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Transforming Pixels into Plates: Harnessing Game Strategies for Sustainable Food Practices
This study explores how digital game strategies can promote sustainable food habits, forming part of the Horizon FOODMISSION project focused on citizen-driven, gamification-supported approaches for transforming food consumption patterns.
- The study addresses a research gap: prior work on digital games has focused mainly on nutrition literacy and dietary behavior change rather than food sustainability.
- Conducted within the Horizon Europe FOODMISSION project, the authors argue that gamified approaches are effective only when strategies are tailored to the target audience and objectives, since a universal approach is often ineffective.
- Cited prior literature suggests scaffolding through structured challenges can motivate hesitant individuals, tracking strategies can enhance environmental responsibility and self-efficacy, and cooperative mechanics can boost motivation toward sustainable behavior.
The Place of the Marginalized: Witchers and Dwelling in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
This analysis explores how the gameworld of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt configures a mode of "minority dwelling" for witchers, arguing that their marginalized status emerges from the ontological and socio-political structure of the game's places rather than solely from narrative or representational politics.
- The paper argues that the witchers' marginalization in The Witcher 3 arises from the ontological and socio-political structure of place itself, not from representation or empathy-driven design.
- Drawing on Heidegger's dwelling, Casey's view of place as an existential actor, and Norberg-Schulz's genius loci, the study treats virtual places as active agents that shape and are shaped by their inhabitants.
- The author defines minority in relational and ontological terms rather than demographic ones, framing the witchers' condition (essential yet excluded, functional yet distrusted) as a structural state of exception following Agamben.
Tacky Games
The document explores the concept of "tackiness" and "kitsch" specifically within digital games, arguing that traditional art and design theories of kitsch are insufficient for this medium.
- Most digital games meet several traditional kitsch criteria (mediatic transfer, reproducibility, low price, mass disposability), yet games can also be art and contain masterworks, so classical kitsch theories offer limited help when applied to games.
- The strongest correlation with perceived kitschiness was found in formulaic movements and gestures carrying stable meanings, and in Kulka's definition of kitsch as art charged with stock emotions that trigger unreflective responses.
- No consistent link emerged between perceived tackiness and transmedia transfer, low price, ubiquitous availability, otherness, or "perverted style," challenging the view that these properties define game kitsch.
For the Trees: Envisioning Sustainable Futures Through Ecomodded Minecraft
The document explores the concept of "ecomodding" in video games, specifically using Minecraft, to foster ecological conversation and critique.
- The project hosted a multiplayer Minecraft server powered entirely by solar energy, running publicly for ten weeks in summer 2025, with a second phase planned for 2026 as part of debates on carbon-neutral game design and the energy footprint of online play.
- The 2025 modpack Gaia's Riddle introduced pollution, extreme weather, temperature extremes, and resource scarcity, and players largely adopted an ecomodernist, anthropocentric stance, treating nature as hostile and sheltering in a technologically sustained enclave while surrounding biomes deteriorated.
- Players formed strong communal bonds, cooperative groups, and negotiated shared resources, and these social connections continued in conversation when the solar battery depleted and the server went offline.
On Inhabiting Nonhuman Bodies: Review of Research Perspectives
This review synthesizes existing research perspectives on "animal games," defined as digital games where players embody nonhuman animal avatars.
- The review argues that a substantial body of work on animal games already exists across animal studies, environmental humanities, and game studies, but lacks an organized discourse in which its contributors recognize themselves as part of a shared conceptual field.
- Its central analytical question is whether inhabiting a nonhuman animal avatar can convey what it is like to be that animal, and it presents this as a methodological and ethical debate rather than a settled finding.
- Gualeni (2011) sees games as spaces of experimental ontology that can transcend human subjectivity, Eggertsson (2022) argues they convey nonhuman animal experience through a blend of biological fact and narrative fiction, and Caracciolo (2021) rejects this as illusory and warns it may reinforce human superiority as a colonizing act.
Nostalgic Ludopopulism and Neoreactionary Movements in Game Development
The paper investigates the emergence and spread of "nostalgic ludopopulism" and neo-reactionary rhetoric within online game development and programming communities.
- The paper's central thesis is that "nostalgic ludopopulism" has emerged among independent game developers and programmers, blending nostalgia for an idealized craftsman era of development with populist critiques of corporate elites, while celebrating skilled individual developers over those who rely on off-the-shelf engines and tools.
- The author argues this thin ideology can be leveraged to undermine labor organizing, consumer rights, and right-to-repair efforts, which the paper treats as a meaningful risk to broader solidarity movements opposing capital consolidation.
- The analysis is a qualitative discursive case study of three figures forming a techno-ideological ecosystem on social media: Jonathan Blow (Twitch stream promoting the Jai programming language), Casey Muratori (the live programming series Handmade Hero), and Łukasz Ściga (host of the Wookash Podcast).
Making the Past Count: Developing Quantitative Measures for Past-Player Experience
This paper proposes a methodology for developing quantitative measures to study "past-player" experience in historical video games, aiming to shift historical game studies and archaeogaming from scholar-centric accounts to player-focused research.
- The paper argues that historical game studies and archaeogaming should add quantitative, player-focused methods to established qualitative work, framing surveys as a way to scaffold existing insights within a mixed-methods design rather than an inevitable next step.
- It characterizes past-play as a recursive, affective process in which players move back and forth between expectations about the past and the present, and argues this needs large survey studies to complement small-scale qualitative readings of games and communities.
- The VALUE survey ran for one month in spring 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing 1,676 respondents recruited through subreddits, forums, and Facebook groups dedicated to historical videogames to map how players perceive the past in such games.
Tracing the Political Economy of the Microgame
The document analyzes the political economy of the "microgame," tracing its historical evolution and cultural function across nearly fifty years of commercial games marketing, serious games research, and contemporary game development funding.
- The term "microgame" gained mainstream currency when Nintendo's American release of the first WarioWare game used it to describe collections of short, simple, referential minigames, codifying an intentionally small-scale design mode.
- Unlike the consistently defined term "minigame" in commercial discourse, "microgame" lacks a settled definition, and the paper treats this definitional instability as central to understanding the term.
- The paper traces the microgame through three strands: 1970s wargaming, early 1980s serious games, and commercial videogame criticism, finding a shared preoccupation with managing strictly limited spatial, technological, financial, and temporal resources.
Old Pleasures, Dying Flames: Final Fantasy XIV and the Evolution of the MMO Genre
This paper, by Benjamin Horn of the University of Hong Kong, examines how Final Fantasy XIV has evolved over more than a decade and what that evolution reveals about the enduring appeal of massively multiplayer online role-playing games.
- Naoki Yoshida, director of Final Fantasy XIV, suggested in 2025 that the MMO genre's demand for hundreds of hours of investment no longer fits contemporary play habits, a claim this paper challenges.
- A February 2026 community census estimated 934,000 active Final Fantasy XIV players, which the author cites as evidence against the idea that MMOs are declining as a genre.
- The paper, by Benjamin Horn of the University of Hong Kong, traces Final Fantasy XIV's development from its original 2010 release through the 2013 relaunch to the present, treating it as a single-title longitudinal case study.
Time vs. History in JRPGs
This paper examines how Japanese Roleplaying Games (JRPGs) that use time travel as a narrative or gameplay mechanic represent history, and what those representations imply for both players and scholars of Historical Game Studies.
- The paper argues that fantasy JRPGs with time-travel mechanics shape how players understand history, rather than merely being interpreted through modernist academic frameworks.
- It introduces the concept of chrononormativity, the conventional linear expectation about time, and asks whether departures from it lead players to see history as fractured and in need of repair.
- The analysis closely reads a selected set of titles, including Final Fantasy XIII-2, Radiant Historia, Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward, Tales of Phantasia, and Tales of Destiny 2.
Lifting the Fog of War: Militarism, Colonialism and Encyclopedic Pleasures in Digital Play
The document analyzes the evolution and implications of the "fog of war" (FOW) concept in digital games, arguing that its contemporary application in entertainment gaming enacts a colonial fantasy and aligns with a broader militarization of digital play.
- The paper argues that the 'fog of war' mechanic has shifted meaning from representing military risk and uncertainty to a source of exploratory pleasure, with the obscured map reframed as 'unfinished business' inviting players to uncover the game world.
- Its central thesis is that 'lifting the fog' in contemporary games enacts a colonial fantasy in which unexplored terrain is cast as terra incognita, a space of untapped potential to be mapped and possessed, obscuring the violence of colonial cartography.
- The authors contend that fog-as-fun parallels the goal of military simulation: eliminating friction and uncertainty to create a 'closed world' that can be fully known and controlled.
Looping Across Genres: How Time Loops, Roguelikes, and Cyclical Levels Shape Narrative Structure
This document examines the increasing prevalence and narrative significance of cyclical play structures in video games, encompassing time loops, roguelikes, and deliberately repetitive levels.
- The paper defines 'loop-based video games' as a single category covering time loop games, roguelikes, and levels built around deliberate repetition, and argues that the interplay between loops and narrative is fundamental to how these games build their storyworlds.
- The paper's comparative framework assesses loop-based games along three dimensions: loop type (strict time loop, no time limit, or single looping level), world structure (open world, hub worlds, linear, or randomly generated levels), and how these choices shape narrative progression and player influence over story developments.
- The paper identifies the 'narrative puzzle' as a key concept: players assemble story information across repeated attempts, gathering knowledge and solving problems from loop to loop.