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
Video Games in Context: An Ethnographic Study of Situated Meaning-Making Practices of Asian Immigrant Adolescents in New York City
This ethnographic study investigates the situated meaning-making practices of Asian immigrant adolescents in New York City as they play video games.
- The meaning of video game play is shaped by real-world physical and social conditions around players, so researchers must attend to the player-human as well as the player-avatar, not just virtual-community dynamics.
- Existing 'situated learning' accounts of virtual communities omit the offline context in which play is constructed, which this multisite ethnography (home, Internet cafés, a university research lab) is designed to capture.
- Three Cantonese-speaking recent immigrant boys aged 15 to 18, from the same public high school ESL program, playing Super Smash Brothers Melee and Naruto: Clash of Ninjas 2, showed players applying one game's unlocking logic to another and misreading the second game's structure.
Piracy in the Caribbean: The Political Stakes of Videogame Piracy in Chávez's Venezuela
This paper examines the political implications of videogame piracy in Hugo Chávez's Venezuela, arguing that piracy enables participation in global media culture for economically marginalized groups, thereby challenging traditional notions of participatory culture and state control.
- Software piracy in Caracas's Libertador district, documented through fieldwork from March to July 2005, was ubiquitous, with pirated games sold far below official prices.
- Distribution networks in Caracas were efficient enough for new North American releases to reach the streets within about 48 hours of launch.
- Apperley argues that piracy can extend access to the global videogame economy for groups excluded by economic barriers, offering a route to inclusion in a knowledge economy rather than a reproduction of poverty.
The Hegemony of Play
The "Hegemony of Play," a concept coined by Bernie DeKoven in 2005 and developed by the scholarly group Ludica, argues that a narrow industry elite of publishers, retailers, marketers, and self-identified "hardcore gamers" has constricted the definition of games and players.
- The report argues the digital game industry is shaped by a narrow, male-dominated, largely white corporate elite that excludes women, non-gamers, and minority players, constricting the market and hindering commercial success.
- A 2005 IGDA survey found 88.5% of game developers are male, 83.3% are white, and 92% are heterosexual, while an ESA figure cited in the report shows 38% of gamers are women.
- The author contrasts the modern video game industry with the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century board game industry, which included women designers such as Anne Abbott (Mansion of Happiness) and Lizzie Magie (The Landlord Game) and reflected a broader range of themes and demographics.
I Fought the Law: Transgressive Play and The Implied Player
Espen Aarseth's DiGRA 2007 paper examines the contested concept of the "player" in Game Studies and argues that transgressive play is central to understanding how games work.
- Aarseth resolves the question of "the player" by arguing that the historical, real player cannot exist without a game, while a game can exist without any actual player, and he proposes the "implied player" as a role of expectations embedded in a game's structure, drawing on Wolfgang Iser's concept of the implied reader.
- Aarseth contends that transgressive play (defying intended rules through unexpected actions, bugs, or exploits) is central rather than marginal to understanding play, even though such behavior is statistically uncommon.
- The paper maps game studies along two axes: methodological (formal versus informal) and empirical (social sciences versus humanities), with social scientists studying the player as a historical, situated person and humanists treating the player as a construct of the text.
Play it for Real: Sustained Seamless Life/Game Merger in Momentum
"Play it for Real: Sustained Seamless Life/Game Merger in Momentum" examines the design and player experience of "Momentum," a five-week pervasive live-action role-playing game (larp) that aimed to integrate gameplay seamlessly into participants' daily lives.
- Momentum was a five-week pervasive live action role-playing game staged in Stockholm in 2006, designed to fully merge play with everyday life and to present fictional content and fabricated clues as reality.
- The authors judged Momentum to be too seamless, largely because of its extended duration, even after seamlessness had already been moderated compared with their earlier work, "Där vi föll."
- Over 90 percent of participants reported feeling guilty about not playing enough, indicating the strong pressure the design exerted on players.
Introducing Applied Ludology: Hands-on Methods for Game Studies
"Introducing Applied Ludology: Hands-on Methods for Game Studies" presents a novel methodological framework for game analysis, integrating systemic game design principles with psychological insights into player experience.
- Järvinen's applied ludology is a hands-on methodology that combines formal systems theory with psychological and player-centered perspectives to bridge the fragmentation between structural and player-focused game studies.
- The approach is operationalized through a toolbox of seven Rapid Analysis Methods covering game elements across nine categories, mechanics and goal hierarchies, and player ability sets and emotional eliciting conditions.
- Analysis of casual games Zuma, Tetris, and Diner Dash finds they rely on a small, recurring set of mechanics (arranging, placing, browsing, point-to-point movement) that typically aggregate into a global goal of accumulating points.
Long-Term Motivations to Play MMOGs: A Longitudinal Study on Motivations, Experience and Behavior
This longitudinal study investigates the long-term motivations, gameplay experience, and playing behavior of users in Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), specifically focusing on the browser-game "Space Merchant Realms."
- The most important motivations for playing Space Merchant Realms, a text-based browser MMOG, were competition and learning, integration of reality and friendship, and escapism, with ten motivation factors explaining 67.2% of variance across 35 items.
- Players were heavily engaged, averaging 5.33 hours of daily play on weekdays and 4.29 hours on weekends, with many playing during work or school hours.
- Monetary willingness to pay was low: 61.7% of players were unwilling to spend money on browser games, and the average stated monthly willingness was about US$3.17.
Stealing from Grandma or Generating Cultural Knowledge? Contestations and Effects of Cheats in a Tween Virtual World
The study examines player-created "cheat sites" within Whyville.net, a virtual world designed for tweens that integrates science games with a virtual economy.
- Cheat sites in Whyville, a non-commercial tween virtual world, were studied through 257 Google-listed sites and over 100 articles from the community newspaper The Whyville Times (2000–2005), with the authors arguing that player-made cheat sites signal an active community and offer cultural and learning value rather than just shortcuts.
- Only about 15 percent of sampled cheat sites offered near-complete solutions with cultural tips, while most were partial or low quality, and the Salen and Zimmerman cheat-site typologies from commercial games applied in this setting too, ranging from solid solutions to scams and copied material.
- Newspaper coverage was largely negative toward cheating: roughly 30 percent of articles condemned cheating in salary-raising games, about 20 percent debated Smart Cars tactics, another 20 percent addressed ballot stuffing, and around 10 percent warned against scams, though some writers recognized creative or useful aspects.
What's My Game Character Worth: The Value Components of MMOG Characters
The document, "What's My Game Character Worth: The Value Components of MMOG Characters," posits that the value of Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) characters is a multifaceted construct derived from players' personal investment across achievement, social, and immersion motivations.
- Character value in MMOGs is multidimensional, arising from the interplay of numerical competence and status, the relationships and reputation built through play, and the personal identity and meaning players invest in their avatar, rather than from any single factor.
- The framework draws on Yee's motivational categories of achievement, social, and immersion components to explain why players value characters differently.
- Some players pay real money to skip progression, valuing a character's social or immersive dimensions over the effort of advancing it, while others deliberately pursue competitive standing as the core of their investment.
Emotions about the Deniable/Undeniable: Sketch for a Classification of Game Content as Experienced
This document introduces a novel framework for classifying game content based on players' emotional experiences, departing from traditional objective psychological analyses.
- Emotions in games are best understood as intentional relationships between players and in-game objects, not as isolated psychological reactions measurable in the abstract, and extreme emotional moments cannot represent the full range of player experience.
- The central thesis holds that understanding game emotion depends on whether players believe in or deny the game's fiction, a stance shaped by their "lusory attitude" toward its rules.
- The paper classifies game content as experienced into "deniable" meanings, which a player can reject without losing standing as a player, and "undeniable" meanings, whose acceptance is required to keep playing.
Ergonomic Evaluation of Portable Videogame Software
This study evaluates the psychophysiological effects of playing portable video games, focusing on short-term and direct impacts on user mood and stress.
- A 2007 DiGRA study of ten healthy graduate students (average age 24.5) playing five PlayStation Portable titles for fifteen minutes each found that video games can produce measurable psychophysiological changes, with the direction of effects depending on the game and the player.
- Ridge Racers and Mojipittan Daijiten were associated with increased vigor and reduced fatigue, though salivary amylase, a stress marker, rose during Mojipittan Daijiten play.
- Lumines produced increased vigor and decreased fatigue alongside low physiological arousal, suggesting a relaxing effect.
Gaming DNA: On Narrative and Gameplay Gestalts
This paper challenges Craig Lindley's assertion that gameplay and narrative gestalts are inherently antagonistic in video games.
- Douglas Brown argues, against Craig Lindley's view, that narrative and gameplay gestalts are not inherently in conflict but form an interwoven "double helix" that can catalyse, reinforce, or sometimes undermine each other.
- Brown concludes that the most successful games are those in which narrative and gameplay gestalts unify, and that the field suffers from a notable shortage of narrative depth.
- The paper contends that Hollywood's three-act structure is often a poor fit for games, and that over-reliance on it creates friction in game design.
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