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
The Theme Park Experience: Kingdom Hearts and the Franchise
This research explores franchise-building and transmedia storytelling within the video game series Kingdom Hearts, a transnational collaboration between Disney and Square Enix.
- The paper argues Kingdom Hearts, a Disney and Square Enix collaboration, is best understood as a transmedia video game franchise centred on its player character Sora rather than as a simple licensed tie-in.
- Using Daniel Vella's framework for game characters, the author positions Sora as a tourist who moves through Disney worlds with the tourist gaze described by John Urry and Jonas Larsen, turning the game into a recreation of the theme park experience.
- Sora's costume changes within Disney worlds are read as cosplay, and reproductions of iconic film scenes have him either participating in or observing the action.
Failure in Videogames: Similarities and Differences to Textile Craft
Juul's account of failure in videogames is applied here to hand knitting, arguing that textile craft and game play share a comparable paradox: people willingly pursue activities that repeatedly frustrate them.
- Both videogame play and hand knitting share a paradox: they are frustrating yet pleasurable, drawing practitioners into repeated trial and error in pursuit of mastery.
- In knitting, errors appear as physical flaws (incorrect stitches or dropped loops) corrected by "frogging," unravelling back to the mistake, while knitters mitigate excessive unravelling by inserting lifelines, stable positions to return to.
- The paper argues that knitting's recoverable, incremental failure parallels the game Unravel (2016) and its sequel Unravel Two (2018), where the yarn-based protagonist's unravelling and the game's rules make catastrophic failure unlikely.
Who Creates Microtransactions: The Production Context of Video Game Monetization
This paper investigates the production context of microtransactions and in-game monetization, addressing a gap in existing game research that primarily focuses on game content or audience reception.
- Monetization responsibilities are usually absorbed into existing roles such as game designers and product managers rather than handled by a dedicated function, though emerging positions like economy designers, live operations producers, and data analysts increasingly carry these duties.
- Interviewees reported that monetization design is sometimes outsourced to external monetization specialists.
- The study uses a mixed-methods design combining nine exploratory interviews with German game professionals, analysis of 91 English and German job vacancy notices mentioning "monetization," and a review of credits from 68 titles released in 2018.
People@Meeple: It's a Community Thing
This research investigates the motivations behind board game hobbyists' attendance at public conventions, specifically examining the apparent contradiction between their preference for controlled, personalized home play environments and the often less-than-ideal conditions of public events.
- Hobbyist boardgamers attend Meeplecon, a small annual Melbourne convention of around 400 mostly returning attendees, despite it offering little of the environmental control they value at home, because community participation can outweigh these practical drawbacks.
- Qualitative research combining field observation with 22 attendee interviews (11 men, 11 women, aged 28 to 64) yielded eight themes, with playing games central for all participants.
- Attendees valued setting aside dedicated time away from everyday obligations such as housework and childcare, and many came specifically to meet people.
Using Physiological Response Data to Examine Horror Video Game Enjoyment
The document investigates horror video game enjoyment by analyzing physiological response data, aiming to understand the mechanisms behind consuming fear-inducing entertainment.
- Heart rate combined with pupil constriction proved an accurate measure of immersion and enjoyment in the horror game "The House," with physiological and eye-movement data captured alongside mouse actions across horror event stages.
- As immersed players progressed through the game, fixation frequency rose while average fixation duration fell, a pattern that runs counter to previously reported immersion patterns in non-horror genres.
- Immersed players attended closely to narrative clues during high-suspense moments while staying alert to possible shocks, whereas less immersed players focused on event triggers that might prompt them to stop playing.
The Interaction of Discourse and Acts: Spectating Grassroot Livestreamers in China
The document explores the streaming and spectating behaviors of grassroot livestreamers and their audiences in China, focusing on how these interactions contribute to the streamer's success and the formation of unique fan cultures.
- Grassroot game livestreaming in China has become a viable full-time career for over ten thousand gameplayers, and the livestreaming audience exceeded four hundred million by June 2018, with game content the most preferred category.
- The paper's central thesis is that a streamer's self-image, verbal and playful interactions with viewers, and recurring communication rituals together create symbolic boundaries that separate one streamer from competitors and cultivate a distinctive fan culture able to sustain a livelihood.
- Self-image is built through distinctive visual markers, displays of daily life, and fixed streaming schedules and spaces, which help define a streamer's identity to viewers.
Bad Vibrations: The Auditory Experience of Digital Dark Tourism
This paper examines how audio design shapes the dark tourist experience in digital environments, focusing on The Town of Light (LKA 2016), a video game set in the derelict Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra in Italy, where conditions were especially harsh under the fascist regime of the late 1930s and early 1940s.
- The paper argues that the role of music and sound in constructing digital dark tourism experiences has been comparatively neglected, despite scholarly attention to digital dark tourism in general.
- Using archaeoacoustics, the study treats the soundscape of The Town of Light (LKA 2016), set in the derelict Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra in Italy, as an object of archaeological analysis, mapping sounds to specific locations and comparing them with similarly themed games.
- The game reconstructs the asylum's dark heritage through voice performance, sound effects, and horror-derived atmospheric tropes such as creaking doors and indistinct noises.
How Theme Park Rides Adapted the Shooting Gallery
Theme park dark rides with interactive shooting, such as Disney's Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin (1998) and Star Wars Millennium Falcon: Smuggler's Run, appear to reflect videogame interactivity, but this extended abstract argues they descend from a long tradition of target-shooting play.
- The paper argues that the interactive shooting dark ride, exemplified by Disney's Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin (1998), emerged from a gradual convergence of fairground, arcade, and videogame traditions rather than a sudden innovation.
- The author uses a media archaeology approach, tracing lineages from early twentieth-century cinematic shooting galleries and electromechanical games through the light-gun tradition that began with William Gent's Electric Rifle in 1920.
- Sega's Ghost Hunters at Joypolis Yokohama (1994) is cited as an early dark-ride shooter, while Disneyland's Main Street Shooting Gallery opened in 1955 and the Dick Tracy's Crime-Stoppers concept, from around 1990, was never built.
Only a Game? Player Misery Across Game Boundaries
The document investigates player misery in video games, arguing for a third category of negative emotions distinct from those arising from fictional narratives or rule-based challenges.
- The paper argues that players enjoy games causing negative emotions because they adopt a fictional stance or lusory attitude that brackets those feelings from real life, resolving paradoxes such as tragedy, horror, and failure.
- Because such negative feelings can be dismissed with "it's only a game," the conventional view holds that developers bear relatively trivial responsibility for player misery.
- The author's main contribution is a third category of player misery, arising when developers create elements players do not perceive as part of the game, so the bracketing effect fails.
Games and Gestures: Remarks on Emotes in Digital Online Games
Emotes, the unlockable character animations distributed as rewards and microtransactions in games like Fortnite, are examined as a case study in how contemporary online games are designed, marketed, and culturally situated.
- Emotes are unlockable character animations and gestures sold or awarded in free-to-play online games, with Epic Games' Fortnite as the primary case study.
- Drawing on Ian Bogost's concept of "unit operations," the paper argues emotes create meaning independently of a game's underlying mechanical systems, yet remain central to player self-expression.
- The author contends that the industry's claim that visual modifications are "just cosmetic" is artificial, since these hedonic attributes drive purchasing decisions.
CryptoKitties and the New Ludic Economy: How Blockchain Introduces Value, Ownership, and Scarcity in the Digital World
This paper investigates CryptoKitties as a case study to understand how blockchain technology introduces value, ownership, and scarcity into digital games, thereby shaping a new "ludic economy."
- The paper's central argument is that blockchain enables artificial digital scarcity through verifiable, tamper-resistant ownership records, and that this scarcity underpins the value of in-game assets.
- Rare CryptoKitties have occasionally traded for more than $100,000, though most typically sell for a few to a few dozen USD.
- CryptoKitties averaged roughly 200 to 500 daily players, a modest figure relative to mainstream multiplayer titles, even though more than 1.3 million virtual cats had been bred at the time of writing.
The Experience of Procedurality: Effects and Appreciation of Persuasive Gameplay Rhetoric
The document investigates the empirical validity and appreciation of procedural rhetoric as a persuasive mechanism in games.
- Procedural rhetoric, which conveys a persuasive message through gameplay systems so players reach conclusions via actions and consequences, was tested as a viable mechanism for persuasive games in two experiments by Ruud Jacobs of the University of Twente.
- In a study of 262 participants aged 15 and older, two persuasive games on teen dating violence (one narrative-driven, one procedural) both changed attitudes toward accepting angry behaviors and boosted self-efficacy in preventing abuse, with no measurable difference between their effects.
- In a study of 241 participants, weakening the reflective power of the picking mechanic in the forced-labor game My Cotton Picking Life roughly halved attitude change, showing the game depended heavily on its procedural rhetoric.
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