Global reports and market data
Documents
Design Process of a Serious Game About Domestic Abuse in the Context of the Vulnerable Avatars Framework
This paper details the design and preliminary evaluation of the Victim Interview Simulator (VIS), a serious game developed within the EU-funded ISEDA project.
- The Victim Interview Simulator (VIS) is a serious game built within the EU-funded ISEDA project to train police officers in first-contact interviews with victims of domestic abuse.
- The Vulnerable Avatars Framework identifies ten contexts of vulnerability and maps them onto aesthetic, narrative, and systemic layers of game design to produce emotionally credible virtual victims.
- VIS uses three scenarios depicting women of different ages, backgrounds, and forms of abuse, co-designed with European police agencies, victim-support organizations, and academic partners.
How General Game Expertise Shapes Player Experience and Problem-Solving Across Different Onboarding Approaches in a Puzzle Video Game
The document examines the impact of general game expertise on player experience and problem-solving within the puzzle video game "Baba is You," specifically across various onboarding methodologies.
- General gaming expertise (self-reported weekly hours and years of play) was a stronger predictor of levels completed in Baba Is You than the onboarding approach, with expertise predicting completions at β = 9.68 (R² = .24, p < .001) while onboarding condition produced no overall performance difference.
- Experienced players engaged the game's mechanics differently, showing more rule-manipulation and undo behaviors than less experienced players.
- Perceived difficulty rose for all groups between the first and third sessions, but the increase was smallest among players who received tutorials.
Genshin Impact: Cultural Hybridisation, Localisation and Contra-Flow of Cultural Production in China's Open-World Role-Playing Game
Genshin Impact, a Chinese-developed open-world role-playing game, strategically employs cultural hybridisation and localization to challenge the established dominance of US and Japanese games in the global market.
- The study frames Genshin Impact as a 'contra-flow' of cultural production in which Chinese publisher miHoYo challenges the long-standing dominance of US and Japanese companies in the global games industry.
- Genshin Impact generated roughly $3 billion in mobile revenue within a single month, with around 70 percent of that income coming from outside China.
- The game blends Chinese motifs, Japanese anime aesthetics, American open-world mechanics, and global mythologies into a multidirectional hybrid aesthetic.
Making and Playing for Catharsis
"Making and Playing for Catharsis" proposes a cyclical methodology for designing deeply personal, cathartic games, expanding upon Kara Stone's Reparative Game Design (RGD).
- The report argues that care in games is inherently ambivalent, and that makers working from their own lives should embrace uncomfortable personal material rather than sanitize it.
- Aesthetic catharsis, drawing on Schaper and Paskow, is reframed as recognition and intelligibility rather than emotional purging, so the sketches make emotional logic legible through mechanics without resolving past grievances.
- The methodology is an iterative research-game-design cycle of self-writing, game sketching, self-play, theoretical reflection, and revision, extending Kara Stone's Reparative Game Design.
Graphonauts: Introducing a Hybrid Human-AI Pipeline for Text-to-Game Transformation via Knowledge Graphs
The "Graphonauts" project introduces a novel hybrid human-AI pipeline designed to transform ethnographic texts into playable 2D platformer games using knowledge graphs (KGs).
- The paper proposes a hybrid pipeline in which a domain expert and Claude Sonnet 4.5 co-construct a knowledge graph from Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific, which a deterministic tool then renders as a 2D platformer where nodes become platforms and relation types map to movement mechanics.
- The primary contribution is methodological: a proposed framework for knowledge-graph-driven game design in the digital humanities, not an empirically validated claim about the approach's effectiveness.
- Evaluation was autoethnographic and minimal, based on a 20-node graph tested in two-participant sessions of about five minutes each, supplemented by reflective notes, with no formal user or community validation.
The Final Frontier of Space in Video Games: Spatio-Narrative Design in Judgment by Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio
The document examines spatio-narrative design in Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's Judgment, focusing on how the virtual city of Kamurocho, a recreation of Tokyo's Kabukicho, shapes gameplay and narrative.
- The report's central thesis is a "triple modality of space" framework that couples designed space with narrative, arguing that Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's Judgment produces a dynamic, "rhizomatic" relationship between its virtual district Kamurocho and the real Tokyo district Kabukicho it models.
- Judgment's spatial strategies, including reuse of architectural assets and linking environmental openness to gameplay difficulty, are presented as the mechanisms through which the virtual city and the life it simulates shape each other.
- The analysis places Judgment within the broader Yakuza series and compares its city environments, combat, exploration, Tail and Chase mechanics, and mini-games against the spatial design of other titles.
The Algorithmic Hostess: Social Mediation, Affective Discipline, and Sanitized Pleasures of Generative AI NPCs in Petit Planet
The document analyzes the evolving role of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in life-simulation games, specifically focusing on the generative AI hostess Nalo in "Petit Planet."
- The paper treats Nalo, a generative NPC in the virtual café of Petit Planet, as an active social mediator rather than scripted background, arguing her presence produces "sanitized pleasure" that helps socially anxious players engage while enforcing a conflict-free environment.
- The author contends such design is not ethically neutral, embedding corporate priorities of productivity, commercial safety, and affective control into the game's social fabric.
- Nalo steers player conduct by refusing to break character, acting as a low-risk facilitator, and proactively controlling discourse, with romantic or social overtures redirected toward cooperative labor, producing "programmed sociality."
The Impact of Evolving Character Customization on Emotional Engagement and Player Behaviour in RPGs
This research explores the impact of dynamic visual character customization in Role-Playing Games (RPGs) on player emotional engagement and behavior, specifically focusing on instances where character appearance evolves in response to narrative choices.
- Dynamic avatar appearance strongly strengthens emotional connection to a character: 93.9% of 149 surveyed players agreed it created an emotional bond with their character.
- Players often manually altered their appearance to preserve visual coherence when the game's systems failed to keep it consistent, showing how much they value visual continuity.
- Visual evolution had far weaker influence on gameplay behaviour: only 61.7% of respondents said their appearance shaped in-game decisions, and 8 of 10 interviewees said changing appearance did not alter their roleplay choices.
It's All a Skinner Box? Typical Core Loop and Operant Conditioning
This exploratory study investigates whether typical video game core loops function as a form of operant conditioning, influencing player experience.
- The study tested whether a game's core loop works like operant conditioning by comparing a reward-structured version of a Reigns-style decision game against a control version where correct choices led to unfulfilling results.
- The control group, which broke the reward structure, reported significantly lower Competence, higher Challenge, higher Negative Affect, and higher Negative Gameplay than the typical-loop group.
- Sensory and Imaginative Immersion, Flow, and Positive Affect showed no relevant change between the two conditions, suggesting the reward structure mainly shaped evaluative dimensions rather than immersion.
Combat System Design for Action Games: Key Concepts and Styles
The document provides a comprehensive analysis of combat system design in modern action video games, aiming to establish a framework for understanding real-time melee combat styles.
- The framework positions real-time melee combat as a middle level of analysis between broad game-wide concepts and narrow single-title studies, and is deliberately restricted to real-time melee, excluding turn-based and auto-battler combat.
- Combat is built from movesets, timing, and frame-based windows, with core vocabulary including startup, active, and recovery frames, cancels, combos, and punishes, and collisions resolved through hitboxes and hurtboxes.
- The report defines 'operational challenge' as the product of operational complexity and action precision, encompassing move, chain, and spatial precision.
Monstrous Desires in Pornographic Videogames
The document, "Monstrous Desires in Pornographic Videogames," examines how 25 independent pornographic video games sexualize monstrosity.
- The paper argues that monsters in indie pornographic videogames fuse fear, disgust, and attraction to heighten arousal and player engagement, using Cohen's monster theory and Lankoski's player allegiance framework.
- Analysis of 25 indie titles identifies three recurring themes: the sexualized non-human body, monstrous seduction and the erosion of will, and dominance, violence, and sexual control.
- Of the games examined, 32 percent cast the player as a monster, and 65 percent feature a male player character versus 7 percent with a female one.
The Infinite Game in the Engine of Control: Proletarianization, Platform Capitalism, and the Future of Playful Pleasure
The analysis posits that contemporary game development, particularly through dominant game engines and AI narrative tools, is undergoing a fundamental transformation from an "infinite game" of open-ended creative pleasure to a "finite game" driven by optimization and data extraction.
- The paper argues that game engines and AI narrative tools pull developers from open-ended "infinite game" creative play toward optimization-driven "finite game" logic of platform capitalism.
- Drawing on Stiegler's proletarianization and Adorno and Horkheimer's culture industry critique, the author contends that Unity's Asset Store deskills developers through a modular, Taylorist workflow that encourages aesthetic homogenization.
- Unity's analytics suite is portrayed as substituting quantified behavioral data for designers' creative intuition, turning design into KPI optimization.