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
Serious Games in Language Learning and Teaching: A Theoretical Perspective
This paper, produced under the "Serious Games on a Global Market" project (2007–2010), advances a theoretical framework for designing serious games for language learning.
Play: A Procrustean Probe
"Play: A Procrustean Probe" applies Marshall McLuhan's media "tetrad" to digital games, using it less as a rigorous scientific method than as an exploratory lens for situating play within its technological environment.
Team Structure in the Development of Game-Based Learning Environments
This study examines how development teams for digital game-based learning environments should be organized, arguing that such projects demand multidisciplinary expertise spanning learning theory, game design, art, programming, testing, and subject-matter knowledge, along with meaningful user participation.
Gameplay Design Patterns for Believable Non-Player Characters
This paper argues that believable non-player characters in games depend on players adopting an intentional stance toward them, a condition that requires qualities such as self-awareness, self-impelled action, emotional expression, natural language use, and persistent traits.
What Videogame Making Can Teach Us About Literacy and Learning: Alternative Pathways into Participatory Culture
Youth video game making in a Los Angeles Computer Clubhouse serves as the basis for an argument that building games offers an alternative route into participatory culture, one that addresses the participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics challenge identified in Jenkins' work.
A Method for Discovering Values in Digital Games
"A Method for Discovering Values in Digital Games" presents the Values Cards exercise, a practical tool that helps game designers identify and discuss human values such as equality, justice, generosity, and competition that are embedded in game mechanics, representation, and players' prior experiences.
Pervasive Persuasive: A Rhetorical Design Approach to a Location-Based Spell-Casting Game for Tourists
"Pervasive Persuasive" presents REXplorer, a location-based pervasive spell-casting game launched in June 2007 in Regensburg, Germany, and argues for a rhetorical design approach to persuading tourists toward situated history learning and city exploration.
Human, All Too Non-Human: Coop AI and the Conversation of Action
Bart Simon's paper examines how cooperative artificial intelligence in contemporary digital games, particularly Activision's Call of Duty 2, reshapes the relationship between players and machines compared with the competitive human-versus-computer framing established by chess and the 1997 Deep Blue–Kasparov match.
Ghastly Multiplication: Fatal Frame II and the Videogame Uncanny
This paper offers a close-play and close-reading analysis of Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, a 2003 PlayStation 2 survival horror game developed by Tecmo, to argue that the videogame uncanny is produced not merely by borrowing literary or filmic techniques but through the interplay of operational demands and affective…
Mapping Time in Video Games
Michael Nitsche's paper "Mapping Time in Video Games" argues that players are situated in both space and time when playing, and that our understanding of temporal structures in games depends on our comprehension of their spatial relationships.
Understanding Pervasive Games through Gameplay Design Patterns
The 2007 study "Understanding Pervasive Games through Gameplay Design Patterns" examines how pervasive games, those that extend play into everyday physical and social spaces, can be characterized and organized through a shared vocabulary of design patterns.
Designing a Game to Model Consumer Misbehavior
This paper argues that computer games, grounded in game design theory, offer a controlled, ethical, and engaging means of studying consumer misbehavior, a phenomenon driven largely by emotion that is difficult to examine through self-reports, direct observation, or role-play.