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
"You Can't Help Shouting and Yelling": Fun and Social Interaction in Super Monkey Ball
This paper investigates the relationship between social interaction and the experience of "fun" in multi-player console gaming, specifically using Super Monkey Ball (SMB) as a case study.
- Console multiplayer play happens in shared living-room settings close to other players, resembling television viewing as a domestic social activity, which encourages sociability distinct from isolated PC gaming.
- Fun in the study emerges from oscillating between mastering a game's rules and staying absorbed in its world, with games acting as "affective alliances" around shared, time-limited experiences.
- A pilot study of nine participants (aged 20 to 30) in groups of experienced players, inexperienced players, and a contrasting male group found all experienced players wanted to play again and most inexperienced players did too.
Vertigo and Verticality in Super Monkey Ball
Troels Degn Johansson's short essay, written around the GameCube title Super Monkey Ball (SMB) in the early 2000s, argues that the game's vertical design and its console-based social setting make it especially suited to a rhetorical, allegorical reading.
- The paper argues that Super Monkey Ball's vertical design and frequent falling and failing give it an allegorical and rhetorical dimension beyond its surface as a light party game.
- Its cute monkey imagery, caricatured infantile behavior, and playful treatment of physical insufficiency invite a lighter mode of play that appeals to both non-gamers and hardcore players.
- The analysis rests mainly on the author's own play experience and an informal empirical study of test players, supplemented by one observation from a related study in the same collection, so the evidence base is modest.
Play in Cultural Environments
Salen and Zimmerman examine how games can blur the "magic circle," the frame, borrowed from Huizinga, that separates a game's artificial space and time from ordinary life.
- The report argues that boundary-blurring games erode the "magic circle" separating play from everyday life, raising fundamental questions about games' artificiality and their relationship to lived reality.
- Games that mix freely with players' surroundings can generate forms of play more culturally relevant than those confined within traditional boundaries.
- Microsoft's web-based alternate reality game A.I.: Artificial Intelligence distributed puzzles across fan sites, used weekly episodic updates, and incorporated real-world rallies.
Approaches to Computer Game Design: Characters and Conflict
This document explores methods for creating and directing player action in computer games, emphasizing that action is the most crucial feature from a player's perspective.
- Action is presented as the defining feature of games from the player's perspective, and it can be created and directed through well-defined characters with conflicting needs and motivations.
- Players perceive a game as logically coherent only when character motivations are consistent with the game's structure; the design of characters, expectations, and space must work together to guide meaningful engagement.
- Player expectations shape interpretation and behavior, including an assumed 'expectation of gaming' that a game should be interesting, challenging, and actionable, plus expectations driven by genre and intermediality.
I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games
Greg Costikyan argues that the term "gameplay" is too vague to guide design, and that designers need a critical vocabulary built from concrete components.
- Game design needs a precise critical vocabulary, since the vague term "gameplay" fails to guide either analysis or practice; the essay proposes organizing discussion around interaction, decision-making, and goals.
- Interaction becomes purposeful only when organized around goals, and games are distinguished from static puzzles and non-game systems by internal meaning that arises from their own structure rather than the real world.
- Games are defined by struggle rather than competition, since obstacles can take many forms (opposing players, computer opponents, puzzles, social or environmental barriers), and a game lacking meaningful struggle becomes dull.
Introduction: All Your Base Are Belong to Us
Games have become a pervasive cultural and economic force, and this introduction to the Computer Games and Digital Cultures (CGDC) conference proceedings argues that game studies must respond with an equally multifaceted, interdisciplinary approach.
- Digital games are cited as a twenty-billion-dollar worldwide industry, a scale that the author uses to argue they have moved from marginal enclaves into a mainstream cultural form deserving serious scholarly attention.
- The author points to the spread of multiplayer networking, mobile gaming, and augmented-reality concepts as evidence of games' expanding reach, while noting that games are becoming more ambitious artistically yet retain a counter-cultural, "low culture" character.
- Game studies is presented as a young, interdisciplinary field still defining its identity, with growing university programs in games technology and research cited as a sign of its maturation.
iDTV Gamers: The Emergence of a New Community?
The document examines the emerging landscape of Interactive Digital TV (iDTV) gaming, positing it as a significant and rapidly expanding segment within the global games industry.
- Roughly 40% of UK homes now have interactive digital television (iDTV), and 44% of digital consumers play games on it, with NTL's games channel drawing older, family-oriented, and lower socio-economic audiences.
- iDTV gaming is characterised by short "dipping" sessions alongside television viewing and a preference for simple, family-friendly titles, making it an extension of household TV habits rather than a dedicated pastime.
- A Netpoll study of 50 homes identified three iDTV player types: Generation I teens, Early Clickers, and Daytime Dabblers.
Console Games in the Age of Convergence
Console gaming has undergone a significant evolution, characterized by a cyclical "convergence-divergence-convergence" trend over two decades.
- Console gaming has cycled through repeated phases of convergence and divergence since the 1980s, with each phase shaped by institutional strategy as much as by technical capability.
- Nintendo held over 80 percent of the US console market and about 90 percent of Japan's in 1989, before Sony's CD-ROM-based PlayStation entered in 1995 and captured over 20 percent of the games market by 1996 through aggressive pricing and a larger software library.
- Sega withdrew from hardware after the Dreamcast's online strategy failed amid slow modem speeds and weak uptake of its service, while Sony's PlayStation came to dominate the late-1990s and early-2000s market.
All the World's a Botfighter Stage: Notes on Location-Based Multi-User Gaming
Olli Sotamaa's paper examines how location-based multi-user games such as Botfighters challenge classical definitions of play and game, while reshaping the meaning of mobile gaming and urban space.
- The paper argues that location-based multi-user games like Botfighters challenge the classical view of play as autonomous and separated from real life, because games using city streets as a board intrude on everyday reality.
- Location-based games are classified into three technological groups: GPS-based treasure hunts lacking real-time multi-user features, local network and proximity-sensor experiments mostly from research projects, and GSM cell-identification games that need only standard phones and are likely to reach large audiences.
- Botfighters, launched in Sweden in 2001 and offered in Sweden and Finland by April 2002, let players hunt and shoot each other via SMS commands, with a web interface for building robots and tracking scores.
The Similar Eye: Proxy Life and Public Space in the MMORPG
The document, "The Similar Eye: Proxy Life and Public Space in the MMORPG," examines the intricate relationship between game design, player behavior, and the emergence of complex social and economic systems within Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games.
- The report argues that MMORPGs such as EverQuest, Ultima Online, Anarchy Online, and Star Wars Galaxies function as genuine public spaces, countering theorists like Richmond, Davidson, and Gibson who deny that virtual environments can support authentic public interaction.
- Its central mechanism is oppositional game design: dividing the world into safe cities, dangerous wilderness, and quest zones, with the environment acting as antagonist, creates functional dependence on other players, which the author identifies as the foundation of community.
- Drawing on de Certeau's strategies and tactics, along with the figures of the crowd and the flâneur, the analysis holds that public space emerges through player improvisation within designed frameworks rather than from the designed structure alone.
In Defense of Cutscenes
"In Defense of Cutscenes" posits that cutscenes and pre-written narratives are not merely supplementary but fundamental to the design and player experience of many popular video games.
- Klevjer's essay argues against radical ludology, the view that narrative in games is an irrelevant ornament, and instead holds that cutscenes are an integral part of the gaming experience where narration and play can coexist.
- Klevjer contends that game events are inherently representational and rhetorical 'symbolic actions,' which gives narrative framing a legitimate role in shaping how players understand their activity.
- The essay addresses the 'paradox of make-believe' in story-based games such as Grand Theft Auto III, where players want both open-ended agency and a pre-written narrative, and argues cutscenes resolve this tension through genre-based framing.
Computer Games / Cinema / Interfaces
King and Krzywinska's "Computer Games / Cinema / Interfaces" examines the formal and industrial relationship between video games and film, arguing that cinematic concepts provide useful analytical tools for some games but that the two media should be compared on their distinct qualities rather than reduced one to the other.
- The authors argue that cinematic concepts are useful analytical tools for some games, but that games and film should be compared on their distinct qualities rather than one being reduced to the other.
- Cinema has shaped games far more than the reverse, since games rarely lend themselves to cinematic adaptation and their narrative and character development remain less developed than film's.
- Games demand more active engagement than film viewing, and the authors propose Aarseth's term "ergotic" as a more precise alternative to "interactive."