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WADs, Bots and Mods: Multiplayer FPS Games as Co-creative Media
Sue Morris's paper examines multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) games such as Quake, Half-Life, and Counter-Strike as "co-creative media," arguing that these games are not produced solely by developers or solely by players, but through the combined input of both.
- The paper argues that multiplayer FPS games such as Quake, Half-Life and Counter-Strike are 'co-creative media,' shaped jointly by developers and players rather than by either alone, extending beyond the participatory-media framing common in fan studies.
- Wolfenstein 3-D (1992) and Doom (1993) set the foundation for the genre, and Doom's source-code release and multiplayer capabilities enabled a durable mod scene.
- Player contributions materially influenced development: early public betas and leaked alphas produced bug reports and patches, volunteer-built anti-cheat tool PunkBuster was later adopted by publishers, and mod authors behind ThreeWave CTF and Counter-Strike were hired or commercially acquired.
The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness
Jesper Juul's "classic game model" offers the foundation for this inquiry into what games fundamentally are.
- Juul's classic game model defines a game as any activity carrying six formal features: fixed rules, variable and quantifiable outcomes, valorized outcomes, player effort, player attachment to the outcome, and negotiable real-world consequences.
- Games are best understood as a transmedial family rather than a single medium, with board games, card games, sports, and digital systems all sharing the same core features.
- The unifying element across game media is computation: rules must be upheld by some process, whether performed by humans, computers, or physical laws.
Making and Breaking Games: A Typology of Rules
Järvinen's "Making and Breaking Games: A Typology of Rules" proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing games by treating them as state machines, in which rules define the possible states of play, the transitions between them, and the conduct permitted to players.
- Järvinen's framework treats games as state machines, where rules define the possible states of play, the transitions between them, and the conduct permitted to players, with rules rather than theme forming the fundamental structure of games.
- Rules are organized around five game elements: components, procedures, environments, themes, and interfaces, of which components and procedures are mandatory for any game while environment, theme, and interface rules are optional layers built on that core.
- The Chess-with-Star-Wars-characters example illustrates that theme sits on a separate layer from the underlying ruleset, so changing the theme does not change the game's rules.
The Gaming Landscape: A Taxonomy for Classifying Games and Simulations
This paper develops a taxonomy for classifying games and simulations, aiming to give gaming communities a common language and a meta-disciplinary framework that reduces confusion across theory, design, research, training, and entertainment.
- The paper argues that existing game classifications, which emphasize function and format, miss the underlying architecture of games, and proposes treating games as socially constructed systems built from actors, rules, and resources.
- It contrasts an acquisition metaphor of learning (knowledge as a commodity transferred to learners) with an interaction metaphor (learning as participation within a system), grounding the latter in the paper's framing of how learning occurs through play.
- Games are proposed to be distinguished as allopoietic (steered by external control) or autopoietic (capable of reproducing and sustaining themselves), a basis the author claims is more coherent than genre- or medium-based classifications for separating gaming from simulation.
Uncle Roy All Around You: Mixing Games and Theatre on the City Streets
Uncle Roy All Around You is a research paper by Flintham, Anastasi, Benford and colleagues that describes a pervasive game mixing street performance with online play in central London during May and June 2003.
- The 2003 London production of 'Uncle Roy All Around You' ran in May and June 2003 as a pervasive game blending street performance with online play, involving 272 street players and over 200 online players.
- Street players searched the city for an elusive character named Uncle Roy using handheld computers and wireless networking, while online players tracked them through a parallel 3D model of London and could help or hinder them via text, audio and chat.
- Street participation was capped at ten simultaneous players due to technical and human resource constraints, and the production required more than ten actors and crew to support just twenty players at a time.
Textuality and Videogames: Interactivity, Narrative Space and Role Play
Textuality and Videogames is an interdisciplinary academic study that interrogates whether videogames, particularly Role Play Games, can be understood as narrative forms.
- Games incorporate narrative elements players genuinely value, but the authors argue they are not inherently narrative media, since real-time play unfolds as events rather than fixed sequences.
- Player agency disrupts the linear structures that narratological theorists such as Chatman describe, challenging the application of traditional narrative theory to games.
- Based on a two-year research project (2001–2003) at the Institute of Education, University of London, the study combines textual analysis, video recordings of players in domestic settings, and interviews with players and developers.
Together We Brand: America's Army
The document examines America's Army: Operations (AA:O), a free online military first-person shooter developed by the US Army's MOVES Institute, and argues that the game functions simultaneously as an advergame, a recruiting tool, an educational training simulation, and a branding vehicle.
- America's Army: Operations functioned simultaneously as an advergame, recruiting tool, training simulation, and branding vehicle, with the authors calling this blend "advertainment" and arguing the Army deliberately fused commercial, entertainment, and participatory online objectives into one brand experience.
- Rather than collecting explicit personal data, the game built the Army's identity through aesthetic and sensory immersion, positioning it as a central expression of the Army brand during its "Together We Stand" rebranding campaign.
- By November 2002 the free game had attracted over one million registered accounts and 32 million completed missions, and Army recruiting website traffic reportedly rose 28 percent after launch.
Enchanting Reality: A Vision of Big Experiences on Small Platforms
Martin Ericsson's paper argues that mobile gaming has so far largely cloned or ported existing console and desktop titles, leaving the distinctive capabilities of handheld devices (mobility, GPS, and communications) underused.
- The paper argues mobile gaming has largely cloned or ported console and desktop titles, leaving handheld capabilities such as mobility, GPS, and communications underused.
- Its central thesis is that compelling physical-world games create immersion through "diegetic consistency," where the fictional world aligns with the player's sensory reality.
- The authors propose "enchanted reality" games, in which real-world actions meaningfully alter the virtual world rather than merely triggering isolated events.
The Playability of Texts vs. the Readability of Games: Towards a Holistic Theory of Fictionality
Julian Kücklich's paper argues that games and literary texts are both best understood as fictional worlds that require active, playful participation from the reader or player, and that literary theory can therefore contribute substantially to game studies beyond narratological analysis.
- Kücklich argues that games and literary texts are both fictional worlds requiring active playful participation, and that literary theory can contribute to game studies well beyond narratological analysis.
- Drawing on Wolfgang Iser's concept of the Textspiel, the paper frames fiction-making as a triadic process linking the real, the fictive, and the imaginary, with play as the mediating force.
- To give the concept rigor, Kücklich proposes a six-world model adapted from Marie-Laure Ryan's possible worlds theory, distinguishing the reader's actual and possible worlds, the narrator's actual world, and the textual actual and reference worlds.
On the Border: Pleasure of Exploration and Colonial Mastery in Civilization III Play the World
Sybille Lammes's analysis of Civilization III: Play the World argues that the game presents exploration and expansion as a colonialist progression, moving from "nature" toward a Western, white, male-centred "civilization."
- Sybille Lammes argues that Civilization III: Play the World frames exploration and expansion as a colonialist progression from "nature" toward a Western, white, male-centred "civilization," drawing on postcolonial and science studies.
- The analysis reads the game's intro cinematics (such as the Tower of Babel imagery) and setup options, including the framing of "Barbarians" as nature-bound and non-Western cultures as rivals, as naturalising links between expansionism, science, masculinity, and whiteness.
- The core claim is that the game's border expansion mirrors European colonial attitudes, with colonies serving as resource extraction zones for the homeland and "othered" peoples and territories subject to control.
Women Just Want to Have Fun: A Study of Adult Female Players of Digital Games
Aphra Kerr's study examines how adult women in Ireland come to play digital games and sustain that play despite a gaming culture that has long been framed as male.
- Social networks, rather than individual initiative alone, are the main force shaping how adult women first enter digital gaming and how they keep playing, with early exposure through brothers, fathers, or friends and access to shared or borrowed consoles as the principal routes in.
- Despite Sony's marketing and redesign claims of gender neutrality, female ownership of the PlayStation 2 reached only 6.7 percent of registered PAL-territory owners, compared with 11.1 percent in Japan.
- The study attributes the PlayStation 2's limited female uptake to a continued focus on hardcore male gamers, price sensitivity among women, and manufacturers' reliance on registered-user data that cannot capture people playing on borrowed hardware.
Representation of Gender and Ethnicity in Digital Interactive Games
This content analysis by Jansz and Martis examines how gender and ethnicity are portrayed in digital interactive games, an area the authors describe as understudied relative to film and television.
- Male characters still outnumbered females in the analyzed games, 13 of 22 characters, yet leading roles were evenly split between men and women, a shift from earlier research that found men dominating games with women in minor stereotypical roles.
- Female supporting characters were never shown in submissive positions, a notable departure from prior studies of game representation.
- Most characters were Caucasian (about 55 percent overall), and leading characters were predominantly white, indicating ethnic representation remained narrow.