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9,321 documents·389 writers·28,548 charts and tables
Documents
Whitepaper5 pages
Player Experience of Hybridity in a Narrative Boardgame
This study investigates how hybrid Storytelling and Informing functions influence player experience (PX) in narrative boardgames.
- Hybrid digital tools for Storytelling and Informing shape player experience in narrative boardgames, a category a 2023 review of BoardGameGeek titles found to be heavily reliant on Storytelling mechanisms, yet which had received little research attention.
- The study was a qualitative case study of Adventure Games: The Volcanic Island, a cooperative card-based game with a companion app, in which eight self-formed groups totaling 29 players played the first of four chapters.
- Players used the app for the first fifteen minutes and then freely chose between app, storybook, or both, with post-game interviews analysed via reflexive thematic analysis alongside session recordings and researcher notes.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
Tarot, Money, and Mnemonics: Histories of Card Games Beyond Quantifiable-Outcome Games
The document challenges the assumed distinction between quantifiable-outcome Tarot games and Tarot oracle games (cartomancy), arguing that both share fundamental "ludemes" or conceptual building blocks.
- The paper argues that the conventional divide between quantifiable-outcome card games and oracular or divinatory Tarot dissolves when one looks for shared conceptual building blocks (ludemes), and that this divide reflects culturally specific, bourgeois-influenced assumptions.
- It critiques rule-centric formalist histories (by scholars such as Dummett, Farley, and Parlett) as presenting a simplified, Anglo-European narrative, and instead foregrounds agency as the medium of games, proposing that cartomancy, trading, and mnemonic practices be studied as games in their own right.
- The historical argument traces playing cards from Tang Dynasty China, where they emerged alongside woodblock printing and paper money, through thirteenth-century Mamluk Egypt, and into Europe via Venice in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper5 pages
Playable Folklore: Digital Games and the Representation of Folklore and Cultural Heritage
This paper examines how digital games represent folklore and cultural heritage, arguing that the translation of living, variable cultural processes into codified, rule-based systems introduces structural and ethical tensions.
- Translating living, variable folklore into codified, rule-based game systems creates structural and ethical tensions, chiefly that tradition becomes stabilised as 'heritage' when it is managed or staged for external consumption.
- The paper proposes 'playable folklore' as a lens that treats games not as display cases for heritage but as cultural systems in which traditions are selected, stabilised, transformed, and contested.
- Its theoretical framework rests on four concepts: cultural presence, folk mechanics, digital folklore, and mnemonic hegemony.
University of MaltaJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
Intersectional Pleasures: Reframing the Value of BIPOC Game Studies and Production
The document "Intersectional Pleasures: Reframing the Value of BIPOC Game Studies and Production" argues that the value of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) game studies and game-making practices should be understood through the lens of "intersectional pleasures" rather than traditional metrics like economic…
- The paper argues that BIPOC game studies and BIPOC-led production should be valued through three forms of pleasure: pleasure in community, pleasure in production, and pleasure of understanding, rather than only through economic success, player base size, or citation counts.
- The author contends these affective and communal rewards are fundamentally valuable and routinely overlooked in capital-focused evaluations of creative and scholarly work.
- Newzoo (2022) data cited in the paper show 42% of U.K. respondents and 51% of U.S. respondents consider diversity, equity, and inclusion important, and about 41.6% of teen players seek diverse representation when choosing a game.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
The Foreigner, The Joker: Dual Identity of Migrant Game Industry Workers in South Korea
This research explores the experiences of migrant game industry workers in South Korea, a country with a prominent yet culturally homogeneous game development sector.
- South Korea's large, established domestic game industry remains exceptionally homogeneous in its workforce, and its domestic-centric ecosystem, with abundant local educational institutions and a restrictive immigration system, reduces the need to recruit foreign workers.
- The study draws on eleven semi-structured interview transcripts collected since 2022 from seven migrant game workers, two of whom took part in longitudinal follow-up sessions; it is presented as work-in-progress research for DiGRA 2026 and framed as a comparative case study following earlier research on expatriate game workers in Finland.
- Most interviewees had no game industry experience before migrating and most arrived for reasons unrelated to games, yet they saw the industry as offering better career prospects, pay, and living standards than other sectors open to foreigners.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
Playing with the Past: The Pleasures of Nostalgic Design with Playdate
The document analyzes the role of intentional nostalgic design in the Playdate game system, exploring its effects on player and creator communities and its potential to foster an alternative vision for gaming's past and future.
- The paper frames nostalgia in the Playdate console (Panic Inc., conceived 2019) as a deliberate, value-laden design strategy rather than a mere aesthetic choice, shaping player pleasure, community formation, and the political economy of game production.
- Drawing on Garda's distinction, the authors classify Playdate as 'reflective' rather than 'restorative' nostalgia, imagining alternative times and places to promote a utopian vision of independent gaming.
- The study is a multimethod project combining platform analysis, discourse analysis of the Playdate developer forum's Games section, and planned interviews with twenty console and game developers scheduled for completion in 2026, so its conclusions are provisional.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper5 pages
"Gotta Get 'Em All!": A Game About Billionaires and Climate Obstruction
This paper presents a case study of "Gotta Get 'Em All!", an analog collaborative game designed to foster critical literacy regarding climate obstruction by extremely wealthy individuals.
- The paper presents "Gotta get 'em all!", an analog collaborative tabletop game about climate obstruction (future actions that prevent effective climate response), testing whether active literacy through play can move players from hegemonic capitalist worldviews toward critical literacy.
- The authors ground the project in the premise that extreme wealth and powerful vested interests act as barriers to climate action, citing reporting on ultra-wealthy individuals investing in private apocalypse bunkers as evidence this concern has become observable practice.
- In the game, players cast as assassins research a wealthy target on their phones and craft a wanted poster arguing why that person should be stopped first; teams pitch targets and the group votes on the most compelling case.
DiGRAJun 2026
Report4 pages
Producing Games, Reproducing Inequalities: Gender and Labour in the Argentine Video Game Market
This paper analyzes gender inequalities within the Argentine video game industry, aiming to provide empirical evidence and critical analysis to foster a more inclusive and equitable local ecosystem.
- Women make up roughly 46% of the global gaming community but held only about 30% of video game industry employment positions in 2021, and more than half face harassment and online abuse affecting both their play and professional visibility.
- The Argentine video game sector has grown substantially over two decades yet reproduces, and in some respects intensifies, the gendered hierarchies found in the wider software and IT services economy.
- No official, systematised statistics exist for the Argentine video game sector: games lack a dedicated intellectual property category and are dispersed across national accounting frameworks, including the Culture Satellite Account and technological classifications.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper3 pages
Female Machamp, Male Lopunny, and Bearded Dragon Gym Leaders Who May Like It Rough: Identitarian Openness in Pokémon
The paper argues that the Pokémon franchise, encompassing its video games, anime, and other cultural texts, functions as a space of "identitarian semantic openness."
- The paper argues that Pokémon's gender, sex, and sexuality are deliberately loosely connected or left unspecified, and it treats this 'identitarian semantic openness' as a generative resource rather than a flaw.
- The authors claim the franchise decouples identity traits usually treated as inseparable, leaving ideological gaps that audiences can fill in varied and often queer ways.
- The analysis organizes this openness into three forms: gendered human figures (Drayden, Bruno, Drake) without readable sexuality, characters resisting easy gender categorization (Bugsy), and creatures whose appearances don't match normative expectations for their sex (Machamp, Lopunny, Gardevoir, Meowscarada).
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
The Gendered Differences in the Connections Between Game Streaming and Gaming Motivations Throughout Adolescence
This study investigates the gendered differences in the relationship between game streaming and gaming motivations, particularly social gaming, throughout adolescence.
- For girls, watching game streams is associated with social gaming, whereas for other respondents the relationship runs in the opposite direction, making the link between streaming and social play strongly gender-dependent.
- The longitudinal study tracked 4,922 children and young people aged 11 to 18 in Helsinki from 2019 to 2022 using a random intercept cross-lagged panel model grounded in self-determination theory.
- Watching streams was the strongest predictor of future watching for all respondents, indicating that streaming habits are highly persistent over time.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper1 page
Feeling With, or Feeling Like? Empathy, Identification, and the Pleasures of Self-Reflection in Story-Driven Games
The study investigates the intersection of empathy, pleasure, and identity in players' experiences with story-driven games, challenging the prevalent notion of "empathy games" as primarily fostering understanding of marginalized others.
- The paper argues that empathy in story-driven games often serves players' own moral and reflective projects rather than sustained engagement with others' structural disadvantage, challenging the games industry's framing of 'empathy games' as proof of cultural value.
- Based on an online qualitative survey of 20 adult players analysed through reflexive thematic analysis, the study identifies three interrelated themes: morality, identification, and personal growth.
- Players reported taking pleasure in moral deliberation itself, with ethical choices functioning as a source of engagement in their own right.
DiGRAJun 2026
Whitepaper4 pages
Embodied Engagement with Environmental Storytelling in Walking Simulators: A Case Study of What Remains of Edith Finch
This analysis investigates embodied engagement with environmental storytelling (ES) in walking simulators, focusing on how players intuitively absorb narrative information through physical interaction with game spaces.
- The paper argues that players absorb environmental storytelling intuitively and bodily while navigating a walking simulator, rather than deliberately searching for narrative evidence like archaeologists, offering an embodied complement to existing archaeological and indexical frameworks.
- The analysis is grounded in 4E cognition theory, which holds that cognition unfolds through physical interaction with the environment, and uses playthrough poetics as its method.
- The study is based on a single-player, first-person interpretive account drawn from the author's own gameplay, documented via field notes and screen recordings, so it is framed as a avenue for inquiry rather than a comprehensive account of environmental storytelling.
DiGRAJun 2026