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Documents
Whitepaper4 pages
Post-Heroic Play in Social Work Education: Structural Constraint and Impossible Care
The document proposes a conceptual framework for integrating digital games into social work education to foster reflection on intersectional discrimination and the limits of individual agency within structurally unjust conditions.
- The paper proposes using "post-heroic" gameplay, where individual action cannot resolve systemic injustice, as a pedagogical space for social work students to confront the tensions of the field's triple mandate: normalizing clients, empowering them, and upholding human rights and social justice.
- The framework rests on a comparative reading of Papers, Please (2013) and A Plague Tale: Requiem (2022), treated as complementary sources: Papers, Please models how discrimination is produced and normalized through bureaucratic procedure, while A Plague Tale: Requiem generates affective identification with persecution and vulnerability.
- The concept of "ethical cognitive friction" describes the tension between what a game communicates procedurally and what it signifies narratively or symbolically, and is a core component of the framework.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper5 pages
Digital Cardboard Crack: The Gamblification of Digital Card Games
The document critically analyzes the "gamblification" of digital card games, focusing on digital card packs as a distinct form of loot box that confers competitive advantage.
- Digital card packs are argued to be a particularly potent form of gamblification because they combine chance-based rewards with direct competitive advantage while eliminating the secondary markets that existed for physical trading card games.
- The UK government declined to extend the Gambling Act 2005 to loot boxes, relying instead on industry self-regulation, a position under growing pressure from public concern and potential legislation.
- Physical card pack distribution has historically been self-regulated and likened to surprise mechanics such as Kinder Eggs, in contrast to the more varied and opaque probability systems used in digital titles.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper5 pages
Intersectional Pleasures of Imagining Non-Western Futures for Tabletop Role Playing Games
The document outlines the "Island Istanbul" project, a system-agnostic setting sourcebook for tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) currently under development as part of the Speculative Games research project at the University for the Creative Arts.
- The paper is a design-and-process account of Island Istanbul, a system-agnostic TRPG setting sourcebook for a speculative future Istanbul, rather than a completed evaluation.
- Its central argument is that tabletop role-playing game worldbuilding can serve as a critical space for reflecting on ecological, socioeconomic, and political risks and opportunities facing underrepresented cities while giving players genuine agency.
- The methodology is qualitative and thematic, combining scientific studies and forecasts with tropes from fictional future-Istanbul works, including the archive of the Turkish science-fiction society Bilimkurgu Kulübü.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
Haptic Dialects: Translating Pleasure Between Adaptive Controllers and Universal Design for Disabled Players
This study investigates how disabled players using adaptive controllers like the Xbox Adaptive Controller negotiate haptic and systemic mismatches with mainstream games to achieve pleasurable engagement.
- Pleasure in adaptive play is framed as an active, negotiated achievement by disabled players, not a passive outcome of accessible design, and the study treats adaptive gaming as a sociotechnical practice.
- The study is a preliminary, qualitative project combining digital ethnography in online disabled gaming communities (specialized subreddits and Discord servers) with planned semi-structured interviews of roughly 15 to 20 regular adaptive controller users and possible screen-recorded play sessions.
- Anticipated findings identify three forms of negotiated pleasure: the satisfaction of solving control puzzles, the communal joy of sharing configuration solutions, and the agency gained by overcoming design not built for one's body.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper5 pages
Dungeons and Dissonance: Coherence in GLAM Games
The research explores the concept of "coherence" in the application of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) within Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) contexts.
- The paper argues that Dungeons & Dragons' appeal to galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) comes from its low internal coherence, which makes it a flexible 'blank canvas' that can be remodelled to convey diverse content.
- That same flexibility creates serious external incoherence in cultural heritage settings because of D&D's colonial legacy, including reinforcement of Whiteness through an exoticised Other, essentialised race reliant on colonial racial hierarchies, and colonial imaginings of the monstrous female in the Monster Manual.
- The authors contend that superficial, player-led, or content-level changes cannot correct these embedded assumptions, so institutions teaching decolonised or inclusive material through D&D risk reproducing the tropes they aim to critique.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper5 pages
Twenty Years of Design Patterns in Games
This document provides an overview of the evolution and current state of design patterns in game development over the past two decades.
- The paper argues the game design pattern field has matured enough to warrant consolidation, and urges a return to Christopher Alexander's original emphasis on explicitly stating the problem each pattern addresses, which it believes has been omitted in game design work much as in software design patterns.
- The two projects are framed as complementary rather than competing, and the authors view the shared intent and format across collections as justification for pursuing their unification or federation.
- Together the collections contain more than 4,500 patterns, and the GDP book has supported numerous research papers, including many at DiGRA and Foundations of Digital Games, and has anchored a gameplay design course at two Swedish universities for two decades.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
The Trustworthy Knowledge DLC: A Game-Design-Theory Expansion Pack for Public Services
This research proposes a novel theoretical framework, "Collaborative Knowledge Play," to address the challenges of misinformation and disengagement in public knowledge services by leveraging core game design theory.
- The paper proposes "Collaborative Knowledge Play," a theoretical framework for public knowledge systems in which verifying, contesting, and co-creating information are experienced as intrinsically meaningful play rather than superficial gamification.
- The framework is built on three design dimensions: procedural rhetoric for verification, intersectional player positioning, and scalable social pleasure within a contributory commons.
- The methodology has three phases: theoretical synthesis, critical speculative design of conceptual prototypes (a participatory archival memory game and a rumor resilience MMO), and comparative case analysis of hybrid platforms such as Foldit, WikiRace, and certain citizen science applications.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
Sketch for a Phenomenology of Gameplay (as) Performance: Bodies, Systems, Worlds
This extended abstract outlines an ongoing research project that develops a phenomenological account of gameplay as performance, integrating performance studies and game studies.
- Gameplay is framed as performance, with three interlocking forces organising contemporary digital play: embodied action, the procedural constraints of rule-based systems, and distributed spectatorship.
- Building on Leino's 'gameplay condition', the authors argue that game systems impose risks, limits, and consequences on players regardless of their intentions, producing a vulnerability that structures meaning differently from the corporeal grounding of traditional theatre.
- The paper proposes an existential configuration model with four dimensions (body, space, time, and world) to describe how performers and spectators relate to each other and to the governing system.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper5 pages
When AI Promises to "Cure" You: Individual Experiences, Systemic Biases, and Community Action for Marginalized Players in Video Games
This study critically examines the "AI promise" in gaming, which often portrays artificial intelligence as an inherently benevolent force for democratizing play.
- AI assistive features can deliver large gains for players: the 'AI Eyes' feature for visually impaired players in Justice Online cut task completion time by 42.7% and interaction errors by 61.3%, with 87.5% of participants reporting restored agency and immersion.
- AI systems in games carry measurable representational bias: a computational audit of 547 AI Dungeon narrative variations found female-coded protagonists were 71.8% more likely to appear in passive or rescue-oriented roles, while ethnically associated names were linked to exoticism or aggression and underrepresented in authority roles.
- Efficiency gains from AI can erode social bonds: in a controlled Sea of Thieves experiment with 112 participants, AI teammates correlated with 23.1% lower social connection scores and a 34.8% reduction in non-instrumental, socially affective communication.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
Pleasure Under Pressure: Laughter, Learning, and Competitive Play in Professional Wargaming
The study investigates the role of laughter in professional military wargaming, focusing on how it facilitates learning, manages competitive pressure, and navigates social dynamics.
- Laughter in professional wargaming is treated as a publicly organized, interactional accomplishment rather than a private internal feeling, so pleasure can be studied through how it is sequenced and shared in encounters.
- Based on roughly 80 hours of audiovisual recordings from naval wargaming practice in the Swedish Defence University's officer program, the study analyzes laughter episodes during both gameplay and debriefing using multimodal conversation analysis covering talk, timing, bodily orientation, and engagement with the game.
- Laughter serves as a key resource for shifting between seriousness and playfulness, letting participants frame competitive moves as clever, acknowledge miscalculations without harming collegial relations, and handle grave outcomes such as simulated mission failure or casualties.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
The Revolution Dances: The Pleasures of Transformation in Final Fantasy X-2
This analysis examines Final Fantasy X-2 (2003) as a pivotal text in understanding evolving gamer literacies around gender politics and feminism within game studies.
- The paper argues that Final Fantasy X-2 (2004) merits serious scholarly attention as a feminist and queer intervention in Japanese RPG traditions, despite fan and critic dismissal of it as "too girly."
- Tracing online discourse from 2006 through 2023, the authors show the game's dancing, dressphere transformation system, and grief-driven plot shifting from objects of disdain to sites of celebration among queer and nonqueer players.
- X-2 is positioned as the counterpart to Final Fantasy X, which centers a male protagonist contesting religious sacrifice, while X-2 follows its female lead through the aftermath of that upheaval.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper5 pages
Pleasure and Intersectionality in Queer Dating-Sims: An Autoethnographic Research-Creation Perspective
This document outlines an autoethnographic research-creation project exploring pleasure and intersectionality in queer dating-sims, focusing on the development of the game "Dispirited."
- The paper treats pleasure, specifically the pleasure of seeing one's intersecting gender, sexual, ethnic, and religious identities represented, as a central force in both playing and creating games.
- Representation is framed as an act of resistance against the marginal treatment that such identities typically receive in fantasy literature and independent video games.
- The game Dispirited is a branching text-based interactive fiction in three acts, with four romanceable characters, each leading to three endings for twelve endings in total.
DiGRAJun 2026