Global reports and market data
Documents
![Cover of A Ludic PSY AI-Game-Engine for Utopia: Exploring Pl[AI] for a Viable Future](https://files.gameindustrylibrary.com/thumbnails/51049/page-1.png)
A Ludic PSY AI-Game-Engine for Utopia: Exploring Pl[AI] for a Viable Future
The paper explores human-AI co-creation through art-based gaming, focusing on the "Ludic PSY AI-Game-Engine" research project.
- The Ludic PSY AI-Game-Engine, built with the open-source Godot Engine and a Wave Function Collapse algorithm, lets players co-create utopian environments with AI and is framed through a "Ludic method" that casts participants as ludic citizen researchers reflecting on ethics, climate change, and AI's emancipatory potential.
- A 52-day public exhibition in Vienna in 2025 drew 527 participants, where Facial Recognition Technology personalized gameplay; the authors deliberately used it to make privacy and surveillance subjects of artistic and ethical inquiry.
- Initial reluctance toward facial recognition shifted to intrigue and acceptance once data processing was explained, and more than two-thirds of players attempted to trick the system.
Shut Up and Let Us Make the Game: Game Developers, Preserving Games, and the Dynamics of Corporate Governance
This research project investigates the preservation of live-service videogames, focusing on the critical role of game developers and the impact of corporate governance.
- Developers are often the most reliable source of game history, yet non-disclosure agreements, continually overwriting monetisation models, and corporate cultures that subsume individual credit separate them from the products of their labour, posing a significant obstacle to game preservation.
- This DiGRA 2026 paper by Will Butler (Bath Space University) is an ethnographic pilot study centred on Jagex in Cambridge, creators of RuneScape and Old School RuneScape, based on 15 interviews with developers, archivists, wiki editors, and former staff, with further interviews planned.
- The study was limited by industry secrecy and contractual restrictions that restricted access to some key project contexts, leaving it at the tension between commercial interests and research participation.
Reshaping Failure: The Design of Hospites Teatro's Theatre Games
The document explores how Hospites Teatro, a Bologna-based theatre group founded in 2018, designs theatre games to reframe the concept of failure within pedagogical contexts.
- Hospites Teatro, a Bologna-based theatre group founded in 2018, designs its theatre games to reframe players' relationship with failure, treating playfulness as a counter to the solemnity and fear of error common in theatre training.
- The study centres on Teatrario, the group's weekly course, where games are progressively intensified to sustain a state of flow and mistakes are deliberately built into play rather than treated as endpoints.
- In a revised version of the game Tag, the elimination rule that determined success and failure was removed, and mistakes are celebrated with a playful gesture so that play can continue.
Entropic Temporality & Care-Based Agency in Eco-Survival Games
The document explores how eco-survival games foster ethical play through "entropic temporality," defined as time experienced through decay, scarcity, and systemic breakdown, which encourages care-based agency rather than conquest.
- The paper argues that eco-survival games use entropic temporality (time experienced as decay, scarcity, and systemic breakdown) as a structural principle that frames ethical play around care rather than conquest-driven mastery.
- It proposes 'relational position' (the player's role as administrator, cohabitant, cultural outsider, or solitary survivor) as a central analytic variable that determines which forms of care become possible or compromised.
- The authors identify four modalities of care across the corpus: distributive care in Frostpunk, communal care in This War of Mine, mitigative care in Green Hell, and embodied care in The Long Dark.
Towards a New Paradigm for Understanding Men and Masculinity in Gaming
The document proposes a new research paradigm for understanding men and masculinity in gaming, moving beyond a pessimistic focus on hegemonic masculinity to acknowledge the diversity of men's experiences and their navigation of gendered power structures.
- The paper argues that existing scholarship on men and masculinity in gaming is overly reliant on frameworks such as hegemonic, hybrid, and geek/gamer masculinity, and too pessimistic about the potential for change, and proposes a new paradigm centered on how men actually encounter and perform gender in game cultures.
- The new paradigm accounts for both persistent gendered power structures and substantial diversity among men and across gaming communities, emphasizing the ambivalences, contradictions, and everyday messiness of men's experiences rather than categorical narratives.
- The empirical basis is interview and qualitative questionnaire data from men of different ages in Finland and Norway, two Nordic countries with comparatively high gender equality, and the authors describe these studies as ongoing and use them as a starting point for theory rather than a generalizable account.
Absent Pleasures or Pleasurable Absence? Player Engagement in Minimalist Retro Horror Games
This paper investigates the concept of "pleasure through absence" in minimalist retro horror games, arguing that the deliberate lack of a main agent, coherent narrative, clear objectives, and ludic challenges in these games fosters pleasurable player engagement.
- The paper uses the 2019 freeware and 2025 full release of No Players Online as its central case to argue that deliberately withholding conventional elements (coherent narrative, clear objectives, a central protagonist) invites players to imaginatively fill gaps, reframing absence as a source of engagement rather than a deficiency.
- Drawing on narratological concepts of undernarration and disnarration, the authors describe absence as a form of narrative and ludic seduction that sustains curiosity.
- The subgenre (labeled analog, creepy, glitch, interface, or meta horror) is linked to 1990s-era references such as early PC and console interfaces, found footage, creepypasta, and alternate reality games.
Tracing Gender Affordances in Avatar Customization: A Methodological Framework
The document proposes a methodological framework for analyzing gender affordances in contemporary avatar customization systems, addressing the challenge of studying gender expression in increasingly complex and non-binary game interfaces.
- Gender in avatar customization systems is not encoded in a single toggle but is distributed across interacting options, boundaries, and defaults, so analysis focused on visible gender widgets misses how gender is actually constituted.
- Han critiques McArthur et al.'s Avatar Affordance Framework for focusing too narrowly on visible widgets, and builds on Butler's notion of performatively constituted gender and Iantorno and Consalvo's work on intersecting class, race, and gender in CRPG character creators.
- The proposed framework rests on four analytical lenses: Gender-Related Options, Option Interactions and Navigational Distance, Boundaries of Gender Expression, and Defaults and Invisible Rules.
Games Against Death
The document examines how video games function as a contemporary space for collective mourning and ritualized responses to death, particularly in "de-ritualized" Western societies.
- Martin Gibbs documents how Destiny players responded to the unexpected death of actor Lance Reddick, who voiced the non-player character Commander Zavala, in March 2023, with hundreds gathering around Zavala in The Tower hub within days.
- Players expressed mourning through emotes such as kneeling, saluting and the "Humanity's Shield" gesture, spell and weapon effects mimicking candlelight vigils, repetition of Zavala's catchphrase "Eyes up, Guardian", and tributes shared on subreddits and other social media.
- The paper frames these practices as "words against death," drawing on Douglas Davies' concept of symbolic performances that help people resist the finality of death and its psychological and social disruption.
Asymmetric Play in a Competitive Landscape: Attitudes and Fairness
This document outlines a research project investigating the implementation and perception of fairness in asymmetric accessibility adaptations within competitive video games, particularly for blind and partially sighted players.
- Accessibility efforts have largely bypassed competitive multiplayer games, which often offer little assistance and can drive some blind and partially sighted players away from the genre.
- The authors propose asymmetric design, inspired by the handicap system in competitive sailing, as a route to inclusion grounded in United Nations disability principles, and frame fairness through Woodruff's factors of equality, agreement, and transparency.
- Prior work by Grabski et al. (2016) found that enjoyment between sighted and partially sighted players converged over repeated rounds of play.
Mythic Alternatives: Mythological Mechanics Beyond Violence
The document, "Mythic Alternatives: Mythological Mechanics Beyond Violence," explores how mythological video games can incorporate non-violent mechanics to represent mythic narratives, challenging the prevalent reliance on combat in the genre.
- Violence is the default mechanic in mythological video games, a pattern the authors tie both to mainstream gaming trends and to the violent episodes found in many myths themselves.
- The paper argues that games can move beyond combat by translating mythic motifs into core mechanics, and it surveys five categories: metamorphosis, heroism, extraordinary movement, dying and rising, and interactions between gods and mortals.
- Heroism is modeled through systems such as the kleos meter in Warriors: Legends of Troy and the aristeiai in A Total War Saga: Troy, which represent the exceptional, exemplary hero.
Daily Rituals and Player Belonging in Video Games: The Sacrifice System in Stardew Valley Community Center Reconstruction
This study investigates how daily, non-sacred rituals in video games foster a sense of player belonging, focusing on the "sacrifice system" in Stardew Valley's Community Center reconstruction.
- The study argues that everyday, low-threshold daily rituals in single-player games like Stardew Valley can generate emotional belonging comparable to the special ritual events of massively multiplayer games, extending ritual theory to simulation and management games.
- Based on in-depth interviews with 27 players (16 women, 11 men, ages 18 to 40) who each logged over 30 hours of play, recruited via the Chinese platform Xiaohongshu, with interviews averaging about 1.5 hours.
- Grounded-theory analysis of 15 transcripts produced 1,277 initial codes consolidated into seven core categories, with seven further transcripts reserved to test theoretical saturation.
Aesthetics of Prohibition: Moral Transgression, Control, and Pleasure in Political Games
This paper examines how political and historical games transform legal and moral constraints into aesthetic and affective experiences, focusing on the concept of "juridical play."
- The paper introduces "juridical play": political and historical games can convert legal and moral constraint into aesthetic and affective pleasure, with player awareness of both ludic rules and external prohibitions becoming part of the ethical experience.
- Its central case is German §86a StGB, which criminalised unconstitutional symbols such as swastikas, and the USK's 2018 reinterpretation that previously excluded digital games from the social adequacy clause granted to art, science, and education.
- Attentat 1942, developed before the 2018 reinterpretation and initially banned in Germany, uses a hybrid documentary structure of live-action interviews, archival footage, and interactive sequences, with its force lying in the silences where history cannot be pictorially represented.