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
Teaching Digital Game Curricula in the Communication Discipline in Higher Education Institutions in the Greater China Region: A Curriculum Analysis Approach
The document analyzes the state of digital game curricula within communication disciplines in higher education institutions across the Greater China Region (China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, and Taiwan).
- Most traditional communication programs across the Greater China Region (China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Taiwan) offer few or sporadic digital game courses, leaving curricula out of step with a fast-growing industry.
- The Asian digital game market was projected to generate roughly $20 billion in revenue in 2015, about 38 percent of the global total, underscoring the scale of demand for skilled professionals.
- Where game courses exist, they lean heavily toward technical and programming instruction, while player research, the social implications of games, and game rhetoric receive comparatively little attention.
Playing with History's Otherness: A Framework for Exploring Historical Games
This paper by Manuel Alejandro Cruz Martínez offers a provisional framework for analysing historical video games through the lens of identity and alterity, drawing on the anthropological work of Gerd Baumann and Andre Gingrich.
- The paper offers a provisional framework for analysing historical video games through identity and alterity, drawing on anthropologists Gerd Baumann and Andre Gingrich, and argues that deconstructing history this way is a necessary step to understand how games represent the past.
- The same critical approach can guide the design of subversive historical games that challenge dominant narratives and open space for marginalised or subaltern histories.
- The medium's interactivity and capacity to foster empathy may complicate conventional ideas about who makes history.
Tell-A-Dyrham-Tale: A Storytelling Board Game
The document describes the development and application of "Tell-A-Dyrham-Tale," a storytelling board game designed to facilitate collaborative narrative creation for Dyrham Park, a 17th-century National Trust heritage site in the UK.
- Tell-A-Dyrham-Tale is a card-based storytelling board game built as groundwork for an Augmented Reality visitor experience at Dyrham Park, a late 17th-century National Trust house near Bristol and Bath, centred on William Blathwayt's bookcase.
- The project aims to involve ordinary visitors in co-creating the historical narratives told about the site, rather than relying solely on curatorial selection.
- The game runs in three phases: an auction where players buy cards with silver and gold coins, a tale phase where purchased cards are woven into a story, and a voting phase where the best narrative wins a tile.
The Challenges of Using Commercial-Off-the-Shelf Narrative Games in History Classrooms
This document outlines research into the feasibility and challenges of integrating commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) narrative video games into US secondary school history classrooms, specifically for 9th-grade World History.
- Historical narrative games present history as dynamic and multi-perspectival rather than as a fixed sequence of events, making them usable as texts for students to critique and interpret, provided educators anticipate significant classroom obstacles.
- The most significant early finding concerned usability rather than content: students struggled with The Last Express's constant-rate time mechanic, which required players to be in the right place at the right time, and many grew frustrated when they could not progress or overhear conversations.
- Classroom constraints limited play in the three two-day tests with ninth-grade World History students at a vocational school, including 40-minute class periods, the inability to preload save points, and classroom noise that hindered audio comprehension.
OFabulis and Versailles 1685: A Comparative Study of the Creation Process Behind Video Games on Historical Monuments
This study compares the creation processes of two point-and-click video games, OFabulis and Versailles 1685, both centered on historical monuments, to identify commonalities in their development.
- The paper argues that heritage games share three inherent traits: cultural institutions participate in design from the outset, the scenario must negotiate a compromise between history and fiction, and multimedia systems are built around limited gameplay and realistic rendering to showcase monuments.
- The study compares Versailles 1685 (Cryo Interactive, 1996), which used the Omni 3D system to let players explore fully rendered reconstructions of 1685 Versailles, with OFabulis (free experimental multiplayer game, online in 2014), covering nineteen monuments managed by the Centre des Monuments Nationaux.
- OFabulis combined photographs, 3D avatars, and filmed agents into "mixed spaces" that could run on modest hardware, while Versailles 1685 relied on fully rendered 3D reconstructions.
Archaeological Storytelling in Games
The document explores the concept of "archaeological storytelling" in digital games, distinguishing it from broader "archeogaming" and existing environmental storytelling approaches.
- Archaeological storytelling is proposed as a distinct narrative technique in which players must study in-game material culture and interpret artefacts to reconstruct a world's history, distinct from both archaeogaming and existing environmental storytelling.
- The authors argue that games should avoid a single authoritative interpretation and instead offer multiple, possibly contradictory histories, drawing on museum practice around active object interpretation and the principle of multi-vocality.
- Popular titles such as Tomb Raider and Uncharted treat artefacts as optional collectibles with little bearing on the main narrative, and often reduce the archaeological past to a surrogate history of social elites.
The SEGA and Microsoft History of India: The British Raj in Videogames
This paper examines how videogames portray colonial history, using the British Raj in India as its case study, with particular attention to the real-time strategy titles Empire: Total War and Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties.
- The paper argues that Empire: Total War and Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties, despite claims of historical rigor, tend to reproduce orientalist and Eurocentric master narratives of empire that flatten the plurality of Indian histories and marginalize subaltern perspectives.
- Its analysis identifies concrete inaccuracies in these games, including the conflation of diverse Indian groups into a monolithic Hindu identity, anachronistic depictions of tea plantations, and the sanitizing of colonial exploitation.
- Counter-historical "what-if" play, such as an Indian faction conquering England, is characterized as still tethered to imperial logics of the nation-state rather than genuinely challenging them.
History, Biography and Empathy in Inkle's '80 Days'
Inkle's 80 Days, a digital gamebook adapted from Jules Verne's novel, is analyzed as an unusual vehicle for experiencing history.
- The report argues that 80 Days, Inkle's steampunk adaptation of Jules Verne's novel, layers real nineteenth-century history beneath a fictional world to foreground minority perspectives.
- Its central claim is a divided structure: the player-character Passepartout is a detached witness to large events that rarely affect his journey, while non-player characters actively shape and reshape history, often through resistance and revolt.
- Historical references in the game are brief, episodic, and optional, with no in-game supplementary resources, so players must consult outside sources such as the Internet to learn more.
The Fortress of Monemvasia as Playground for a Location Based Game
This study details the ongoing deployment and design of "If … in Monemvasia," a location-based mobile game intended to enhance historical understanding among secondary school pupils visiting the medieval fortress town of Monemvasia in the Peloponnese, Greece.
- The location-based game "If … in Monemvasia" has been integrated into an Environmental Education Center's program since February 2016, and in its first three months was played 18 times by 343 secondary-level pupils, averaging 19 per session.
- Players form four teams of three to five and move through the medieval town to match seventeen role-playing missions, framed around Siege, Rebuilding, and Everyday Life, to landmarks revealed through GPS "hot zones" on Android tablets, earning points only for correct associations.
- The design treats historical concepts such as repeated invasions, multicultural architecture, limited space, and reliance on rainwater as lenses for observing the environment rather than facts to memorize, with the authors arguing that linking historical analysis to physical exploration fosters historical thinking.
Playing with Herstory: Representing Femininity in Historical Video Games
This analysis proposes a framework for evaluating the representation of femininity in historical video games, moving beyond a sole focus on "strong" characters.
- The paper proposes six indicators for systematically assessing feminine character representation in historical video games: the link to real historical persons (historical, fictive-representative, or purely fictive), proportion of women, strength of agency, playability as a player character, age diversity, and other diversity such as personal histories, skills, and personalities.
- The authors argue that historical video games have received far less critical attention than historical texts and films, making systematic evaluation of their representation of women especially important.
- The analysis of three games shows each has both strengths and weaknesses: This War of Mine offers balanced, individualized playable civilians of varied ages and backgrounds, though only one woman appears in its civilian cast balanced with men.
Public History, Game Communities and Historical Knowledge
Nick Webber's paper argues that scholarly attention to historical games has focused too narrowly on the historical content encoded within game design, and that the more significant site of historical thinking lies in the communities that form around games, particularly persistent massively multiplayer online games.
- Nick Webber argues that scholarly focus on historical games has been too narrow, concentrating on historical content in game design when the more significant site of historical thinking is the communities that form around games, especially persistent MMOGs.
- The paper frames a tension between historians, who prioritise "what we know" through disciplined analysis of evidence, and publics, who often prioritise "why" the past matters in the present, and proposes public history as a way to reconcile the two.
- The central case study is EVE Online, a science-fiction MMOG with more than 300,000 players on a single server and thirteen years of history at the time of writing, whose sandbox design lets player alliances of thousands produce a persistent, politically complex past.
A Playful Tinder-Like Interface for Search and Rescue
This paper explores the application of playful, gamified interfaces to micro-volunteering tasks, specifically focusing on image recognition for search and rescue operations.
- aeroSee is a web-based micro-volunteering platform that uses drone-captured imagery to support search and rescue for missing persons in rural environments, relying on volunteers to sort and tag photos at scale.
- The core proposition is that a playful, Tinder-inspired swiping interface can motivate volunteers to process large photo sets, grounded in the authors' co-design work and prior research on gamification and citizen science.
- An earlier alpha trial using a points-based leaderboard to encourage textual tagging produced no measurable gain in performance or tag quality, prompting a redesign that removed points, rewards and leaderboards in favour of interaction, story and community.
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