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
Making Right(s) Decision: Artificial Life and Rights Reconsidered
This study explores the ethical implications of artificial life (A-life) and the concept of rights for artificial entities, using the popular video game The Sims as a primary case study.
- The paper argues that as machines become more socially interactive and emotionally expressive, the boundary between human and machine becomes less fixed, calling for a reconsideration of what rights mean for artificial life.
- The author's central evidence is qualitative analysis of public forums about The Sims and the robotic pet AIBO, where players described deliberately cruel treatment of their Sims (such as drowning or confining them) while also expressing guilt and reluctance to harm characters resembling family or friends.
- Research on AIBO users cited in the paper found people were attached to robotic pets yet seldom attributed moral standing to them, showing a gap between emotional attachment and moral consideration.
Mise-en-scène Applied to Level Design: Adapting a Holistic Approach to Level Design
This document proposes that level designers can enhance emotional depth and narrative communication in video games by adopting the filmic concept of mise-en-scène.
- Mise-en-scène, the film concept of deliberately arranging everything visible within a frame to convey meaning, is proposed as a framework for level design to deepen emotional engagement and communicate narrative and psychological subtext.
- The paper maps Robert Kolker's mise-en-scène elements (spatial arrangement, props, camera relationship, color, lighting, and framing) onto level designers' responsibilities such as set dressing, lighting, texturing, and object placement, noting that cinematography and costuming typically fall to other team members.
- Close readings of Kubrick's The Shining show how scale, the Overlook Hotel's labyrinthine architecture, shifting color temperatures from warm amber to cold blue, atmospheric effects like snow and haze, and repurposed props reinforce themes of isolation, decay, and supernatural dominance.
Video Games: A Significant Cognitive Artifact of Contemporary Youth Culture
This qualitative study, "Video Games: A Significant Cognitive Artifact of Contemporary Youth Culture," posits that recreational video games hold substantial informal educative value and should be considered for inclusion in school curricula.
- A study of five 13-year-old players of Final Fantasy IX recorded 600 instances of thinking skills during play, most often predicting, evaluating, and justifying, plus 155 instances of strategy use led by exploration and trial-and-error.
- All five participants engaged in higher-order reasoning while playing, supporting the authors' claim that recreational games can be a legitimate site of cognitive activity.
- Informal cognitive performance during play often diverged from teachers' ability ratings, as one student rated average outperformed a peer rated very high, which the authors use to question conventional academic assessment.
A Real Little Game: The Pinocchio Effect in Pervasive Play
Jane McGonigal challenges the common view that players of pervasive and immersive games are dangerously credulous, prone to mistaking games for reality.
- McGonigal argues that immersive and pervasive game players are knowing participants who strategically perform belief (the "Pinocchio effect") rather than credulous dupes, challenging press coverage of the 2001 alternate reality game The Beast.
- Evidence from The Beast shows players repeatedly smoothed over moments that threatened to expose the game's construction, such as WHOIS lookups revealing hidden domain ownership, a link to Microsoft, and an actor's slip, in order to sustain the "This is not a game" framing.
- Interview evidence from the designers, Lee and Stewart, supports the view that audience complicity, not gullibility, kept The Beast's experience alive.
Issues and Approaches in Artificial Intelligence Middleware Development for Digital Games and Entertainment Products
The document examines the challenges and solutions in developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) middleware for digital games and entertainment products.
- AI has shifted from a secondary concern to a priority in game development, yet developers still rely on a narrow set of techniques and lack flexible, reusable tooling.
- Dedicated AI middleware, a software layer that supplies agent behavior and decision-making services to game engines, is presented as the likely next step for improving game AI and freeing developers for creative work.
- Dominant practice relies on finite state machines, hierarchical and fuzzy state machines, A pathfinding, steering behaviors, decision trees, and rule-based systems, each trading off speed, expressiveness, and predictability.
Characters in Computer Games: Toward Understanding Interpretation and Design
The document, "Characters in Computer Games: Toward Understanding Interpretation and Design," posits that character interpretation is fundamental to the player experience, extending even to non-human entities.
- Game characters are often perceived as flat because of weak design rather than any inherent limitation of the medium, and a consistent personality can be built deliberately.
- Personality is conveyed through predefined elements such as cut-scenes, dialogue, and animation, together with the goals assigned to a character and the actions enabled or restricted within the game.
- The authors argue that a protagonist's nature can be encoded into mechanics, meaning which actions are possible or impossible, rather than conveyed only through narrative exposition, and that this generates the conflict and goals that drive player behavior.
Exploration in Computer Games: A New Starting Point
Egenfeldt-Nielsen proposes exploration as the foundational, intrinsically motivating drive behind all computer games, drawing on Kelly's "man-as-scientist" personality theory.
- Egenfeldt-Nielsen frames exploration as a foundational drive in computer games and analyzes it through two complementary optics: the 'system position' (rules and logic, where exploration ends once rules become predictable) and the 'player position' (games as subjective sites of meaning, where exploration stays open-ended).
- Drawing on George Kelly's 'man-as-scientist' theory, the paper argues games act as safe environments for testing and revising mental constructs, and that every game begins with a tension that gradually subsides through play.
- Players construct their experience by reinterpreting the tension set up by a game's rules, setting, and story; meaning-oriented exploration is illustrated by Myst, while rules-oriented exploration is illustrated by chess and Age of Empires II.
Expressive AI: Games and Artificial Intelligence
The document proposes "expressive AI" as a new interdisciplinary agenda that connects game studies, design practice, and technical research, arguing that Artificial Intelligence (AI) in games is not merely a technical detail but a crucial element for creating meaningful player experiences.
- Mateas argues that as graphical gains yield diminishing returns, game development is shifting attention toward artificial intelligence, and proposes "expressive AI" as an interdisciplinary agenda linking games studies, design practice, and technical research.
- Game AI is defined as the production of behavior that players read as intentional, distinguishing it from game physics: Asteroids' asteroids and water simulations generate behavior without inviting psychological interpretation, whereas enemies like Pac-Man's ghosts invite readings of goals, desires, and moods.
- The paper positions game AI as a "white box" vocabulary for analyzing and designing games, complementing the "black box" vocabularies of design patterns and humanistic game studies that deliberately ignore implementation.
Stepping Back: Players as Active Participators
The document, "Stepping Back: Players as Active Participators," posits a novel "active participator" model for game design, challenging the traditional single-character player perspective.
- The paper argues that single-player third-person games can position players flexibly among multiple characters rather than binding them to one fixed role, and that this variable positioning offers dramatic and narrative advantages design has yet to fully explore.
- The central case study is Common Tales, a 1999–2000 prototype by Sony and Cambridge researchers in which players alternate control between two heroes, Thomas and Fiz.
- Common Tales structures the hero relationship through three interaction types (teamwork, anguish, and rescue), along with spatial and cinematic design.
The Ideology of Interactivity: Video Games and the Taylorization of Leisure
Matt Garite challenges the prevailing theory that video game interactivity is inherently liberating, arguing instead that games discipline players through relentless demands for repeated input and thereby hail them as ideological subjects in the Althusserian sense.
- The central thesis is that video game interactivity is an ideological mechanism rather than genuine player freedom: games train players, through repeated input, to internalize the designer's mental structure while feeling they are choosing.
- Games are framed as productive labor that reproduces dominant ideology, functioning as symbolic violence in which players learn to police both the screen and themselves, drawing on Foucault's panopticism and Jameson's concept of "autosurveillance."
- The author argues that player options are largely illusory, tightly constrained to predetermined responses such as choosing between buttons "A" and "B," with meaningful choice emerging only after the designer's decisions are already fixed.
Technology Tells a Tale: Digital Games and Narrative
"Technology Tells a Tale: Digital Games and Narrative" examines how digital games redefine and transform traditional notions of storytelling, rather than simply being narratives themselves.
- Digital games are not narratives in themselves; the digital medium is reshaping how culture understands what a story is.
- The paper frames the long-running debate between narratologists (applying literary and film theory to games) and ludologists such as Aarseth, Frasca, and Eskelinen (prioritizing play and interactivity).
- The author identifies five recurring characteristics of computing as the basis for how games produce meaning: procedurality, participation, quantifiability, modularity, and finiteness.
Problem Solving: The Essence of Player Action in Computer Games
The core thesis of this analysis is that player engagement in computer games fundamentally stems from a problem-solving process, which it terms "computer game agency."
- Player agency in computer games is framed as intentional actions that advance play by solving problems, built on Espen Aarseth's concepts of aporia (an obstacle) and epiphany (its resolution).
- The paper proposes a three-phase model of problem solving: comprehending the aporia, developing a strategy, and executing intentional action, with flawed approaches requiring a return to earlier stages.
- Baldur's Gate II conceals its overarching goal and presents a fixed, staircase-like chain of linked aporia-epiphany pairs with a role-play emphasis.