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
Metagaming and Subversive Play in League of Legends
This study examines metagaming practices among high-level players of League of Legends, focusing on how competitors navigate a strategic metagame that shifts constantly because of frequent game patches.
- Metagaming in League of Legends, as examined in this study, goes beyond mechanical skill to include community-enforced strategic norms governing how players approach their roles and positions on entering a match.
- Frequent game patches constantly shift the metagame, and interviewed players reported that updates disrupted their established position and role combinations.
- Based on interviews with 13 high-level players from the Korean and Oceanic servers at the close of the 2015 competitive season, most players responded to patches by either switching to other pre-existing combinations or maintaining their habitual style even when it reduced their enjoyment.
"Game Over, Man. Game Over": Understanding the Limitations of Ego-Centric Videogame Design and Analysis Through Adaptations of Alien
Brendan Keogh and Darshana Jayemanne examine why videogame adaptations of the Alien film franchise have so consistently drawn on a narrow slice of the source material, and what this reveals about the limits of "ego-centric" design in blockbuster games.
- Blockbuster videogame adaptations of the Alien franchise, such as Xenophobe and Aliens: Colonial Marines, tend to favor muscular, ego-centric action design that casts the player as an empowered, exceptional agent.
- This power-fantasy framing narrows adaptation toward physical prowess and spatial mastery, largely sidelining the films' gender politics, critique of corporate technological culture, and Ellen Ripley's central role.
- Alien: Isolation is identified as a notable exception because it places the player at the mercy of the environment and an nearly invincible alien antagonist rather than in a privileged position.
Baby Gamers? Theorizing the 'Haptic Habitus' of Very Young Children, Parents and Touchscreen Technologies
This paper examines the largely overlooked relationship between very young children, touchscreen devices, and play, arguing that game studies has been slow to account for digital interaction at the earliest stages of life.
- Game studies has been slow to account for digital interaction among very young children, since babies and toddlers cannot self-report and devices have traditionally excluded them through minimum age requirements and out-of-reach placement.
- Mobile touchscreens are becoming common in domestic spaces and respond better to small, gestural hands than keyboards or controllers, making infants and toddlers increasingly active participants in digital environments.
- The paper introduces the concept of a "haptic habitus": an emerging set of embodied, touch-based norms shaped by very young children's encounters with touchscreens, assembled through both mediation and materiality (children's bodies, device design, and social representations).
Gaming's Secret Public: Nerdcore Porn and the In/Visible Body of the Female Gamer
Tom Apperley's short conference paper examines the relationship between nerdcore pornography, social media, and gaming culture, positioning it as a response to the "gamergate" controversy that began in mid-2014.
- The paper uses the 2014 'gamergate' controversy as its starting point, arguing that anonymous harassment directed largely at women made visibility dangerous for women while many male participants stayed anonymous.
- Rather than claiming a direct causal link, the paper argues that connections among nerdcore pornography, online harassment, and toxic masculinity reveal a libidinal circuitry within gaming culture that helps shape the conflict.
- Nerdcore is characterized as a pornographic genre blending amateur and professional production, largely made by everyday users on platforms such as Instagram and Tumblr, blurring the line between creation and curation.
Where You're Looking, Who You're With and How You Get There: Designing a Virtual Reality Art Game for Inclusion and Emotion
Lemarchand and Campos describe the design of The Meadow, a virtual reality art game developed at the USC Game Innovation Lab, as an alternative to VR projects that simply port conventional screen-based mechanics and genres.
- The Meadow, a VR art game from the USC Game Innovation Lab, was a finalist at the IndieCade Festival of Independent Games and was exhibited at the UCLA Game Art Show at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
- To counter simulator sickness, which the authors say disproportionately affects women, the game keeps the player stationary while events come to them, and the authors report this eliminated simulator sickness among every player who tested or used it.
- The game replaces complex controllers with gaze control, where players trigger state changes by steadily looking at interactive objects.
Localizing Location-Based Gaming: Situating Australian Urban Play
The document, "Localizing Location-Based Gaming: Situating Australian Urban Play," proposes "situated play" as a new conceptual framework for understanding the everyday practices of playing location-based games in urban environments, specifically within an Australian context.
- The paper proposes 'situated play' as a conceptual tool for understanding everyday location-based gaming in urban environments, shifting focus from games as spatial or temporal phenomena to the localized cultures in which they are played.
- It argues that urban play sits in a tension between Western conceptions of the city as functional space and as playful space, and frames historical playful urban mobility as resembling play rather than being play in itself.
- Urban play is presented as a potentially subversive reading of cities as sites of capitalist functionality, while also serving a civic and social purpose within the tradition of public play design.
Burying E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: Undoing Game Archaeology
Paolo Ruffino's conference paper uses the April 2014 excavation of Atari's buried E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial cartridges in Alamogordo, New Mexico, as a case study in how video game history is written.
- The 2014 excavation in Alamogordo, New Mexico, was an attempt by Microsoft and Fuel Industries to verify a long-circulating urban legend that Atari buried unsold copies of the 1982 E.T. game in the desert.
- The author argues the excavation functioned less as genuine historical inquiry and more as confirmation of a narrative already accepted, with the existing Atari story serving as the endpoint of the search.
- Drawing on Foucault's archaeology and genealogy, the paper critiques media archaeologists Raiford Guins, Erkki Huhtamo, and Jussi Parikka for treating game history as the history of an industry's successful and failed products, reinforcing present-day categories.
Algorithmic Play in Georges Perec's Ludic Narratives
Georges Perec's novels W, or the Memory of Childhood (1988) and Life A User's Manual (2008) are presented here as a productive resource for thinking about play in an algorithmic culture, with particular relevance to digital game studies.
- Georges Perec's novels W, or the Memory of Childhood (1988) and Life A User's Manual (2008) are used as a resource for analysing play in algorithmic culture, with direct relevance to digital game studies.
- In W, play is depicted as corrupted by absolute adherence to rules, linking competition, control, and fascism, while Life A User's Manual reframes play and chance as techniques for creative action within rule-based systems.
- Life A User's Manual is read as celebrating error and glitch as sources of contingency that can push a project beyond the limits of systemic logic.
Platforms in the Cloud: On the Messy Ephemerality of Platforms
The essay "Platforms in the Cloud: On the Messy Ephemerality of Platforms" critically examines the concept of a "platform" within Platform Studies, arguing for its ephemeral and complex nature.
- Platforms are treated as ephemeral socio-technical assemblages with fluid, hard-to-locate boundaries, and the essay argues that prior Platform Studies scholarship has not adequately confronted this messiness.
- The central contribution is the insistence that platform analysis must make its own analytic frameworks and theoretical assumptions explicit rather than leaving them opaque.
- Nintendo's Wii software development kits carried over assumptions about memory allocation, file formats, and game architecture from the GameCube, since early Wii development kits were modified GameCube kits.
Games to Live With and Die For: Speculations on NikeFuel
The document offers an alternative perspective on gamification and quantified-self technologies, arguing that they represent a type of "game" that requires no active play and where agency is diminished.
- The paper treats NikeFuel, a movement-quantification technology built into Nike+ wearables, as an example of gamification that resembles play without requiring it, running largely on its own and needing only that the user keep it updated.
- Its central thesis is that such playful systems erase the player and the sense of agency as human and machine assimilate, with the paper arguing they transform the user as much as the user transforms them.
- The author combines Foucauldian biopolitics, which frames quantification as control over living bodies, with Roger Caillois's anthropology of play as pure waste and mimicry as a self-dissolving instinct.
A Framework for Understanding Player Experiences with Controversial Game Content
The document presents a preliminary framework for understanding player experiences with controversial game content, such as violence or stereotypical representations.
- The paper proposes a preliminary framework for explaining when players experience controversial game content (such as high violence or stereotypical gender representation) as speculative, objectionable, or offensive versus as a source of insight and reflection, shifting focus from psychological effect research to players' subjective interpretations within gameplay.
- The framework is built from four focus groups of experienced players aged 21 to 35, mixed by gender, education, and occupation, analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, which the author notes tends to reveal attitudes as much as lived experience.
- The framework draws on the concept of positive negative experiences (distressing yet gratifying because they generate new understanding) and reversal theory, which holds that shifts between motivational states determine whether an emotion feels pleasant or unpleasant.
Perceptions, Perspectives and Practices: A Study of the Players of Historical Games
This study investigates adult players' perceptions, motivations, and practices concerning historical games in informal learning contexts.
- The study surveys over 600 adult respondents from more than 30 countries, focusing on informal player engagement with historical games rather than classroom learning.
- Fewer than a quarter of respondents are students and over half hold non-academic occupations, so the authors frame the work as a study of the general public rather than of history learners, broadening its relevance beyond earlier student-focused research.
- Prior research on historical games has largely been confined to formal education settings involving adolescent students or undergraduate history majors, leaving informal player practices understudied.
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