DiGRA
The Digital Games Research Association: the international association of academics and professionals who study digital games. Its Digital Library holds the proceedings of the DiGRA conferences since 2002.
Documents
Game Tips as Gifts: Social Interactions and Rational Calculations in Computer Gaming
Game tips shared among console and online role-playing game players in Taiwan are examined here as a form of gift economy, with the study arguing that tip exchanges are driven less by pure altruism or narrow reciprocity and more by social approval, networking, and local linguistic and social contexts.
- Game tip sharing among Taiwanese console and online RPG players is better explained by social approval, networking, and local linguistic contexts than by pure altruism or narrow reciprocity, based on 15 interviews, an 861-respondent online survey, and bulletin board observation.
- Tip contributors are classified into four categories: complete walkthroughs, need-based answers, secret treasure maps, and drama-play translation guides.
- Role-playing games are the dominant genre, named as the favorite format by 67.6% of survey respondents.
Family Values: Ideology, Computer Games & The Sims
Miguel Sicart's "Family Values: Ideology, Computer Games & The Sims" contends that The Sims, despite marketing itself as a neutral social simulator, embodies an ideology specific to modern capitalist societies.
- Sicart argues that The Sims, though marketed as a neutral social simulator, encodes an ideology specific to modern capitalist societies, embedded in its economic mechanics and social structures rather than its surface content.
- Drawing on Althusser's theory of Ideological State Apparatuses, Jameson's account of late capitalism, and Taylor's ethics of daily life, the paper frames the game's rules as encoding assumptions about what counts as a successful life and a legitimate society.
- The central conclusion is that ideology resides primarily in structural rules and gameplay, which position the player as a subject within an ideological discourse, leading Sicart to propose the category of "ideological games."
Encounters With Consumption During Computer-Mediated Play: The Development of Digital Games as Marketing Communication Media
This paper examines digital games as marketing media by considering both the consumer-culture context of play and the psychological processes that shape how players respond to in-game brands.
- Exploratory focus groups with 24 experienced video game players across four sessions found that players generally view in-game brand placement as a source of realism and as a way to fund lower-priced games.
- Players also voiced concern that brand placement can be invasive and that advertising revenue could distort game design.
- Brand placement is presented as potentially effective: it can strengthen brand recall, and players may show shifts in attitude or purchase intention.
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.
Ludologists Love Stories, Too: Notes From a Debate That Never Took Place
Gonzalo Frasca's article argues that the widely described "ludology versus narratology" debate in game studies never truly took place, because it rests on a cluster of misunderstandings about terminology, positions, and intentions.
- The 'ludology versus narratology' debate in game studies never truly took place; Frasca argues it rests on misunderstandings about terminology, positions, and intentions.
- The label 'ludology' was not coined by Espen Aarseth or by Frasca, and it was defined in ways that many later scholars wrongly took to mean a rejection of narrative.
- Few scholars actually self-identify as narrativists, making the supposed opposing camp difficult to locate.
In Search of a "Fifth Dimension"
Maaike Lauwaert's paper argues that Roger Caillois's established taxonomy of play, comprising agôn (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (vertigo), is insufficient for analyzing digital games.
- Maaike Lauwaert argues that Roger Caillois's four-category taxonomy of play (agôn, alea, mimicry, ilinx) is insufficient for analyzing digital games and proposes a fifth dimension, "repens," defined as sequentially embedded surprise deliberately programmed into a game's progression.
- Repens differs from chance because its surprises are intentionally placed rather than randomly generated, with examples including medical packs appearing in Tomb Raider and back-attacks in Final Fantasy.
- The paper's central thesis is that repens distinguishes digital games from non-digital games and enables them to combine multiple play dimensions at once, with No One Lives Forever and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 offered as illustrative cases.
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.