players direct empathic attention inward onto their own experiences.
- Using Nomada Studio's GRIS (2018) and Neva (2024), both wordless narratives centered on grief and loss, the author contends that evocative visuals, sound, and mechanics invite players to project their own lives onto the gameworld rather than inhabit a fully defined character.
- The methodology is an exploratory qualitative analysis of selected Steam reviews, not a systematic or statistical sample, coded into categories including color and visuals, sound and score, and game mechanics and design.
Making Friends with Death: Posthuman Post-Life Play
This paper, by Poppy Wilde of Birmingham City University, examines how videogames centred on death, dying, and grief can be used to reconceptualise mortality through a critical posthumanist lens.
- The paper argues that games about death, dying, and grief, such as Spiritfarer, Gris, A Mortician's Tale, and Last Day of June, can reframe mortality away from humanist, capitalist views of death as an interruption of progress toward a view of death as one phase in a generative, interconnected process.
- Drawing on critical posthumanism, feminist, new materialist, and rhizomatic theory (notably Rosi Braidotti), the author reads both Spiritfarer and Gris as enacting postdualistic relations with death, in which the ego and its anxieties dissolve into ongoing processes of becoming.
- Spiritfarer is interpreted as embracing a notion of final destination through its ferrying of spirits to the afterlife, while Gris conveys grief as both overwhelming affect and a process of discovery through its score, restored colour, and backward-moving mechanics.
