DiGRA
Association1,972 reports · 613 articles
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
Whitepaper2 pages
A History of Voice Interaction in Games
This paper traces the history of voice interaction in digital games, arguing that the modality has long been promised as a natural form of play while remaining marginal in practice.
- Voice interaction in games has long been promised as a natural form of play yet has remained marginal in practice, a tension the paper examines through platform studies and the constraints platforms place on voice input.
- The earliest identified voice-controlled game is Voice-Chess, built on the Hearsay-I speech understanding system in 1973, and 1960s computer science research used simple games as test cases because a limited, standardised vocabulary made recognition tractable.
- Ambitious early-1980s speech add-ons such as the Halcyon console and the Atari Voice Commander never reached mass production after the 1983 North American video game crash, while Japan's Famicom microphone, largely unused and omitted from the international NES, found a modest niche in titles like The Legend of Zelda and Kid Icarus.
DiGRAJan 2016
Whitepaper2 pages
Breaking New Ground: Indie Community, Flash, and Newgrounds.com
The document examines the historical role of online collaborative-creative communities, specifically Newgrounds.com and Macromedia Flash, in fostering contemporary indie game development.
- The paper argues that Macromedia Flash and Newgrounds.com served as an accessible, open-access alternative to mainstream publisher-controlled game development during a period of tight industry control.
- A central thesis is that Flash functioned as a vernacular creative language and Newgrounds.com as a collaborative network that fostered shared discourse and eventual pathways to commercial success for independent developers.
- The study's key case is Super Meat Boy, traced back to its origins as a free Flash submission to Newgrounds.com, used to illustrate how the site enabled a developer's career-defining breakthrough.
DiGRAJan 2016
Whitepaper2 pages
"You Don't Ever Stop Playing EVE Online, You Just Take a Break": Rethinking What It Means to Quit a Massively Multiplayer Online Game
This research investigates the reasons why players discontinue participation in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), specifically focusing on EVE Online.
- The study draws on survey responses from 133 former EVE Online players, focusing on why they left rather than why current players stay, to fill a gap in research that has mostly studied active players.
- Reasons for leaving depend on whether the break was meant to be temporary or permanent: temporary departures were mainly driven by external constraints such as school commitments or financial limitations, often with a planned return date.
- Permanent departures were more commonly linked to a lack of enjoyment, with some players describing EVE Online as having become more like work than play.
DiGRAJan 2016
Article
A Game Within a Bio-Object(s): Redefining a Moment of the Gameplay
This conference abstract proposes a posthumanist framework for understanding the relationship between player and video game, drawing on Tadeusz Kantor's theatrical concept of the "bio-object."
- Posthumanist theory, drawing on Bryant and Latour's actor-network framing, treats humans as one actor among many in a relational network rather than the privileged center, and this paper applies that lens to video games.
- The player is framed as a co-creator of game reality alongside the software, with meaning produced performatively through the interaction rather than dictated by the game's narrative.
- Tadeusz Kantor's concept of the 'bio-object' (the actor and stage object fused into a unity held together by constant rivalry) is proposed as a theoretical tool for understanding the player-game relationship.
DiGRAJan 2016
Whitepaper2 pages
Designing for Constructive Failure: Reflections on the Design and Execution of an Introduction to Simulation Gaming
The document explores the concept of "constructive failure" within the context of simulation gaming in higher education, specifically focusing on an introductory course for Media & Entertainment Management students.
- Games can serve as a productive space for learning from failure, and the paradox of enjoyable play for serious professional ends can be deliberately harnessed in higher education, drawing on Juul, Statler et al., and Dweck's work on learning orientations.
- The course aimed to help future creative-industry managers recognize when simulation games might or might not help solve real-world problems, rather than to train game designers; it ran from 2011 to 2015 with third-year BBA Media & Entertainment Management students.
- Student reception varied across years: early non-mandatory sessions and weak incentives for preparatory reading were later replaced with stronger incentives, classic games such as the Dollar Auction and the prisoner's dilemma, and competitive paper-prototyping exercises.
DiGRAJan 2016
Whitepaper2 pages
"It's a Me, Mario!": Costumed Gaming's Effects on Character Identification
This exploratory research investigates the impact of "costumed gaming" on players' character identification, self-perception, and social engagement.
- Costumed gaming is an exploratory qualitative study of ten dyads of UC Irvine students, each playing Super Mario 3D World (as Mario and Peach) or Hyrule Warriors (as Link and Zelda) for 30 to 60 minutes both out of costume and in costume, followed by a dyad interview.
- Preliminary findings indicate that players used more first-person singular and plural pronouns ("I" and "we") to refer to their characters while in costume, and consciously adjusted their verbal and body language to match them, suggesting stronger character and avatar identification.
- The study draws on enclothed cognition, theatrical outside-in transformation and mask work, and fan cosplay scholarship to frame how clothing shapes identity during play.
DiGRAJan 2016
Whitepaper2 pages
Comparing Gameplay Across Formal and Informal Contexts
This analysis examines how gameplay differs between formal and informal contexts, specifically focusing on the real-time strategy game "Virulent."
- Formal classroom-style and informal play of the real-time strategy game Virulent were largely similar among 32 middle school students (aged 10 to 14), with context not consistently shaping how they played.
- Time played in formal and informal contexts was positively correlated, and t-tests found no significant differences in the rates of creating paths, changing paths, or spawning units.
- Upgrading units, an infrequent action, showed the largest relative difference between contexts, but it was only borderline significant (p = 0.05).
DiGRAJan 2016
Whitepaper2 pages
Design Paradigms and Principles for Free-to-Play Games: A Developer Interview Study
This study investigates the design paradigms and principles for free-to-play (F2P) games from the perspective of game developers.
- The study is a qualitative interview study of 14 game developers from six Finnish companies (interviews of 50–100 minutes each), with experience ranging from one to twenty years; ten had worked on free-to-play games and six on gambling games.
- Transcripts were analyzed with a Grounded Theory approach and organized into five themes: generic paradigms, F2P paradigms, generic principles, F2P principles, and poor F2P design.
- The report distinguishes abstract design paradigms (e.g., a game must be fun) from concrete principles (e.g., chokedown levels), and separates generic design approaches from those specific to free-to-play.
DiGRAJan 2016
Article
Who Made That Last Game? The Alternative Chronology of the 8-Bit Era in Poland
Game history scholarship tends to fixate on "firsts," such as the first game, genre, or formal innovation, while neglecting the late stages of game history phenomena.
- The 8-bit era reached Poland late because the CoCom embargo on exports to Eastern Bloc countries kept 8-bit microcomputers expensive and scarce until the collapse of communism in 1989.
- After 1989, Polish gamers were flooded with used Western gaming machines, and Atari's 8-bit line stayed popular in Poland until the mid-1990s, earning Poland the nickname the "Last Fortress of the Little Atari".
- Polish late 8-bit games such as the Miecze Valdgira series were hits on the local market until about 1995, but by 1996 new 8-bit titles like Knoorkie: The Pig struggled to find publishers and were picked up by smaller firms like TimSoft.
DiGRAJan 2016
Whitepaper2 pages
Engaging Elements in a Commercial Game
This study investigates which features in commercial games contribute to player engagement and how this engagement impacts skill acquisition.
- A study of 52 undergraduates compared the commercial game Peggle with Mockle, a stripped-down version built in GameMaker Lite that removed engaging features while keeping the core target-hitting skill, with participants randomly assigned to one condition.
- Peggle players showed significantly higher enjoyment on several measures, including total time played, average time per session, self-reported enjoyment, and desire to continue playing.
- Peggle players hit more targets on average from the earliest turns of play, suggesting the Peggle environment was simply easier to score in, and neither group meaningfully improved over time in targets hit.
DiGRAJan 2016
Whitepaper2 pages
On a Design Approach for Collaborative Decision Making Games: A Preliminary Validation Study
This study presents a preliminary validation of a five-step design approach for Collaborative Decision Making Games (CDMGs), which integrates principles from game design, software design, and Collaboration Engineering.
- The study proposes a five-step iterative design approach for Collaborative Decision Making Games (CDMGs) — capturing game activities, considering collaboration patterns, creating game elements, allocating game mechanics, and validating game activities — drawing on Collaboration Engineering and patterns from game, software design, and collaboration research.
- The evaluation was small and exploratory: two groups of four third-year undergraduate Computing or Game Technology students, with no prior exposure to complex decision-making topics or CDMG design, completed a two-hour workshop designing a football management game called Ultra League Football.
- Participants rated the approach highly for analysability, adoptability, and effectiveness, especially for decomposing game objectives, mechanics, and elements into manageable parts, and found the supporting training material comprehensive and useful.
DiGRAJan 2016
Whitepaper2 pages
Internally Enacted Narratives: Jonathan Blow's The Witness
The document proposes that games can serve as academic experiments, validating or questioning research methods, assumptions, and findings in the humanities and social sciences.
- Robinson argues that humanities and social science scholars should build games as experiments, not only write texts, using emergence in multi-player systems to test the assumptions, methods, and findings of their fields by playing out their consequences.
- The approach draws on Alan Turing's observation that the consequences of a fact are not immediately apparent, and is positioned as distinct from proceduralist arguments that value games mainly for communicating ideas in novel forms.
- The central case study, The Amalgamated, is an experiment-game modeling Montreal's labour movement between 1915 and 1920, in which players take on roles of entities and try to accumulate capital and labour by reconfiguring the network.
DiGRAJan 2016
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