Global reports and market data
Documents
From Policy to Paradox: Diversity Washing, Policy Failures, and the Limits of Authentic Intersectional Pleasure in the European Video Game Industry
This extended abstract from the Horizon Europe GAMEHEARTS project critically examines the systemic failure of inclusiveness within the European Video Game Industry Ecosystem (EVGIE).
- The paper argues that weak institutional frameworks and formalised organisational mechanisms encourage superficial compliance with inclusivity goals, a practice it terms "Diversity Washing", with inclusivity often imposed to satisfy financing and reporting requirements rather than arising from grassroots creativity.
- The study's evidence base combines a systematic review of 61 academic publications, analysis of 55 industry reports and 18 statistical reports, and nine comparative case studies of games incorporating European cultural heritage.
- A 2024 quantitative survey of 1,270 European video game developers, supplemented by 27 in-depth interviews, three national and one international design thinking marathons (72 participants), and focus groups with eight practitioners from Austria, Ireland, Sweden, and Poland, forms the empirical core of the research.
Designing Hybrid Agency: AI-Mech Collaboration in Contemporary Mecha Games
The research explores how contemporary mecha games construct AI-mech units as sites of hybrid agency, where initiative, responsibility, and risk are distributed between human and non-human actors through game rules, automation thresholds, and representational cues.
- The paper reframes AI-controlled mechs in games as co-acting subjects ('hybrid agency') whose decisions directly shape what the player can do, rather than as enemy routines, scripted companions, or background coordination systems.
- Its analysis rests on three titles spanning genres: Titanfall 2 (first-person shooter), Daemon X Machina (third-person mech action), and BattleTech (turn-based tactics), each built on a human pilot collaborating with a semi-autonomous war machine.
- Initiative shifts between pilot and machine through mech takeovers, automated follow-up actions, and quieter reallocations via turn order and accuracy thresholds, often without the player noticing the transfer.
Portraying Unfavorable Sociocultural Circumstances Through the Videoludic Picaresque
This extended abstract proposes an analysis of how contemporary sociocultural challenges are depicted through the "videoludic picaresque," drawing parallels with picaresque literature's historical role in portraying marginalized lives.
- The paper argues that the videoludic picaresque continues a centuries-old tradition: picaresque fiction, from sixteenth-century Spain onward, served as an early form of intersectional storytelling addressing class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality.
- The author proposes that urban density, visible economic disparity, and institutional corruption, prominent in early modern picaresque novels, closely parallel present-day conditions, which is a key reason for the rogue's renewed popularity in games.
- The rogue protagonist is framed as a vehicle for exploring how identities are treated within oppressive systems, with games shaped by their historical moment in the same way early literature was.
Exploring Critical Utopian Gaming Pedagogy in a Youth Club in Barcelona
This study explores the integration of video games into critical utopian pedagogy to help youth imagine alternative futures, addressing the perceived collapse of future imaginaries amidst global crises.
- The pedagogical design of a session mattered more than which game was chosen: facilitation, debriefing, and structured dialogue were the key drivers of critical reflection.
- Dystopian games were effective at prompting critique of socio-political issues but weaker at inspiring envisioned alternative futures.
- Architectural-mode games such as Townscaper and The Sims 4 helped participants articulate concrete future visions rooted in their own everyday experiences.
Landfill: Designing for Low-Carbon Pleasures
The document details the design and production of "Landfill" (2026), a durational deck-building videogame hosted on Solar Server, a solar-powered web server for low-carbon games.
- The paper presents Landfill, a durational deck-building game hosted on Solar Server, a solar-powered web server built to host low-carbon games, as a case study in designing for low-carbon leisure.
- Its central argument is that a game's eco-consciousness lies less in persuasive or educational messaging than in how it is created and shared, with its environmental intervention being a modest carbon footprint and autonomous, solar-powered infrastructure.
- The work draws on degrowth theory, including Kohei Saito's argument that green economic growth can still increase emissions and Kate Soper's concept of "alternative hedonism," which treats reduced consumption as a source of new pleasures rather than sacrifice.
Misleading Omissions of Loot Box Presence Disclosures: Widespread Unfair Commercial Practices in Video Game Advertising on Social Media in Ireland and the EU
This study investigates the compliance of video game advertising on social media with EU consumer law regarding the disclosure of loot box presence, focusing on Ireland.
- Among 1,417 social media ads for 147 loot-box games targeting Ireland, 86.3% failed to disclose in-game purchases generally and 88.6% failed to disclose loot boxes specifically, indicating widespread non-compliance with EU consumer law.
- Only 34 of 1,417 ads (2.4%) fully complied with consumer law, and only five of 147 games visually prominently disclosed loot box presence in at least one advertisement.
- Of the disclosures that did appear, roughly four in five were visually obscured and not reasonably prominent, typically small, faint text on low-contrast backgrounds.
Gacha Game Collaborations and the Circulation of Affective Value
The document analyzes cross-media collaborations within China's mobile gacha game sector, arguing that these events function as an "affective infrastructure" that circulates emotions across various domains, converting them into economic, cultural, and symbolic value.
- Collaborations in China's mobile gacha games are framed as affective infrastructure that moves and redirects existing emotional attachments across commercial, cultural, and institutional domains, rather than as mere marketing or fan service.
- The study identifies three collaboration modes: brand and retail co-promotions that channel affect toward consumption, culture- and state-oriented partnerships that redirect affect toward cultural legitimacy, and inter-game crossovers that extend the lifespan of fan attachments.
- A 2024 romance game partnership with a fast-food chain is cited as an example of turning purchasing into a pleasurable and socially performative act.
Shaping Interactions and Experiences: Investigating the Effects of a Game-Specific Custom Controller on Player Experience in a Digital Game Environment
This research explores the influence of game-specific custom controllers on player experience within digital game environments.
- A pilot study of 32 game design students found that a 3D-printed, game-specific custom controller produced an overall NASA-TLX workload similar to a conventional mouse (54.90 versus 50.58), but significantly higher temporal demand, effort, and physical demand.
- Players using the custom controller completed the game faster, took less damage, and destroyed fewer submarines, which the authors interpret as evidence of a more movement-focused playstyle.
- Custom controller users showed tighter, more consistent performance distributions, which the authors partly attribute to varying mouse proficiency among participants in the control group.
Six Positive Words for Talking about Theory in Games Research: In Pursuit of Interdisciplinarity
The document proposes a framework of six positive words—importance, interestingness, actionability, generality, simplicity, and accuracy—to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue and evaluation of theories within games research.
- The paper proposes six positive descriptors of theory (importance, interestingness, actionability, generality, simplicity, and accuracy) as a shared vocabulary for discussing theory in games research, aiming to foster interdisciplinary dialogue without requiring agreement on ontology.
- The authors argue games research is best understood as a multidisciplinary field rather than a unified discipline, and reject play-centred agendas, a unified "game science," ontological inventories, and anti- or postdisciplinary stances as exclusionary or insufficiently precise.
- The six dimensions derive from Carton's (2025) meta-synthesis of 284 accounts of "strong" theory.
From Hopscotch to Digital Games: The Pleasure and Dilemma of Interactivity
The document, "From Hopscotch to Digital Games: The Pleasure and Dilemma of Interactivity," examines the evolution and inherent challenges of interactive experiences, using Julio Cortázar's novel Hopscotch as a foundational case study and extending its analysis to digital games.
- The paper's central thesis is that interactivity creates both pleasure and a structural dilemma: authorial power is genuinely redistributed to readers and players, but only within bounds, generating lasting anxiety for novelists and designers about how authorship should be shared.
- Pan treats this author-reader tension not as a failure to be resolved but as a productive condition that refines interactive design over time.
- Using Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch as its primary case, the paper examines its three-part structure of 155 chapters offering multiple reading paths, and frames the shift from reader-as-audience to reader-as-player as the novel's defining innovation.
Glitching Objects as Temporal Mediators: Hyperobject Temporality in NORCO
The document analyzes how the narrative game NORCO employs "glitching objects" to mediate player perception of "hyperobjects," specifically petrochemical contamination and its associated "slow violence."
- The article argues that malfunctioning everyday objects in the 2022 game NORCO make the slow, distributed violence of petrochemical contamination felt within intimate domestic space, a function it defines as "temporal mediation."
- The author proposes a four-criteria definition of temporal mediation, building on Morton's hyperobjects, op de Beke's petroduration, Fisher's the eerie, and Wasserman's ephemera.
- The analysis centres on four objects: a domestic window staging past floods and a prophesied fourth flood, household ephemera, a defective television broadcasting corrupted memories, and a hybrid Virgin Mary statue.
Identity Play as Identity Work: Representation, Identity Integration, and Possible Selves in Digital Games
The document, "Identity Play as Identity Work: Representation, Identity Integration, and Possible Selves in Digital Games," examines how marginalized players, specifically LGBTQ+, disabled, and neurodivergent individuals, engage with digital games for identity exploration and integration.
- The authors argue representation in games is not reducible to demographic visibility, but is evaluated across accessibility, expressive customization, and narrative and relational design.
- Players treat accessibility features and customization not as optional extras but as foundational conditions for imagining and inhabiting alternate selves.
- The study proposes the "Representation Triad" of structural (accessibility and pacing), aesthetic (visible identity cues), and experiential (narrative, relational, and affective alignment) representation, with structural accessibility as the precondition for participation.