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Documents
Whitepaper20 pages
Are Loot Boxes Gambling? Random Reward Mechanisms in Video Games
The document, "Are Loot Boxes Gambling?
- The paper argues "loot box" is too imprecise for academic and regulatory use and proposes "random reward mechanisms" (RRMs), defined as an eligibility condition that triggers a random procedure delivering a reward.
- The authors' central finding is that RRMs resemble gambling only when both the purchase and the reward are embedded in the real-world economy, i.e., they can be bought with and exchanged for real money.
- Regulators diverged on this point: Denmark's Gambling Authority treated CS:GO skin-betting as gambling because skins could be sold for cash, but did not classify Star Wars Battlefront 2 loot boxes, whose contents could not be converted to currency.
DiGRAJan 2018
Whitepaper16 pages
Does Platform Matter? A Game Design Analysis of Female Engagement in MOBA Games
This analysis explores the factors contributing to the significantly higher female player engagement in the mobile Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game, King of Glory (KoG), compared to its PC counterparts like League of Legends (LoL).
- King of Glory, a mobile MOBA reportedly around 54% female in China, draws substantially more female players than League of Legends, a PC MOBA with roughly 35% female participation, despite similar core mechanics, suggesting platform shapes female engagement.
- King of Glory's accessibility advantages include simplified controls, fewer abilities, QQ and WeChat login integration, interactive tutorials, handheld mobility, and avatars that players found appealing.
- Interviewees identified sociability as a key draw of King of Glory, while serious players of either gender often preferred League of Legends for its complexity and teamwork demands.
DiGRAJan 2018
Whitepaper12 pages
"Clementine Will Remember That": Methods to Establish Design Conventions for Video Game Narrative
This paper proposes a rigorous empirical framework for establishing design conventions in video game narrative, moving beyond traditional media theories to focus on the unique interactive properties of digital experiences.
- The paper argues narrative game design should be treated as an empirical research field, with the goal of establishing concrete, transferable design conventions that reliably produce predictable audience effects, distinct from unmeasurable abstract patterns and broader principles like Murray's 'scripting the interactor'.
- The proposed four-phase method moves from identifying candidate techniques in acclaimed narrative games, through focus groups and review analysis, to validation via controlled quantitative testing using established user-experience scales.
- The authors warn that typical samples of 25 to 30 participants per condition are underpowered for the small-to-medium effects likely to be found, and recommend larger samples, a priori power calculations with GPower, and reporting effect sizes such as Cohen's d.
DiGRAJan 2018
Whitepaper17 pages
A Three Person Poncho and a Set of Maracas: Designing Ola De La Vida, A Co-Located Social Play Computer Game
The document examines the design principles of "Ola de la Vida," a co-located social play computer game, as a case study for fostering temporary play communities.
- The paper argues that co-located social play games staged at 'play parties' can create temporary play communities by widening the game's magic circle through deliberate social design, event curation, and 'semi-spectatorship' (alternating between active play and observation).
- Its central case study, Ola de la Vida, is a three-player cooperative game played with a Wii balance board, golden maraca controllers, and a shared poncho, and the research is qualitative, based on a single game, developer interviews, focus groups, and observations across four events in 2017.
- A three-month post-development review with 18 student focus-group participants identifies four design approaches: spectacle, physical game design, internal semi-spectatorship through mechanics, and external semi-spectatorship.
DiGRAJan 2018
Whitepaper11 pages
Towards Design Principles for Humor in Interactive Emergent Narrative
The document, "Towards Design Principles for Humor in Interactive Emergent Narrative," investigates the integration of humor into dynamic, player-influenced digital stories.
- Humor in interactive emergent narrative is framed as a 'pleasant surprise' that can be analyzed and systematically generated, reframing it from a purely subjective response into a formalizable property of interactive systems.
- The authors distinguish plot-based humor, which alters the story's overall progression, from discourse-based humor, which changes only how events are told, and find that classical humor theories (incongruity, benign violation, relief, superiority) mostly apply at the discourse level, leaving plot-level humor neglected.
- The central claim is that humor emerges when players test a system's limits without breaking it, producing 'aha moments' of delight, illustrated with case studies from The Stanley Parable, Sunspring, and Middle Earth: Shadow of War.
DiGRAJan 2018
Whitepaper14 pages
Aesthetics and Cosmetic Microtransactions in Path of Exile
A study on Path of Exile's aesthetic and cosmetic microtransactions reveals their profound impact beyond mere monetization, positioning them as critical elements influencing player behavior, identity, and the game's post-release development cycle.
- Cosmetic microtransactions in Path of Exile are formally disconnected from game mechanics yet meaningfully shape play practices and sustain the game's post-release lifecycle, according to six months of participatory observation of in-game data, forums, and Reddit.
- The paper identifies three roles for cosmetics: social signifiers, incentives that motivate continued play, and tools of agency outside the core gameplay frame.
- Rare cosmetics serve as the principal tangible incentive in the late-game reward structure around reaching level 100, and acquiring different cosmetics is unevenly difficult.
DiGRAJan 2018
Whitepaper19 pages
Ethics at Play in Undertale: Rhetoric, Identity and Deconstruction
"Ethics at Play in Undertale: Rhetoric, Identity and Deconstruction" examines how the video game Undertale employs ethical choices to shape player identity and deconstruct traditional role-playing game (RPG) conventions.
- Frederic Seraphine argues Undertale is a deliberately ethical, rhetorical, and deconstructive text whose mechanics steer players toward nonviolence and reflection on the moral weight of their actions, framed through procedural rhetoric and Derridean différance.
- Completion rates diverge sharply: 87.3% of players finished the pacifist route versus 46% for the genocide route, based on a survey of 560 fandom participants plus scraped YouTube comments.
- Play and watch behavior diverge: 83% of respondents watched others play the genocide route and 45% knew the game only through such content, which the author links to avoidance of its emotionally dissonant experience and to logocentrism.
DiGRAJan 2018
Whitepaper11 pages
Wrecking the Game: The Artist as Griefer
"Wrecking the Game: The Artist as Griefer" explores how contemporary artists appropriate and subvert video game mechanics to create artistic interventions, effectively transforming ludic spaces into contemplative ones.
- Fantacci argues that artists like Kent Sheely, Marque Cornblatt, Justin Berry, and Alan Butler practice 'anti-game' subversion by repurposing a game's designed rules and affordances as 'griefers' rather than by editing code or visuals, halting goal-driven play to create unexpected meanings.
- The analysis frames these interventions as destructive-creative: they first dismantle standard gameplay and then build a new artistic grammar from the same materials, a dual process the author links to Dada and Situationist strategies.
- Theoretically, the work draws on Galloway's counter-gaming and Schleiner's concept of ludic mutation, situating the practice within a lineage of avant-garde art movements and game studies.
DiGRAJan 2018
Whitepaper12 pages
Free-to-Play or Pay-to-Win?: Casual, Hardcore, and Hearthstone
The analysis, titled "Free-to-Play or Pay-to-Win?: Casual, Hardcore, and Hearthstone," examines how free-to-play (F2P) monetization models, specifically exemplified by Hearthstone, redefine the traditional casual versus hardcore gamer dichotomy.
- The central thesis is that free-to-play models with microtransactions for randomized card packs create a "pay-to-win" dynamic, in which spending money tends to move players from casual toward hardcore engagement, using Blizzard's Hearthstone as the primary case study.
- Hearthstone had over 70 million registered accounts as of Blizzard's 2017 report, and an analyst estimated its monthly revenue at over $25 million.
- Randomization mitigates the most extreme pay-to-win effects, but expansions, metagame shifts, and a daily quest system still pressure casual players to either spend money or devote substantial daily time to stay competitive.
DiGRAJan 2018
Whitepaper12 pages
Bleed-In, Bleed-Out: A Design Case in Board Game Therapy
This paper explores design considerations for "Mind Shadows," a therapy board game aimed at helping players collaboratively understand and cope with emotionally complex real-life issues.
- The paper presents design considerations from the ongoing development of Mind Shadows, a two-to-three-player therapeutic board game in which players bring real-life emotional difficulties into a framed play session to understand and cope with them cooperatively.
- The author argues tabletop play can offer a structured, safe space to describe and examine personal problems in a way similar to everyday conversation with a trusted friend.
- The design draws on the concept of 'bleed,' where real-life feelings and relationships spill into play and vice versa, alongside Goffman's frame analysis, the magic circle, and Hollander's three-phase psychodrama curve.
DiGRAJan 2018
Whitepaper14 pages
Indie Game: The Movie: The Paper - Documentary Films and the Subfield of Independent Games
This paper examines documentary films about independent game developers, arguing that such films play a significant role in constructing the cultural meaning of "indie" games, a term that remains ill-defined in both popular and academic discourse.
- The paper argues that documentary films about independent game developers play a significant role in constructing the cultural meaning of "indie" games, a term that remains ill-defined in both popular and academic discourse, drawing on Bourdieu's field theory and Fairclough's critical discourse analysis.
- The analysis rests on a corpus of four documentaries released between 2012 and 2017, selected for variety in subject matter, distribution, and release timing, and the author frames these films as contributing to the symbolic capital of independent developers and delimiting indie games as a space of heightened artistic value.
- The films consistently portray independent developers as passionate, creatively driven auteurs while casting major commercial studios in a negative light.
DiGRAJan 2018
Whitepaper20 pages
Design Concepts for Empowerment through Urban Play
The document, "Design Concepts for Empowerment through Urban Play," establishes a conceptual framework to enhance the design and analysis of urban games aimed at fostering civic engagement.
- The urban play field lacks a shared vocabulary linking game design, urban planning, and civic engagement, and the report proposes an experience-based framework to fill that gap.
- The authors extend the existing PLEX model into a PLEX/CIVIC framework, adapting nine playful experience categories (Completion, Control, Discovery, Exploration, Expression, Fantasy, Fellowship, Subversion, Sympathy) to civic empowerment and linking it to Schouten's conditions of motivation, participation, and advocacy.
- The framework is explicitly provisional: it rests on qualitative, descriptive analysis rather than empirical testing, and the authors call for user testing and validation before it can be considered robust.
DiGRAJan 2018
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