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
ROM Hacks, Randomizers, and Retro Games: Challenging Copyright and Remixing Zelda
This conference paper, presented at the 2019 Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference, examines how videogame hacking communities share and distribute projects built on copyrighted commercial games despite legal risk.
- The paper uses the A Link to the Past Randomizer, a ROM hack of the 1991 Super NES game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, as its central case study; the hack turns the linear adventure into a randomized, competitive game played through communities on Twitch and Discord.
- The author frames ROM hacking communities as creative labour operating at the margins of media production and law, placing the work within the history of hacker ethics and the tightening of intellectual property enforcement after the rise of the Internet and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
- Nintendo's lawsuits against ROM distribution sites such as LoveROMs.com and LoveRETRO.co are argued to produce a chilling effect on hobbyist hackers who lack the resources to resist corporate pressure.
Challenges and Opportunities for Collective Action in Local Games Industries
The document explores the challenges and opportunities for collective action and unionization within local games industries, particularly focusing on regions outside the major Triple-A development hubs of North America and Western Europe.
- The central argument is that decentralised, project-based, and socially entangled local games work creates distinct barriers to traditional unionisation, so organising strategies must not assume a large-studio model.
- The Australian games sector, used as the case study, is dominated by small firms: the average studio employs only nine people, and many workers are on fixed-term contracts or work as solo developers.
- In a GDC 2019 State of the Industry survey of roughly 4,000 gameworkers, 47 percent said they wanted to unionise and a further 26 percent said maybe.
Fostering Ethics and Morality in Adult Learning through Gameplay
The document presents preliminary findings from a design-based research study investigating the efficacy of a narrative digital game in fostering ethical and moral learning in adult professional development.
- The study is a design-based research project by Rafael Leonardo da Silva at the University of Georgia, testing whether a narrative game built around real workplace situations can improve adult learners' moral reasoning, empathy, and transfer of concepts into professional practice.
- It targets a gap in prior work, which relied on commercial off-the-shelf games whose scenarios bore little resemblance to learners' own professional contexts.
- The prototype was an interactive narrative game for an adult professional development course on internal controls in local governments, tested iteratively with only four participants of differing gameplay experience.
Canons of Games Research: An Analysis of the Most Cited Publications
This study by Karhulahti and Koskimaa maps the most-cited publications in play and games research, aiming to test and extend Paul Martin's earlier work on the most-cited authors in the field.
- The study maps the most-cited publications in play and games research, screening Google Scholar, CiteSeer, and Microsoft Academic for works with at least 2,000 citations and arriving at 35 publications (16 articles and 19 monographs), only ten of which had a woman author.
- The canon reflects the institutional emergence of game studies: only one to three canonical works appeared per decade from the 1930s through the 1990s, versus fifteen in the 2000s and six already in the 2010s.
- Recent canonical works are predominantly oriented toward games and play themselves rather than using them metaphorically, marking a shift in the field's focus.
Evolution of PC Bangs: Traditions and Trends in South Korea
The study examines the evolution of PC bangs in South Korea, highlighting their transformation from gaming-centric spaces into diversified entertainment and leisure centers.
- PC bangs in South Korea have shifted from dedicated gaming venues into multipurpose third places where gaming blends with everyday leisure, according to research based on three months of 2018 fieldwork in Seoul.
- Weekly visitation is rising: 43.5% of South Korean teen gamers visited a PC bang more than once a week in 2018, up from 26.7% three years earlier, per Korea Creative Content Agency survey data.
- Venues have expanded into general entertainment offerings including movie viewing, music, VR experiences, live-streaming studios, esports screens, and dining.
Dwelling in Digital Game Worlds
This paper argues that existing game studies scholarship has characterized the player's spatial existence in digital game worlds as essentially hermetic, meaning path-oriented, transitive, and defined by movement and progression.
- The paper argues that game studies has largely framed players' spatial existence as 'hermetic' (path-oriented, defined by movement and progression), and contends that a 'hestial' (centralizing, homelike) mode of being-in-the-gameworld is also present and deserves recognition.
- The argument draws on Edward Casey's distinction between hestial and hermetic dwelling, along with Heidegger's and Norberg-Schulz's phenomenologies of dwelling, to broaden theoretical understanding of spatial player existence beyond games as spaces to be traversed.
- The paper critically surveys influential theorists, including Aarseth, Gazzard, Calleja, Wolf, and Günzel, whom it interprets as privileging forward movement, while acknowledging exceptions such as Flynn's 'digital hearth,' McGregor's architectural nodal space, and Liboriussen's work on building in Second Life.
Who Is a Videogame Developer? The Politics of Videogame Maker Identities
The term 'videogame developer' is widely used for people who make games, yet who it includes remains contested and political.
- The term "developer" carries technological and software-industry connotations inherited from the medium's origins, and this framing shapes how industry, policymakers, and scholars imagine and count game makers, marginalising hobbyist, artistic, and noncommercial practices.
- Using Bourdieu's concept of the field, the paper argues the label "developer" helps sustain a videogame field centred on commercial production.
- Interviews with game makers in Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands show wide variation in whether people identify as developers and whether they see themselves as part of a videogame industry, with some identifying as developers without seeing an industry affiliation and others reversing this pattern.
A Ludo Mix Perspective on Dynamic Game Characters
The document examines the tension created by "dynamic game characters" within media mixes, particularly the "ludo mix" where games are central.
- Games are increasingly anchoring media mixes, yet they tend to receive peripheral treatment in transmedia storytelling, which has historically prioritized anime and manga over digital games.
- Dynamic game characters, whose identities branch according to player choices, intensify friction in media mixes because multiple player-influenced identities are hard to reconcile with the canonization processes used to maintain a character's continuous identity.
- The paper argues that players' sense of creative agency is often an illusion, since the dominant character identity is ultimately presented through non-ludic media such as manga and anime.
How Musical Leitmotifs Enhance Narration and Evoke Emotion
This document presents a contemporary understanding of musical leitmotifs tailored for digital games, particularly Japanese-style role-playing games (JRPGs), aiming to formalize their narrational and affective functions.
- Leitmotifs are musical ideas tied to a specific character, location, sentiment, or story element, and the paper argues they deserve a contemporary definition suited to digital games and accessible to non-musicians.
- The paper distinguishes leitmotifs from broader thematic material (which evokes a work as a whole) and from motifs (which lack specific representational reference).
- The paper identifies nine intratextual functions of leitmotifs, including defining characters and locations, seeding and substantiating emotion, foreshadowing, and constituting an emotional climax.
Ludo Mix as an Aesthetic Experience: Designing Games for Franchises
The document explores how game designers can approach the "ludo mix," defined as a convergence of products centered around one or more games, drawing inspiration from the "media mix" or media franchise concept.
- The paper proposes that designers of 'ludo mixes' (franchises organized around one or more central games) can resolve the tension between creative world-building and marketing demands by adopting John Dewey's pragmatist concept of aesthetic experience.
- The central idea is that player and consumer experiences should be unified under Dewey's notion of an experience that is 'whole' and 'complete,' where each component meaningfully fits the larger whole rather than fragmenting the intellectual property.
- The ludo mix is framed as a descendant of Japanese media mix and franchise models described by Ōtsuka, Jenkins, and Steinberg, in which each product should contribute to a 'grand narrative.'
Schoolyard Riot: League of Legends and High School Esports
The document examines the integration of esports, specifically League of Legends, into high school settings in Australia and Hong Kong, highlighting the commercial, political, and pedagogical realities involved.
- The paper is a comparative case study of League of Legends (developed by Riot Games) entering high school extracurricular systems in Australia and Hong Kong, arguing that high school esports is shaped by competing commercial, pedagogical, and socio-cultural forces.
- In Australia, a Victorian high school's boys' team reached the championship stage of Riot's inaugural High School tournament in 2018, a competition built with commercial partners including an Australian football league representative.
- The authors interpret Riot Oceania's educator workshops, tailored curriculum packaging, and professional-grade livestreamed finals as deliberate efforts to build a grassroots-to-professional pipeline, with team members allowed to replace school PE with online practice.
Designing a Digital Roleplaying Game to Foster Awareness of Hidden Disabilities
The document details the design and development of "On Fighting Shadows" (OFS), a two-dimensional digital roleplaying game intended to raise awareness and foster discussion about hidden disabilities, specifically anxiety, depression, and hydrocephalus.
- The project is On Fighting Shadows, a 2D digital roleplaying game built in RPG Maker MV to raise awareness of hidden disabilities, using hydrocephalus as the focal condition in its prototype.
- The protagonist, Marvin, experiences anxiety, depression, and hydrocephalus, and the game targets both the medical realities of these conditions and the social misunderstandings surrounding brain and mental illness.
- The designer chose a 2D format and limited player actions to directional movement, dialogue, and object interaction to reduce cognitive load for players unfamiliar with roleplaying games.
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