Global reports and market data
Documents
Designing Open Dialogue Systems for LLM-Based NPCs
The document introduces an "open dialogue system" for video game Non-Player Characters (NPCs) that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate dynamic, player-driven conversations, aiming for a more natural and immersive experience than traditional pre-scripted options.
- The paper proposes free-form typed dialogue with NPCs, where an LLM generates responses under pre-written "directing prompts" that constrain behavior, positioning this against historical text-parser and menu-based dialogue systems.
- Its central thesis is that LLM reasoning, including step-by-step and causal reasoning, lets game state change through qualitative semantic judgments rather than numerical win conditions.
- Rather than seeking deterministic outputs, the authors treat both player input and model output as non-deterministic and achieve predictability through system-level instructions that shape every response.
Racial Recursivity as Critical Race Game Studies Methodology
The document introduces "racial recursivity" as a critical race game studies methodology, proposing it as a bridge between formalist and cultural analyses of video games.
- Anderson proposes 'racial recursivity' as a systematic methodology for critical race game studies that bridges formalist and cultural approaches, arguing that games and racial formations are both structured by repetition that naturalizes mechanics, narrative devices, and visual conventions.
- The method analyzes repetition at three levels: the game's internal structures, the medium as a whole, and wider cultural circulation, and is designed to be repeatable across titles, including those with no overt racial themes.
- Anderson's case study of BioShock argues that its 'A man chooses, a slave obeys' twist, its critique of Ayn Rand, and its Little Sister harvesting mechanic carry racial logics despite lacking explicit racial content.
Between Diverse Industry and Game Characters: An Analysis of Tool-based Representation Design
The analysis examines the King's Diversity Space (KDS) tool, a collaborative effort between King, Activision Blizzard, and the MIT Game Lab, intended to foster inclusive character design within the global games industry.
- The King's Diversity Space (KDS) was a web-based inclusive character creation tool developed through a collaboration between King, Activision Blizzard, and the MIT Game Lab, with characters tied to Overwatch 2.
- The tool was conceived as an iterative design aid rather than a measurement instrument, but Activision Blizzard's promotional framing presented it as a quantifiable solution to representation, a mismatch the authors argue cost the research team ownership, access, and influence over the project.
- Interview evidence surfaces corporate culture problems, the departure of marginalized contributors, and the eventual inaccessibility of the tool, which the authors read as structural rather than incidental obstacles to inclusive design work.
Translating the Game Space Model from Analytic Framework to Practical Methodology for Structuring Game Development and Research
The document introduces the Game Space Methodology (GSM methodology), a nine-stage framework designed to structure game development and practice-based research.
- The paper adapts Howell and Stevens' nine-stage Game Space Model into a practical organising methodology for game development and practice-based research, repositioning it as a breadth-first planning scaffold rather than a rigid waterfall process.
- Existing frameworks such as the Design Research Methodology, the Expanded Game Experience model, and conventional pre-production, production, and post-production phases each cover only parts of the game lifecycle, which motivated the authors' whole-lifecycle approach.
- The methodology was tested in a single-case study of the values-conscious wellbeing game "Where We Turn When Unwell" (WWTWU), developed between 2021 and 2023, using qualitative triangulated project data and the authors' dual practitioner and researcher positions.
From Checklists to Playability: A Systematic Mapping of Player Reviews to the Game Accessibility Guidelines
This study systematically maps player accessibility reviews to the Game Accessibility Guidelines (GAG) and evaluates Minecraft Education, aiming to understand the alignment between player priorities and established guidelines, and to identify gaps in game accessibility.
- Analysis of 479 player accessibility reviews from the 'Can I Play That?' community site (2019–2025) against the 120 Game Accessibility Guidelines shows 66.5% of tagged features reported positively, but attention is highly concentrated.
- Player discourse focuses heavily on hearing and motor provisions, and basic features like subtitles, control remapping, and adjustable text are both frequently mentioned and often satisfied.
- Advanced items such as macros, input cool-downs, and VR-specific guidance are rarely addressed by reviewers or present in games, revealing the sharpest divergence between community discourse and formal guidance at the complex end.
Designing Virtual Reality Games About Grief: Reflections from Psychology and Healthcare Professionals
The document presents a framework for designing virtual reality (VR) games to explore the experience of grief, drawing on the Kübler-Ross five stages.
- VR grief games are framed as clinician-informed supplements to traditional therapy, not replacements, with the authors insisting they remain carefully bounded in scope.
- Clinicians' core concerns centre on emotional safety, informed consent, and individual suitability, with particular attention to older adults and people with sensory disabilities.
- Proposed design safeguards include grounding techniques, accessible exit options, and structured post-play debriefs.
Why Do We Suffer for Fun? Ordeal Pleasure in Souls-like Games
This paper introduces the Ordeal Pleasure Framework (OPF), a model explaining why repeated failure in Souls-like games such as Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Hollow Knight can become satisfying rather than merely frustrating.
- The paper proposes the Ordeal Pleasure Framework (OPF), which explains why repeated failure in Souls-like games such as Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and Hollow Knight can feel satisfying rather than merely frustrating.
- OPF rests on three interacting mechanisms: Ludic Cultivation (trust built through fair, learnable difficulty), Aspirational Deferment (reading present frustration as investment in future competence, which depends on that trust), and Communal Mythopoesis (shared ordeal stories that amplify but do not cause the experience).
- The paper frames its central claims as hypotheses requiring causal and empirical testing, and its quantitative support is deliberately modest: a 95-participant survey of Dark Souls III players (Petralito et al., 2017) and an analysis of a 2,363-comment Elden Ring Reddit thread (Czauderna et al., 2024).
Time in Digital Games: A Comparative Map of Temporal Constructs
"Time in Digital Games: A Comparative Map of Temporal Constructs" presents a cartographic synthesis of 22 named temporal constructs from digital game studies, spanning 2003 to 2025, rather than a new master theory of game time.
- The report maps 22 named temporal constructs in digital game studies, spanning 2003 to 2025, as a cartographic synthesis rather than a new master theory of game time.
- Constructs are arranged along two axes: temporal control (player-controlled to system-controlled) and temporal scale (moment-level, session, persistent, and lifestyle play), with clock time as a neutral origin point.
- The conceptual landscape is imbalanced: system-controlled constructs, such as the many engineered "X time" labels, are densely represented, while player-organised and affective temporal concepts are sparsely populated.
Remediations of Japanese Cinema and History in Ghost of Yōtei
"Ghost of Yōtei" is an action-adventure game that serves as a significant case study in the remediation of Japanese cinematic and indigenous Ainu history.
- The authors argue that Ghost of Yōtei's optional "Kurosawa Mode" offers a narrow, samurai-focused reading of Akira Kurosawa's output, excluding late works like Ran (1985) and contemporary-set films like I Live in Fear (1955) and Rhapsody in August (1991).
- Unlike Assassin's Creed, which grounds its authenticity in historical research, Ghost of Yōtei embraces an openly ahistorical cinematic pastiche of mid-twentieth-century Japanese film.
- The game remediates Kurosawa's cinematography, including pathetic fallacy, choreographed violence, and Rashomon-style fractured memory, alongside Western frontier tropes.
Final Boss: Video Games as a Technology of Geopolitical Cultural Power
The document, "Final Boss: Video Games as a Technology of Geopolitical Cultural Power," posits that the global video game industry functions as a field of geopolitical and symbolic power, characterized by significant inequality and a "technocoloniality" that favors the Global North.
- The paper argues video games are not neutral entertainment but instruments of cultural and geopolitical power, with effects reaching into sovereignty, identity, and knowledge.
- Production and cultural influence in video games are concentrated in the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, while Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East are marginalized and largely confined to consumer roles.
- The author frames the Global South's dependency as "technocoloniality," linked to the Coloniality of Power and Milton Santos's account of metropolitan control over time and information flows, with pressure on producers to reproduce Northern narratives in exchange for symbolic recognition and market access.
"Identifying with a Character" but "Embodying an Avatar": Differentiating Relationships Between Players and Their On-Screen Representations in Video Games
The document's central thesis posits that a fundamental distinction between "characters" and "avatars" is essential for accurate theoretical understanding and empirical measurement of player experiences in video games.
- The paper argues that 'character' (a narrative entity with predefined emotions and motives, identified with via emotional and mental connection, even without play) and 'avatar' (a player-controlled, customizable representation mediating agency and embodiment, requiring active engagement) should be treated as distinct constructs and measured separately.
- The authors place characters in the narrative domain and avatars in the simulation domain, drawing on Frasca's framing of games as both simulation and narrative, and present this distinction as foundational for accurate measurement and design of player experience.
- The paper critiques 'avatar identification' research for measurement inconsistencies in widely used scales, such as Van Looy et al. (2012), and for blurring identification with embodiment.
From Play to Poetics: Reconfiguring Pleasure through Defamiliarisation in Game Poems
The document explores game poems as a distinct hybrid art form that merges poetic expression with digital play, aiming to reconfigure pleasure through defamiliarisation, expressive intimacy, and formal constraint.
- Game poems are presented as a distinct poetics of play that locates pleasure in expression, subjectivity, and affective resonance rather than in conventional goals of fun, mastery, and completion.
- The authors argue that game poems generate reflective, intersectional, and even "no-fun" modes of engagement through defamiliarisation, expressive intimacy, and formal constraint, thereby expanding what counts as pleasurable play and legitimate game design.
- The argument draws on lyric poetry and constraint-based movements such as Oulipo and Dogme 95, contending that mechanical, temporal, or social limits generate intensity and originality rather than diminishing them.