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
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."
Towards Communicative, Collaborative and Constructive Multi-Player Games
This paper proposes a refined understanding of "interaction" within multi-player games, offering conceptual and hierarchical models to inform the design of richer, more meaningful player experiences.
- The central finding is that participants communicate effectively in virtual environments when systems offer multiple communication channels in a "memorable, yet invisible" manner, with non-verbal communication identified as a key design priority.
- The author proposes two models of "rich interaction": a horizontal concept model describing forms of interaction and a vertical hierarchical model structuring them, aimed at making multiplayer games more communicative, collaborative and constructive.
- The work argues that multiplayer games are often mechanically shallow and that academic theory and industry practice remain poorly connected, partly because commercial secrecy limits researchers' access to industry data.
Gran Stylissimo: The Audiovisual Elements and Styles in Computer and Video Games
The document, "Gran Stylissimo: The Audiovisual Elements and Styles in Computer and Video Games," aims to establish a comprehensive framework for understanding and categorizing the diverse aesthetic forms of computer and video games.
- Järvinen's framework classifies game audiovisual style into three categories (photorealism, caricaturism, and abstractionism) and defines its elements as dimensionality, point of perception, visual outlook, and soundscape, arguing these matter more for understanding games than conventional genre labels alone.
- Games differ from film because players manipulate and simulate environments, which gives sound a functional role: diegetic sound grounds the player in the space and gives feedback on actions, while nondiegetic sound can be anchored to locations to build mood.
- Game aesthetics circulate constantly with film, as shown by Max Payne borrowing the 'bullet time' effect from The Matrix, so game styles cannot be analysed in isolation.
The Study of Computer Games as a Second-Order Cybernetic System
Kücklich's paper argues that the dominant literary and narratological approaches to computer games rest on a problematic two-level model of code and interface, inherited from Aristotelian and structuralist traditions.
- The paper argues that narratology should not be the governing discipline for game studies; games should instead be situated within ludic, representational, and media traditions.
- It proposes a constructivist, second-order cybernetic framework in which game and player form an interdependent whole, shifting focus from the underlying code to the player's experience of play.
- Interactivity and narrativity are treated as synergetic effects of semiosis rather than fixed properties of the software.
Computer Game Criticism: A Method for Computer Game Analysis
The document proposes a comprehensive, bottom-up method for analyzing computer games, specifically designed for computer game criticism rather than adapted from other fields.
- Konzack proposes a seven-layer method for analysing computer games (hardware, program code, functionality, gameplay, meaning, referentiality, and socio-culture), arguing that all layers should be considered together so that technical, aesthetic, and socio-cultural perspectives are integrated.
- The method takes a bottom-up approach, beginning with a general description of the game that separates its virtual space from the surrounding playground to preserve a sense of the whole.
- The paper argues that games must be analysed on their own terms rather than by transferring frameworks from other disciplines, while still drawing on existing analytical traditions.
Gameplay Rhetoric: A Study of the Construction of Satirical and Associational Meaning in Short Computer Games for the WWW
"Gameplay Rhetoric" investigates how short computer games distributed via the World Wide Web function as a medium for non-narrative rhetorical meaning, specifically satire and association.
- The study argues that short web-based games communicate satirical and allegorical meaning through rhetorical devices rather than through story or simulation, so meaning persists even when gameplay is rudimentary.
- Satirical effect in these games is produced mainly by incongruity, pretense via parody and low burlesque, surprise, superiority, exaggeration, and violence, drawing on Feinberg's taxonomy of satirical technique.
- Allegorical meaning relies on conceptual mappings such as "life is a journey" and on metonymic relations, which the author's pilot game Vanitas Game uses to express mortality.
The Gameplay Gestalt, Narrative, and Interactive Storytelling
The document, "The Gameplay Gestalt, Narrative, and Interactive Storytelling," posits that a fundamental conflict exists between repetitive gameplay patterns, termed "gameplay gestalts," and the achievement of deep narrative immersion in computer games.
- Craig Lindley argues that gameplay in computer games is best understood as a "gameplay gestalt", a learned, repeatable pattern of perceptual, cognitive, and motor interaction, and that this repetitive structure undermines deep narrative immersion.
- In many action-oriented titles, the three-act story is delivered through non-interactive cut scenes while player interactivity is confined to low-level tasks with little bearing on the plot.
- Lindley proposes that gameplay gestalts be studied as measurable across perception, cognition, and motor demands, and notes that strategy games often compete with narrative for players' limited cognitive resources while offering thematically shallow experiences.
Whose Game Is This Anyway?: Negotiating Corporate Ownership in a Virtual World
T.L. Taylor contends that the growing commercialization of massively multiplayer online games, with EverQuest as her central case, undermines user autonomy and authorship.
- Taylor argues that corporate claims of ownership over MMOs like EverQuest are an incomplete account of authorship, because the identities, communities, and economic value of these virtual worlds are produced largely through players' collective labor.
- Sony's 2000 ban on selling accounts and items through eBay and Yahoo! was framed as intellectual property protection, but it also safeguarded subscription revenue and the integrity of the game's cooperative economies, illustrating how property rhetoric can serve commercial interests.
- Corporate owners assert control through end-user license agreements, account bans, and claims over fan fiction and derivative works, while users are poorly positioned to contest these claims in court.
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