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
When Game Design and Narratives Unite
Dominic Arsenault introduces the "Dynamic Range," an analytical tool for measuring how much freedom a game system gives players, and uses it to examine the relationship between game design and narrative.
- Arsenault's central thesis is that game design actively shapes narrative content, and the two work well together only when the game system's openness matches the designer's narrative intentions.
- The paper introduces 'dynamic range' as a tool measuring how far a player can manipulate a game's internal dynamics to meet a challenge, drawing on the MDA framework of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics, and treats openness as a matter of degree rather than a binary.
- Diablo's resource-driven system offers wide internal manipulation, whereas Splinter Cell relies on external player skill and so offers a narrow dynamic range, as shown through character charts of a level-22 Warrior and Sam Fisher.
A Brief Social History of Game Play
Video games are widely pictured in the United States as the pastime of isolated, pale-skinned teenage boys hunched in dark basements, yet the historical record points to vibrant social settings and diverse playing communities.
- The popular stereotype of the isolated teenage gamer diverges sharply from the statistical and historical record, which points instead to vibrant social settings and diverse playing communities.
- The early 1980s were a pivotal turning point: gaming, initially an open and free space for cultural and social mixing, was rapidly reshaped by industrial and political forces rather than by game content, producer goals, or consumer demand.
- Age, gender, and place have been framed as seemingly natural characteristics of gaming, a framing that obscures issues of power and control in ways that favor some groups over others.
Cinematic Camera as Videogame Cliché
Thomas and Haussmann argue that the videogame camera is not an optical device but a computational system for producing light, and so is free to render any perspective rather than the linear, scientific perspective associated with photography and cinema.
- The videogame camera is a computational construct, not an optical one, so it is not bound to the linear, lens-based perspective that dominates cinema and photography.
- The authors argue that contemporary game design has increasingly adopted cinematic camera conventions, a tendency they describe as a cliché that narrows games' expressive vocabulary and blurs the boundary between games and film.
- The paper traces linear perspective from Renaissance scientific perspective through Cubism's rejection of it, and cites Lev Manovich's account of how linear perspective became an unquestioned default in computer interfaces.
The Pervasive Interface: Tracing the Magic Circle
"The Pervasive Interface: Tracing the Magic Circle" posits a redefinition of the interface concept within pervasive games, arguing it extends beyond conventional hardware and software to encompass the player's imagination and the reinterpretation of everyday reality.
- Eva Nieuwdorp's DiGRA 2005 paper argues that pervasive games, which embed fantasy within everyday physical and social settings, require rethinking the concept of an interface beyond hardware and screens.
- The paper proposes a "liminal interface" crossed in two stages: the paratelic interface, a playful state where players set aside lifeworld conventions through Goffman's rules of irrelevance, and the paraludic interface, a rule-bound structure where the game world's semiotic conventions dominate.
- The paper reworks the magic circle as a permeable, two-way boundary rather than a sealed space, and contends that the game world must feel omnipresent and internally consistent or the magic circle is pierced and the game collapses.
The Narrative and Ludic Nexus in Computer Games: Diverse Worlds II
"The Narrative and Ludic Nexus in Computer Games: Diverse Worlds II" empirically investigates the interplay between narrative and gameplay elements in contemporary computer games.
- The study analyses 80 critically acclaimed 2003 titles using Jenkins' four dimensions of narrative architecture and Aarseth, Smedstad and Sunnanå's thirteen-factor ludological typology, aiming to move past the narratology-ludology debate by examining how story and mechanics interact dynamically.
- Narrative formal systems appear in roughly three-quarters of the sampled games, with evoked and enacted narrative the most prevalent forms, while flashback and flash-forward techniques are rare and story information is predominantly presented objectively.
- Most titles feature geometrical topography, finite goal structures, real-world-paced time, and single- or two-player configurations, with deterministic responses, real-time environments, and objective-based rules common, and overcoming evil the dominant strategic objective.
The Localization of Digital Games: A Case Study in China
This paper investigates the complexities of digital game localization, specifically focusing on the Chinese market.
- Game localization is more complex than general software localization because games function simultaneously as commercial and cultural products.
- The authors propose a three-dimensional model comprising the In-Game Environment (storyline, gameplay, engagement, interface), the External Environment (social, political, legal, ideological factors), and the Users, who link the two.
- The central contention is that all three dimensions should be considered throughout the entire game design process rather than treated as a late-stage adjustment.
The Use of Video Game Technology for Investigating Perceptual and Cognitive Awareness in Sports
This paper outlines a research framework designed to investigate the transferability of perceptual and cognitive learning from video game environments to real-world sports, specifically ice hockey.
- The paper is a 2005 DiGRA conference proposal, not a completed study, and it reports no empirical results; its planned experiment's outcome remains untested.
- The authors argue that expert athletes and skilled video game players both build advanced perceptual and decision-making abilities through immersive practice, with ice hockey as the focal sport domain.
- The central claim is that expertise depends on holding and shifting between multiple knowledge types (cue utilization, pattern recognition, visual search, situational probability assignment) within ecologically realistic contexts rather than isolated lab trials.
How Multiplayer Games Create New Media Politics
This paper by Lars Konzack and Thessa Lindof, presented at the DiGRA 2005 conference, argues that massive multiplayer online games create a "new media politics" that differs fundamentally from the manipulative, one-way character of mass media.
- Massive multiplayer online games create a "new media politics" that differs from older mass media (print, radio, film, television), which cast audiences as passive recipients who can only switch channels or turn off, whereas games let players make meaningful choices, interact with each other, and reshape the game's meaning as social actors.
- The authors reject Gonzalo Frasca's claim that seriousness requires irreversibility and death, arguing instead that a serious game is one that prompts players to reflect on underlying structures after encountering a breakdown, with repetition and failure central to learning.
- Drawing on Huizinga, Piaget, and Brecht's alienation effect, the authors contend that a serious game must first be engaging enough that players willingly persist through obstacles before reflection can occur.
Possibilities of Non-Commercial Games: The Case of Amateur Role Playing Games Designers in Japan
The document examines the unique characteristics and possibilities of non-commercial game development in Japan, specifically focusing on amateur role-playing game (RPG) designers utilizing the "RPG Tkool 2000" tool.
- The study surveyed 102 self-identified Tkool 2000 designers ("Tkoolers"), a freeware RPG toolkit with simple 2D graphics and menu-based scripting that lowers hardware and technical barriers; the author notes self-reported data and possible sampling bias as limitations.
- Tkoolers are predominantly young males, many not especially drawn to computers, and are motivated mainly by fantasy fulfillment, storytelling, and extending games they enjoyed rather than by financial reward.
- The internet is indispensable to amateur designers: online communities, graphics and music repositories, and sites and review boards such as 2ch enable collaboration, distribution, and feedback.
Contexts, Pleasures and Preferences: Girls Playing Computer Games
This study investigates the gaming preferences of girls, arguing that these preferences are dynamic, context-dependent, and shaped by an "assemblage" of past experiences, access, and peer culture, rather than being solely attributable to gender.
- Preferences are not fixed: over one school term, the nine participating girls expanded their favourite-game lists from 26 titles to include 16 newly encountered games, suggesting that simply offering new games in a new context was enough to alter stated tastes.
- Physical site features shaped genre choice: consoles placed near the noisy social area drew girls to instantly gratifying, turn-taking games such as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4 and Dead or Alive 3, while the solitary PC corner favoured narrative-driven titles like The Sims and the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings games.
- Avatar gender mattered less than assumed: the girls showed little interest in female-led games, and questionnaire responses about ideal characters rarely specified gender, with those who did sometimes choosing male avatars, most pronounced among girls with the greatest home access.
The Effects of a Consumer-Oriented Multimedia Game on the Reading Disorders of Children with ADHD
This study investigates the impact of the consumer-oriented multimedia game Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) on the reading disorders of sixth-grade students diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
- A test-retest study of 62 sixth-grade students with ADHD and reading impairments, drawn from four West Virginia and neighboring-state middle schools between 2002 and 2004, tested whether Dance Dance Revolution could improve reading skills.
- Results were modest: of 24 PAL-RW subtests, the DDR treatment group showed only slightly larger gains than controls on RAN Digits and Receptive Coding, with small effect sizes.
- The RAN Digits result was ambiguous, with some evidence that treatment participants performed worse on that measure.
The Psychophysiology of Video Gaming: Phasic Emotional Responses to Game Events
This study explores the phasic psychophysiological responses to specific game events, aiming to demonstrate how emotion-related physiological data can inform game design.
- The study shifts from tonic, averaged physiological measures to phasic, event-level responses, arguing that tonic measures cannot separate the varied emotions elicited by specific moments of play.
- Physiological data (facial EMG, skin conductance, and cardiac interbeat intervals) were recorded from 36 participants playing Monkey Bowling 2 and synchronized with video at roughly single-frame accuracy.
- Falling off the lane and knocking down pins both produced positive-valence responses, and falling off the lane also elicited high arousal, suggesting active participation can make even failure emotionally rewarding.