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Documents
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
Whitepaper4 pages
Pleasure Not for Everyone: Epistemic Injustice Towards Ukrainian Game Studies
The document argues that Ukrainian game studies scholars face significant epistemic injustice, limiting their participation and recognition within the global academic field.
- The paper argues Ukrainian game scholars face a dual exclusion: structural inaccessibility inside Ukraine (limited humanities funding, scarce institutional support for games research, restricted access to libraries and journals, war disruptions) and epistemic misrecognition in Western academia.
- Drawing on Miranda Fricker's concept of epistemic injustice, the authors contend that game studies' claims to being international and intersectional are undercut by unevenly distributed infrastructure across funding, publication venues, conferences, and academic networks.
- The authors argue Ukraine's postcolonial position is obscured by 'post-Soviet' generalizations, by framing Ukrainians as white, and by casting Russia as a non-European empire, leaving Russia's colonial aggression unacknowledged in Western institutions.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
Cultivating History: Gender, Power, and Reflection in Cozy Botanical Games
The document analyzes how "cozy botanical games" mediate historical realities, particularly concerning gender, power, and environmental themes.
- The paper argues that cozy botanical games such as Botany Manor and The Abbess Garden use gentle, nurturing design to make historically violent or unequal settings (Victorian England, Grand Siècle France) feel comfortable, with the authors calling cozy games a potential "new mode of doing history in games."
- Rather than dramatizing danger through gameplay, these titles displace historical inequality into letters, books, and dialogue; for example, Botany Manor conveys institutional sexism through correspondence, and The Abbess Garden hints at threats to the abbey through conversation.
- The authors contend this indirect design lets players inhabit historically informed worlds without firsthand peril, which is central to how the games mediate the past.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
Spectating the Samurai: Performing and Preserving History through Twitch
The document, "Spectating the Samurai: Performing and Preserving History through Twitch," investigates how collaborative livestreaming practices on Twitch can facilitate historical interpretation and preservation.
- The paper argues that non-playing co-hosts on Twitch, positioned between player and spectator, can perform and construct historical meaning in real time, so spectatorship can itself be a form of historical practice and preservation.
- The central concept is Bierstedt's 'streamer-historian', which the authors extend beyond education and outreach toward improvisational, participatory history-making.
- The empirical basis is a qualitative case study of two two-hour streams of Ghost of Yōtei (set in Hokkaido in 1603), held one day after release and two weeks later, with hosts deliberately avoiding prior engagement with the game to capture first-encounter play.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper5 pages
Moneyball, but for Kids: Games as Vehicles for Predatory Prediction Markets
This document examines the ethical and policy implications of integrating prediction markets into user-generated content engines (UGCEs) like Roblox, particularly concerning child users.
- The paper frames the proposal to bring prediction markets into children's games on Roblox as a continuation of 'gamblification,' the broader expansion of gambling mechanics into digital entertainment, and treats it as a policy problem exposing the limits of current platform governance.
- Prediction platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi are placed in a longer history of gambling's growth, with more than $3.3 billion wagered on the 2024 US presidential election outcome on Polymarket alone.
- More than 35 US states have legalized some form of sports betting since the 2018 repeal of the federal sports betting prohibition, and European casino and sports betting apps have grown with young adults driving usage.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
Cursed Coziness: Cursed Mechanics in Dark Cozy Games
This research introduces "cursed" as an analytical concept to explore the tension between "soft" aesthetics and dark narrative elements in "dark cozy games," using Cult of the Lamb (Massive Monster 2022) as a primary case study.
- The paper argues that coziness is not merely a counterpoint to darkness but an active enabling condition that lets players engage with themes of power, control, and exploitation in a comfortable setting.
- Using Cult of the Lamb (2022) and its Sinful Pack expansion as its primary case study, the authors introduce "the cursed" as a provisional analytical concept for describing how soft aesthetics carry and normalize socially transgressive content.
- The authors read follower mechanics as treating followers as manageable resources, with humanizing them being an optional, conscious player choice rather than the default.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
Decentralising Queer Game Studies: The British Situation
The document argues for decentralizing queer game studies to incorporate regionally specific approaches, moving beyond its current North American-centric focus.
- The paper argues queer game studies should adopt regionally specific framings instead of its typical North American urban focus, using Britain as a case study.
- The authors contend the British queer context is distinct and is often wrongly conflated with North American experience.
- Two shaping forces are identified: the Section 28 legislation (1988–2003), which restricted local authorities from promoting homosexuality, and contemporary British attitudes plus anti-gender movement strategies that seek to limit queer public participation.
DiGRAJun 2026