Global reports and market data
9,225 documents·382 writers·28,548 charts and tables
Documents
Whitepaper4 pages
Global Games Education Now: Regional Realities and Pedagogical Innovations
The document, "Global Games Education Now: Regional Realities and Pedagogical Innovations," examines the evolving landscape of global games education, arguing against a singular, Western-centric pedagogical model.
- The field is shifting from a single North American or European curriculum model toward regionally responsive education, as game development becomes globally distributed.
- Educators' core challenges are framed as a dual problem: rapid adoption of generative AI and the need to decolonize curricula.
- In Southeast Asia, infrastructure gaps have led to mobile-first teaching and community-based games that turn hardware limitations into distinctive local storytelling aesthetics.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper2 pages
Hauntecology: Arboreal Pleasures as Represented in Elden Ring (2021)
This paper offers a textual analysis of arboreal imagery in Elden Ring (FromSoft, 2021), arguing that the game's depiction of the Erdtree and its surrounding flora carries a complex, layered set of meanings.
- The paper is a single-case textual analysis of arboreal imagery in Elden Ring (FromSoft, 2021), arguing that its depiction of the Erdtree and surrounding flora carries layered meanings despite the game not being primarily about ecology.
- It applies hauntology (following Derrida and Fisher) to read the game's botanical landscape as haunted by The Shattering, the cataclysmic war among the demigods triggered by the breaking of the Elden Ring.
- Hauntology is framed as a dual temporal force: the past persists in the present, and loss that has not yet occurred still shapes the present, giving the analysis its lens on the game's world.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
Between Pleasure and Harm: Transcreating a Serious Game on Older Adult Mistreatment with Indigenous Communities
The document explores the ethical and methodological challenges of adapting a serious game, "La valise de Lise," designed to address older adult mistreatment, for Indigenous communities in Canada.
- Standard translation and localization are argued to be inadequate for serious games on older adult mistreatment, because signs of harm, concepts of kinship and care, and histories of colonial violence vary across cultures.
- The authors propose transcreation, a more expansive re-authoring process that preserves the game's emotional and interpretive force while reworking story arcs, objects, puzzles, and tone for new communities.
- The case study adapts the serious game La valise de Lise into two versions, Jane's Journey and Mary's Message, for Cree and Inuit communities, developed through slow, collaborative work with local community members and artists.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
The Ludic Narrator: Towards the New Typology
The document outlines a research project aimed at developing a new typology for "ludic narrators" in digital games, defined as characters or entities that verbally recount, frame, or comment on in-game events.
- The paper argues that narratology's adaptation to digital, interactive, and multimodal media remains limited, and seeks to reassess classical models from Genette, Stanzel, and Booth for game contexts.
- The narratology/ludology debate fostered a lasting assumption that games are distributed, multi-agent storytelling, which left the single game narrator marginal in scholarship despite many games containing explicit narrators.
- The author contends that the absence of a coherent typology of ludic narrators leaves the phenomenon theoretically underexplained, motivating the proposed framework.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
My Cozy Hero: How Cozy Games Challenge Conventional Hero Dynamics
This paper examines how cozy video games reshape the traditional hero paradigm that dominates mainstream digital play.
- Cozy games shift the hero paradigm away from combat, conquest, and power accumulation toward care, gentleness, and relational support, positioning coziness as both an aesthetic and an ethical stance.
- The study draws on Project Horseshoe's definition of coziness as "the fantasy of safety, abundance, and softness" and on Miguel Sicart's concept of "player logic" as its theoretical foundation.
- The analysis is based on close readings of three titles (Spiritfarer, Wanderstop, and Sips and Sonnets) rather than large-scale player surveys or quantitative data, and is presented as among the first systematic studies of the hero's role in the genre.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
Make It Cuddle, Make It Fight, Market It Pink: Virtual Pets and Affective Economies of Gendered Play
The document analyzes how virtual pets of the 1990s, through their design and marketing, reinforced gendered assumptions about emotional labor and play, contributing to broader cultural hierarchies.
- The paper argues that 1990s virtual pets were cultural texts that encoded assumptions about gendered emotional labour, organising care, attachment, mastery, and competition within a divided affective economy rather than being trivial novelties.
- It proposes a typology separating standalone 'distinct' virtual pets (Tamagotchi, GigaPets, Neopets, a Little Mermaid companion) from 'embedded' creatures within larger game ecosystems (Pokémon, Digimon, Sonic Adventure's Chao, Final Fantasy's Chocobos).
- Care-based distinct pets were typically pastel-coded, domestic, and marketed toward girls, while embedded pets used bold colours and adventure or competition rhetoric, with Digimon explicitly positioned as a 'boy-oriented' Tamagotchi.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
Diegetic Pleasure: Multimodal Immersion and Emotional Engagement in Escape Rooms
The study investigates how escape room designers utilize diegetic construction and multimodal strategies to create immersive and emotionally engaging experiences.
- Escape rooms do not automatically produce immersion; a coherent fictional world must be built through the integration of narrative, spatial design, and interactive elements, with diegesis as the organizing principle.
- Multimodal cues such as scent, temperature, soundscape, and texture heighten affective involvement only when they remain consistent with the narrative and game mechanics.
- The empirical basis is a qualitative study of 10 Polish escape rooms ranked in the TERPECA awards between 2023 and 2025, spanning horror, adventure, and science fiction genres.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
The Conjurative Voice of the Player in Escape Rooms: A Framework
This paper proposes a framework for understanding the "conjurative voice" of players in escape rooms, defining it as a discrete form of agency that can alter the conditions of play, effect tangible change in the ludic environment, and shape group navigation.
- Speech in escape rooms functions as a performative tool rather than mere description: utterances like "try turning that" or "we've solved this" enact play by prompting actions, triggering technology, and sustaining puzzle momentum, drawing on Austin and Derrida's speech-act theory.
- The proposed framework identifies four parties shaping the escape room soundscape: the Game (constraints and affordances tied to speech and listening), Game Masters (instructions, hints, narration), Actors (scripted or improvised dramaturgical texture), and Players (who generate the majority of vocal activity).
- Player speech moves upward through the system, influencing design components, actor responses, and the pacing of play, so players are not passive recipients of the experience but active shapers of it.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
Artificial Pleasures and Ideological Subjectivation in Video Games: The Function of Positive Artefact Emotions in the Naturalisation of Ideology
This paper examines how positive "artefact emotions" in video games contribute to the naturalization of ideology, bridging emotional rhetoric analysis with Marxist ideology critique.
- The paper argues that player empathy with the playable character is a third necessary pillar of ideological naturalisation, alongside the realism and engaging design emphasised in standard Marxist accounts, because empathy morally validates artificial domination as natural order.
- Empathy transfers ethical value from the protagonist's agency to the game world and its implicit ideology, so players come to endorse the system through the character they identify with.
- The author distinguishes world-represented emotions, produced by scripted narrative casting the protagonist as victim and antagonist as wrongdoer, from artefact emotions, which arise from the artificial manner in which characters and spaces are represented.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
Queer Games Studies Material Turn: Centering Trans Bodies in Video Games
This paper argues for a "material turn" in queer game studies, specifically by centering the role of transgender bodies and embodiment in video games beyond mere character customization or scripted narratives.
- The paper argues that queer game studies has neglected the virtual body as a site of identification and transformation for transgender and gender diverse players, focusing instead on image, narrative, and abstract gender categories.
- The research combines 198 survey responses from transgender and gender diverse players in Brazil, Ukraine, and an English-language sample with 12 semi-structured interviews with transgender players in the United Kingdom.
- Players engage with their avatars in varied ways: some prioritise speed and movement to move beyond gender concerns, while others craft characters whose behaviour matches a designed identity.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper5 pages
An Exploration of Cozy Games as Coping Mechanism to Manage Mental Well-being
This research explores how gamers utilize cozy games as a coping mechanism for managing mental well-being.
- The study draws on semi-structured Zoom interviews with just ten adults aged 18 to 34 who play cozy games at least weekly, recruited from large Discord communities, so its findings are exploratory rather than broadly generalizable.
- Players use cozy games as a dual coping tool: short-term emotion-focused stress relief, with participants consistently reporting feeling relaxed, recharged, and mentally lighter after play, and longer-term problem-focused clarity and resilience.
- Players initially seek hedonic gratifications such as relaxation and aesthetic appeal, but often discover unexpected utilitarian and social benefits, including autonomy and a sense of control, with fulfilment occurring when experiences meet or exceed expectations.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper2 pages
Is Gameplay Fun After All? Queer Indigenous Resistances Through Gameplay
The paper explores the experiences and resistances of queer Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander individuals within videogame gameplay, focusing on how they navigate and transform spaces not designed for their identities.
- Queer Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander players experience and resist colonial and heteronormative structures through videogame play, drawing on a standalone survey of queer Indigenous gamers in Australia.
- The paper adapts Maria Lugones' concept of "world-travelling" and Elaine Castillo's "unexpected reader" into the idea of the "unexpected player," who must build connections across characters and narratives not created with them in mind.
- Survey respondents described experiences comparable to world-travelling, and their accounts indicate that play is not separable from these navigational practices.
DiGRAJun 2026