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Now You're Playing with Graphics Processing Power: Nvidia and the Discursive Pleasure of Artificial Intelligence
The document analyzes Nvidia's corporate communication history, particularly its use of the "flywheel metaphor," to understand its transition from a gaming-focused company to a leader in Artificial Intelligence infrastructure.
- Nvidia's 'flywheel' metaphor, central to the paper, casts video games as the original high-volume, computationally demanding market that financed the research behind GPUs, and the paper uses it as an entry point for analyzing the company's shift from PC gaming to AI data center infrastructure.
- The paper traces a branding shift beginning around 2015, in which gaming gradually gave way to AI infrastructure as Nvidia's central focus, alongside a growing emphasis on CEO Jensen Huang's personal brand.
- Nvidia coined the term 'graphics processing unit' in 1999, initially aimed at hardware reviewers and later introducing the GPU concept to a broader public.
Valuable Childhoods: Nostalgia, Intersectionalities, and Vintage Game Fairs
This paper explores the complex interplay of nostalgia, intersectionality, and the commercialization of retro gaming, focusing on how personal childhood memories of games are re-negotiated in the context of modern vintage game markets.
- The paper argues that nostalgia for retro games is strongly sensorial, shaped by the tactile handling of cartridges, the location of play, and the company kept during it, and that these affective memories diverge sharply from the monetary value the same objects carry in the secondary resale market.
- Based on a duoethnography of two UCL researchers' childhoods in Brazil and England, the authors found their tactile recollections of Sega Mega Drive play were markedly similar despite differing national and social contexts.
- The authors interpret this similarity as evidence that class and shared material experience may matter as much as ethnicity, nationality, or gender in shaping gaming memory, and therefore advocate interconnected rather than nationally bounded approaches to game history.
Right Click to De-escalate: Call of Duty and Turning Propaganda into Pleasure
This paper offers a case study of the Call of Duty franchise, focusing mainly on the Modern Warfare series, to examine how the pleasurable mechanics of first-person shooters carry political messaging about armed conflict.
- The paper argues that Call of Duty's pleasurable first-person mechanics carry political messaging about war, drawing on Ian Bogost's concept of procedural rhetoric, and that fast, embodied gameplay leaves players little room for critical distance from these claims.
- Modern Warfare II is cited for a de-escalation prompt on the US-Mexico border mission that is undercut by the player aiming weapons at panicked civilians, and for an AC-130 sequence that lets players destroy schools and residential buildings without the campaign acknowledging any breach of the laws of war.
- The multiplayer Killstreak system, which includes white phosphorus alongside conventional rewards, is read as normalizing questionable weapons.
Pleasures Under Pressure: Misogyny, Moral Outrage, and Creative Contraction in Contemporary Chinese Game Culture
The document examines the impact of misogyny, moral outrage, and gendered power dynamics on creative expression and player experience within contemporary Chinese game culture.
- The 2024 backlash against Black Myth: Wukong centred on resurfaced remarks by the game's art director and sexually suggestive recruitment material, and it extended to commentators who had praised the game while treating male players as the default audience.
- Because Black Myth: Wukong was a national industrial milestone, gender criticism was often read as an attack on China's rising game industry rather than as a question of representation and respect.
- A commentator's audience fell by more than 400,000 after he watched a reveal of a miHoYo title with a contested record on gender, illustrating the commercial cost of participating in these disputes.
Aiōn and Digital Play: Toward a Cosmo-Phenomenological Approach
This paper proposes a cosmo-phenomenological framework for understanding digital play, utilizing the metaphor of Aiōn from Heraclitus and Fink.
- The paper frames digital play as an ontological principle rather than mere entertainment, arguing that gameplay is a mode of being-in-the-world structured by rhythmic attunement, sensory engagement, imagination, and non-linear lived temporality.
- Its central conceptual tool is Aiōn, the ever-becoming child from Heraclitus as reinterpreted by Eugen Fink, which the author uses to clarify how players inhabit, perceive, and co-create game worlds.
- The paper contrasts Aiōn with Chronos, the measurable time of everyday life, arguing that gameplay produces a continuously transforming present of lived intensities rather than a departure from linear time.
What Now?: Ecogames after Missed Climate Targets
This conference paper by Conor McKeown argues that ecogames scholarship must shift from a focus on preservation and damage limitation toward engagement with the lived realities of an already-changing climate, now that overshooting the Paris 1.5°C target is effectively acknowledged as inevitable.
- McKeown argues ecogames scholarship must shift from preservation and damage limitation toward engaging with the lived realities of an already-changing climate, since overshooting the Paris 1.5°C target is effectively acknowledged as inevitable.
- He contends that existing ecogames work remains oriented toward hopeful, forward-looking reforms of game design and industry practice and is insufficiently anchored in present climate catastrophe.
- The paper proposes that games addressing livability, citizenship, and practical adaptation should count as ecogames, with climate migration identified as the most pressing concern.
Mapping Eco(politics) in Ecogames
The primary objective of this paper is to develop a structural map of eco(political) elements within ecogames to better understand how ecological aspects are configured and to identify ecopolitical patterns.
- The paper proposes a structural mapping tool for the political dimensions of ecological content in video games, treating ecology and politics as a single assemblage marked "eco(politics)."
- The central framework maps ecogame content onto Aarseth and Grabarczyk's four-layer game ontology: physical, communicational, structural, and mental.
- The approach is grounded in biopolitical theory and benchmarked against four ecopolitical conceptualizations: Verena Conley's ecofeminist revolution, Blühdorn and Welsh's account of greenwashing and simulation politics, Stoett and Mulligan's multi-layered decentralized model of agency, and Kuperus's experiential non-human-centered reading.
How Accessible QTE Inputs Reshape Suspense Trajectories in Survival Horror Games
The document explores how accessible Quick-Time Event (QTE) input options, specifically the "hold-to-continue" alternative to traditional "button-mashing," reshape the player's suspense trajectory in survival horror video games.
- The paper argues that accessible input modes for a survival horror QTE, such as hold-to-continue versus rapid button-mashing, can reshape the suspense trajectory of the same in-game event rather than being neutral barrier removals.
- Using a single illustrative case from The Last of Us Part II (a ten-second QTE where Ellie is pinned to a window ledge), the author constructs two conceptual suspense curves to model the differences.
- Button-mashing is hypothesised to produce sharper suspense spikes during the ascent because repeated inputs multiply potential failure points and raise perceived likelihood of an undesirable outcome.
Neurodivergent Pleasures in Game Environmental Design
This extended abstract outlines a study focused on understanding and improving cognitive accessibility in game environmental design for neurodivergent players, particularly those with ADHD.
- Environmental design elements such as spatial composition, lighting, color, and visual hierarchy function as tools that distribute information and regulate attention, rather than serving only decorative purposes.
- The authors propose splitting ADHD into its clinical subtypes (ADHD-HI, ADHD-I, and ADHD-C) so that design guidance can be matched to distinct needs such as low-distraction environments, moderate sensory variation, or balanced signaling.
- For inattentive profiles, sparse indexical cues like visual disruptions or decal-based markers can attract curiosity and embed narrative content, whereas hyperactive-impulsive profiles are better served by challenge-reward loops and immediate feedback than by environmental storytelling.
Digital Gaming, Disability, and Social Capital: Understanding Intersectional Pleasures and Community Formation
This research program investigates how adults with acquired brain injury (ABI) engage with digital gaming communities and how these environments foster social connection, pleasure, and belonging.
- The report frames pleasure in gaming as affective and relational rather than merely recreational, arguing that disabled players actively build social meaning through games, not only encounter accessibility barriers.
- Acquired brain injury (ABI) is used as a standpoint for studying disabled gaming: fatigue, mobility limits, communication changes, and stigma restrict social and leisure participation, making structured, low-barrier games potentially well suited to this population.
- Prior research on disabled gamers and people with spinal cord injury suggests online play can reduce isolation and provide valued opportunities for connection and agency, though the authors stress systematic evidence for ABI populations is still needed.
The Absent Teacher in Eco-Games: A Theoretical Framework for Teacher Integration in Eco-Games
This theoretical framework examines the critical role of teacher integration in eco-games, arguing that the absence of pedagogical support leads to shallow engagement and hinders the translation of gameplay into epistemic understanding.
- Eco-games are typically designed as self-contained pedagogical tools, leaving a critical gap in teacher mediation, and the authors argue this absence produces shallow engagement with systems thinking.
- The argument rests on a systematic literature review of 175 empirical studies plus a theoretical re-analysis of that dataset, which recoded teacher involvement into three roles: gatekeeper, facilitator, and absent.
- The authors propose "resilient flow" as the design target: sustained engagement achieved by scaffolding difficulty rather than removing it, since seamless-flow games eliminate the productive friction teachers provide.
Make Games No One Wants to Play
The document explores the purpose and player experience of "serious games," which include educational, activist, biomedical, and intentionally uncomfortable games, challenging the conventional notion that all games must prioritize fun.
- The paper asks whether all games must prioritize fun, contrasting Fullerton's player-centered orthodoxy with critical and "user-unfriendly" design approaches from Wilson, Sicart, and Bogost that treat provocation and designer-player dialogue as legitimate goals.
- Its central methodological contribution is "thick discomfort," adapted from Geertz's thick description, which asks players to reflect on and report their own discomfort rather than having observers interpret their responses.
- The approach is a form of autoethnography intended to reveal what players retain after a play session and how a game's message affects them.