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Documents
Queering the Third Place: Dungeons & Dragons at Your Friendly Local Game Store
This study investigates the transformation of the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) community over the past decade, focusing on the role of Friendly Local Game Stores (FLGS) in fostering inclusive environments for diverse identities.
- The paper argues that Friendly Local Game Stores function as ephemeral, queer "third places" where D&D community is built and identities are performed and reshaped, with gender understood at the game table as performed and play-based rather than fixed.
- The central claim is that D&D's historically narrow demographic of white, cisgender, middle-class, heterosexual men is gradually loosening, as the community diversifies over the past decade.
- The study is an ethnography of five game stores in southern California conducted over several years, supplemented by interviews with players at Gen Con 2024 in Indianapolis, with the author participating mainly as a player and often as Dungeon Master.
The Civilization of Sid Meier's Civilization: Player Reception of Change in A Long-Running Game Series
The document explores player reception of "Sid Meier's Civilization VII" (Civ7), which experienced unusually mixed feedback compared to previous entries in the long-running series.
- The study analyzes roughly 26,000 English-language Steam reviews of Sid Meier's Civilization VII, collected in December 2025 from more than 50,000 total ratings, which place the game near an even split between recommended and not recommended.
- Comparison with earlier Civilization titles dominates player discourse, appearing in about 59 percent of reviews, making it the most common frame for reactions to the game.
- Unfinished or polish issues appear in roughly 11 percent of reviews, while resistance to change accounts for about 7.5 percent, indicating that outright opposition to innovation is a smaller driver of criticism than technical or polish concerns.
Cruel Pleasure: Affective Security and Territoriality in Games
The document, "Cruel Pleasure: Affective Security and Territoriality in Games," investigates the relationship between pleasure in gameplay and the circulation of cultural and political affect, specifically focusing on games representing the Israel-Palestine conflict.
- The paper argues that pleasure in games is not a neutral metric: it can be bound up with narratives of security, territoriality, and exceptionalism, even when those narratives are harmful, and this can obscure the political structures shaping which games get produced and made visible.
- Drawing on Lauren Berlant's concept of cruel optimism, the author proposes "cruel pleasure" as an analytical framework for understanding gameplay that circulates political and cultural affect, focusing on mobile games depicting conflict in Israel and Palestine.
- A comparative, longitudinal study of Israel and Palestine-related games in app stores and game platforms contrasts the 2014 corpus, which included simplistic titles such as Bomb Gaza, Iron Dome, and Gaza Resistance framing violence as entertainment, with the 2025-26 landscape.
Thinking on Our Feet: Baby Steps (2025) Towards (Im)balancing the Somatic and the Stoney
This paper examines Baby Steps (2025), the Bennett Foddy, Cuzzilo, and Boch game, through a combined phenomenological, post-phenomenological, and ontological lens, arguing that the game's minimalist, extremely difficult design makes visible a reciprocal relationship between the human body and the mountain.
- The paper argues that Baby Steps (2025) makes visible a reciprocal relationship between the human body and the mountain, with the player feeling both themselves and the stony terrain as mutually constitutive agents rather than neutral backdrops.
- Its core mechanic of foot-by-foot movement (gripping, leaning, planting) is read as a source of somatic knowledge about momentum, friction, and restraint, analysed through phenomenological and new materialist scholarship including Merleau-Ponty, Straus, Marder, and Cohen.
- The awkward, unassisted protagonist (a "failson") and the plain, store-bought environment are argued to confront the assumed able-bodied, male player with the banality and uncertainty of movement.
Examining Jank as Design Through Challenge Runs
The document explores "jank" in video games, defining it as a player's perception that a game does not behave as it should, often due to deviations from common or personal literacies.
- Jank is defined as a player's perception that a game does not behave as it should, and the paper argues it is a productive design space rather than merely a flaw.
- The author distinguishes glitches (system behaviors working as defined but unexpectedly) from jank, which occurs when such moments spontaneously recontextualize the game within its system, and critiques Schmalzer's definition for overlapping too heavily with 'glitch'.
- The central claim is that jank prompts reflection and shifts the player's role from player toward co-designer.
Making Non-Monogamy: A Design-Oriented Approach for Studying Digital Game Intimacies
The document outlines a design-oriented research approach for studying non-monogamous intimacies in digital games, shifting focus from analyzing existing representations to understanding player desires and informing game design.
- The paper argues that as non-monogamous relationships move from the margins of game culture into mainstream titles, the field should shift from analyzing representations alone toward understanding how players experience these intimacies and how creators might design them to resonate with queer desires and identities.
- The methodology pairs open-ended player questionnaires about gaming and relationship histories with conversational "gaming interviews" conducted during play, allowing participants to revisit and extend earlier responses.
- Interview findings feed an iterative, participatory prototyping process that alternates player feedback with input from small, independent queer game developers based in Montréal, combining players' informal design knowledge with developers' formal expertise.
From the Invisible to Glitch: Rethinking the Possibilities of Aesthetics, Bodies, and Connection in Virtual Parties
This study critically analyzes the aesthetic codes and possibilities within two distinct virtual party environments to understand how they shape player embodiment, social connection, and speculative imaginaries.
- The paper asks why some virtual parties feel like simulations of the present while others function as spaces for speculation, comparing an unofficial GTA V roleplay mod with the NeuroXcape speculative events hosted in Club Cooee by the Neurodungeon collective.
- The GTA V roleplay party environment is characterised as representational, reproducing a standardised, Western-coded festivity centred on consumption, luxury, and wealth display, often mirroring the stereotypical American pool party and associating social life with masculinity and power.
- GTA V avatar customisation is limited to binary gender presentation and social interaction is described as largely disembodied, whereas NeuroXcape foregrounds queer, neurodivergent, marginalised, and other-than-human perspectives, including posthuman and transspecies avatars.
Disclosure and the "Secret Underground Movement": Analysing Queerness in Disco Elysium
This paper examines whether disclosure is necessary for players to engage with queer elements in Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (ZA/UM, 2019), an isometric detective RPG set in the post-war city of Revachol.
- The paper argues that queerness in Disco Elysium: The Final Cut is often ambiguous, probabilistic, and interpretively constructed rather than explicitly revealed, and that whether disclosure is necessary depends on the player's own embodied relationship to queerness.
- Its two focal cases are Kim Kitsuragi and the male escort "Smoker on the Balcony," both conditionally closeted characters whose queer elements are encountered through chance, dialogue choices, and specific character engagements.
- Kitsuragi's disclosure that he is gay occurs only at the end of an optional quest, yet the authors had already read him as queer from the start of their playthroughs, suggesting disclosure was not required for engagement.
Modernities of Authenticity in Recreated Online Digital Games: A Comparative Case Study
This paper examines how nostalgic game recreations construct authenticity, using a comparative case study of two projects that attempt to restore earlier versions of online games: World of Warcraft Classic, a recreation of the 2006 "Vanilla" version of World of Warcraft, and Team Fortress 2 Classified, a community-developed mod…
- The paper compares two nostalgic game recreations: World of Warcraft Classic, a recreation of the 2006 'Vanilla' version of World of Warcraft, and Team Fortress 2 Classified, a community-developed mod re-imagining Team Fortress 2's 2008–2009 era.
- It reframes the question from whether restorations are accurate to how different philosophies of authenticity, drawn from postmodern and post-postmodern perspectives, shape nostalgic design and play.
- World of Warcraft Classic is described as a 'genuine fake' operating through postmodern hyperreality, built on players' subjective memories and sentimental myth rather than strict fidelity, including quality-of-life updates and reimplemented historical bugs.
Democratizing Interactive Filmmaking: A No-Code Solution for Arts Students
This paper proposes a no-code, free software solution to democratize interactive filmmaking for arts and humanities students, addressing the challenge of inaccessible and expensive tools.
- Arts students learning interactive filmmaking face a shortage of free, accessible authoring tools, forcing them to learn intermediate coding, use workarounds, or pay for costly software, a problem worsened by tight university budgets and coding anxiety among arts and humanities students.
- The paper proposes TwineForge, a modified version of the open-source Twine storytelling tool with a largely drag-and-drop interface for uploading video, adding choices, setting variables, previewing, and viewing a story map, with output exported as code or compiled into a playable Twine story via Tweego.
- The revival of interactive and full-motion-video (FMV) films and games has been hampered by the disappearance of dedicated authoring tools and by remaining platforms shifting to costly enterprise or subscription models.
The Pleasure(s) of Griefing: Tracing Multimodal Toxicity in League of Legends
The paper examines multimodal toxicity in League of Legends, arguing that hostile communication in competitive online play is not confined to text chat but emerges from the combined use of pings, emotes, UI interactions, champion positioning and chat messages.
- Toxicity in League of Legends is multimodal: hostile signals emerge from combined pings, emotes, UI interactions, champion positioning and chat rather than from text chat alone, so text-only classification misses much of it.
- Toxic episodes tend to appear as clusters across channels, and understanding them requires temporally synchronized, context-aware analysis instead of surface-level classification.
- The paper's main contribution is MuMoDeTox, a prototype pipeline combining YOLOv8-based detection of pings and champion positions from video frames, minimap localization, OCR of chat and on-screen text, and external match metadata such as role and performance statistics.
Killjoy Play: Illness, Disability, and No-Fun Pleasures in Video Games
This paper examines video games that deliberately refuse conventional notions of fun in order to represent illness, disability, and care.
- The paper argues that the expectation that games be enjoyable shapes which play experiences get valued, and proposes 'no-fun' games about illness, disability, and care as a counter-model of pleasure built on frustration, slowness, non-mastery, and acceptance.
- Drawing on disability studies, crip theory, and Sara Ahmed's feminist killjoy concept, the author frames these games as 'crip killjoy' modes of play that resist cure, progress, and resolution.
- The analysis centers on three titles: you're just imagining it (npckc, 2024), That Dragon, Cancer (Numinous Games, 2016), and Before I Forget (3-Fold Games, 2020), examined through close readings of narrative, mechanics, and audiovisual design.