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Playing the Othered Self as Wukong: A Resilience in Speculative-Mythological Games
This paper examines how Sun Wukong, the Monkey King of Chinese mythology, is reimagined within speculative and science fictional settings, and how such reimaginings in video games shape players' experience of selfhood.
- The paper's central argument is that speculative-mythological worlds, which juxtapose historicism (preserving cultural memory and trauma) with futurism (pushing myth toward adaptive transformation), give players a way to work through existential crisis, marginalisation, and disorientation in a rapidly changing techno-social environment.
- The Monkey King Sun Wukong is treated as a site of temporal friction, where archiving cultural memory and imagining redemption meet within reimagined speculative and science fictional settings.
- The analysis applies precedents including Chen Leng's late Qing novel Neo-Journey to the West (1909) and Ken Liu's short story The Litigation Master and the Monkey King (2013) to three single-player action-adventure games: Sun Wukong VS Robot (Bitca, 2019), The Crown of Wu (Red Mountain, 2023), and Black Myth: Wukong (Game Science, 2024).
At the Crossroads of Art and Games: NPCs in Contemporary Video Art
This paper examines how contemporary video artists are using the figure of the non-player character (NPC) to explore questions of agency, labour, race, and subjectivity.
- The paper examines how contemporary video artists use the non-player character (NPC) to explore agency, labour, race, and subjectivity, scoping 'game art' as artworks that reference videogames or appropriate game content.
- The term 'NPC' migrated from gaming communities into online political discourse in the late 2010s, where it was used both to ridicule perceived conformity and to reinforce racialised and gendered hierarchies, before creators reclaimed it to describe constraints of economic and sociotechnical systems.
- Larry Achiampong and David Blandy's GOD MODE (2023), shown at the Wellcome Collection, uses game-engine imagery to reflect on scientific racism, eugenics, and how popular media shapes ideas about heredity and race, contrasting the free player with the pre-ordained, labouring NPC.
Speculative Games: Games Envisioning Possible Futures
This paper, presented as an extended abstract from the Speculative Games Project, examines how games engage with possible futures and proposes principles for designing speculative games, with particular attention to tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs).
- Speculative games are defined as featuring plausible, fact-based mid- and long-term future scenarios, mainly extrapolated from current scientific, technological, social, and environmental trends, though they may also move beyond contemporary conditions.
- The paper treats game design itself as a form of speculative design, inviting players to reflect on plausible futures rather than predict them precisely.
- Games represent futures through several modes: foresight games that expose bottlenecks in local issues, alternate reality and playful foresight games that surface players' biases, and technology demonstrators that simulate emerging technologies to anticipate social, economic, and cultural impacts.
The Fractured Imbunche: A Study of Chilean Horror Games
This extended abstract, presented as a work in progress at DiGRA 2025, examines Chilean horror videogames through the lens of transculturation, a concept describing cultural contact that generates new identities, forms, and motifs through heterogeneous authorship and active audience participation.
- The study examines Chilean horror videogames through transculturation, a concept describing how cultural contact generates new identities, forms, and motifs through heterogeneous authorship and active audience participation.
- The central research questions are whether Chilean horror games enact transculturation and whether recurring motifs can be identified as distinctly Chilean; the paper is presented as a work in progress at DiGRA 2025, not as established findings.
- The author argues the videogame is a particularly suitable medium for transculturation because it functions as a space of cultural creation requiring participation from both developers and players.
Decisions in the Loop: An Empirical Study of Narrative Time and Player Agency in Hades and Twelve Minutes
This study examines how loop structures shape narrative time and player agency in two narrative-driven games with contrasting time treatments: Hades, a roguelike that offers unlimited time within each death-and-restart cycle, and Twelve Minutes, a time loop mystery that imposes a strict twelve-minute limit before each reset.
- The study is qualitative and exploratory, based on just ten participants aged 18 to 30 who played Hades and Twelve Minutes for ninety minutes each, so its results are not generalizable.
- Twelve Minutes players generally felt they could meaningfully influence the story and exercise agency, while Hades players reported the reverse, suggesting that narrative time structure shapes perceived agency.
- The strict twelve-minute limit in Twelve Minutes produced more rushed decisions than the open-ended, unlimited-time structure of Hades.
Crafting Comfort: Postdigital Practices in Current Cozy Games
This paper examines how a subset of cozy video games, a genre defined more by aesthetic feel than by conventional game mechanics, incorporates nondigital media technologies and practices into its design.
- The paper proposes "postdigital practices" as a framework for cozy games that incorporate nondigital media such as tape recorders, instant cameras, and scrapbooks, distinguishing this from the glitch and failure aesthetics that dominated earlier postdigital discussions.
- The authors argue that foregrounding analog tools within digital spaces evokes nostalgia and reinforces the cozy genre's sense of safety, abundance, and softness.
- The framework draws on remediation theory, transmediality, and game studies, and is complementary to existing research on cozy games covering feminist design, the politics of care, neoliberal critique, and mental health benefits.
A Call for an Appalachian Game Studies
This paper argues for establishing Appalachian game studies as an intersection of Appalachian studies and game studies, drawing on the emerging "regional turn" in game research.
- The paper proposes establishing Appalachian game studies as an intersection of Appalachian studies and game studies, arguing each parent discipline would gain from the other.
- The argument is framed within the internal colony model of Appalachian underdevelopment, while acknowledging critiques that postcolonial analogies can overreach or oversimplify complex histories.
- Games cited as featuring Appalachia include Fallout 76, Nights in the Woods, Kentucky Route Zero, and the early text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure, which was inspired by a regional cave system.
Undead Ecologies: Reconceptualising Zombiism in Videogames
Lawrence May's paper, presented at DiGRA 2025, argues that zombies in contemporary videogames are shifting from embodied figures into distributed "undead ecologies" that reflect the ecological crisis and the material conditions of the Anthropocene.
- Lawrence May's DiGRA 2025 paper argues that zombies in contemporary videogames are shifting from embodied figures into distributed "undead ecologies" reflecting the ecological crisis and the Anthropocene.
- The paper links the necrotisation of Earth to late-stage capitalism and contends that videogames, reliant on extractive mineral sourcing, exploitative labour and fossil energy, are well placed to make players notice a damaged planet's entangled lives, deaths and temporalities.
- The analysis is a qualitative textual study with close readings of Timberborn (Mechanistry, 2021) and Elden Ring (FromSoftware, 2022), not an empirical survey, and reports no quantitative data or sample sizes.
Virtual Burden: Representations of Animal Disabilities in Video Games and Their Posthuman Contexts
This paper examines how animals with disabilities are represented in video games and how these representations participate in posthuman questions of agency, embodiment, and relationality.
- The paper treats animals with disabilities in video games as ambiguous figures, both computational constructs and narrative agents that shape players' subjectivity within hybrid systems of affect, automation, and human and non-human causality.
- It identifies recurring strategies for deploying disabled animals: cultivating sympathy through "cute animals with dysfunctions," depicting "transhuman camouflage" where implants or exoskeletons fully compensate for impairment, framing disabled animals as monstrous, and treating animals as military or war resources.
- The authors attribute these patterns to converging conditions: the predominantly agonistic structure of gameplay, the general underrepresentation of disability in games, instrumental attitudes toward animals, and broader cultural stereotypes.
At the Crossroads of Game Studies and Business Ethics: Sustainability Obligations
This paper examines the sustainability obligations of stakeholders in the video game industry, arguing that the industry has made comparatively little systematic progress on sustainability and corporate social responsibility since scholars first raised these concerns.
- The paper argues the video game industry has made comparatively little systematic progress on sustainability and corporate social responsibility since scholars first raised these concerns.
- The authors frame sustainability across three pillars: economic (market disruption among shareholder-driven triple-A publishers, acquisitions and closures of mid-sized developers, and independent developers struggling for visibility), social (crunch, unionization conflicts, indie self-exploitation, and gaps in diversity, equity, and inclusion), and environmental.
- Mobile models built on user data extraction, big-spender dependence, and free-to-play loot boxes and gacha mechanics that approach gambling are flagged as ethically and regulatorily contentious.
From Military Simulation to Ludic War: A Generational Typology of the Mobilization of Play
This paper, presented at DiGRA 2025, proposes a generational typology of how play and games have been mobilized for military purposes since the end of the Second World War.
- The paper's central thesis is that play has been absorbed into a logistical procedure it calls "ludologistics," which serves warfare and the militarization of society in NATO states and allies, eroding distinctions such as citizen/soldier and war/peace much as capitalism erodes work/play.
- A four-generation typology traces military play from first-generation military simulation (1940s: professional wargames, vehicle simulators, training platforms) through second-generation interactive militainment (1970s: commercial shooters and recreational wargames), third-generation recruitainment (2000s: state-commissioned games and military esports), to fourth-generation ludic war (2010s).
- Fourth-generation ludic war is characterized by "prototype warfare," which relies on rapid experimentation and civil-military partnerships with tech start-ups and venture capitalists, producing examples such as drones, military AI, and battlefield smartphones.
Towards a Southern Epistemology in Game Studies: Gaming Practices, Ideological Struggle, and Common Sense in Latin America
This paper argues for a Southern epistemology in Game Studies, grounded in Latin American cultural studies, as a corrective to the field's reliance on frameworks developed in the Global North.
- The paper argues for a Southern epistemology in Game Studies, grounded in Latin American cultural studies, to correct the field's reliance on Global North frameworks.
- It contends that video games made for Global North markets are not simply alienating for Latin American players, who reinterpret and resignify them by integrating local temporalities, historical memory, and popular traditions through cultural hybridity.
- Drawing on Martín-Barbero, the author reframes gaming as an active, negotiated practice of everyday consumption and appropriation rather than a passive ideological effect.