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
Progress Wars: Idle Games and the Demarcation of "Real" Games
This paper examines how idle games, which reduce gameplay to a single repetitive interaction or automate it entirely, have served as a site for negotiating what counts as a "real" game.
- The paper argues that the category of "real" games is not a natural given but is actively produced through contested practices of designers, players, and critics, drawing on social constructivist views of games.
- Idle games began as parody: titles like Progress Quest (2002), StatBuilder Classic (2008), Progress Wars (2010), and Godville (2010) used reductio ad absurdum on RPG grinding mechanics to argue such progress involved no real skill.
- Ian Bogost's satirical Cow Clicker (2006) unexpectedly became hugely popular, revealing an absorptive "being in the zone" appeal that its critical intent had not anticipated.
Paidia to Ludus, Non-Commodity to Commodity: Uncovering the Residue of Player Developed Custom Game Modes in 'Zombies' and 'ARAMs'
This paper examines the co-creative relationship between grassroots player activity and developer-led platform design, focusing on how two influential online game modes, "Zombies" from the Halo series and "All Random All Mid" (ARAM) from League of Legends, emerged from player-built custom games.
- The paper argues that game studies has mapped Caillois's ludus/paidia distinction onto competitive games versus open-world sandboxes, overlooking the paidiac innovation behind many commercially successful modes.
- Its central claim is that modes such as Halo's "Zombies" and League of Legends' "All Random All Mid" (ARAM) originated as player-built custom game rule sets in a non-commodity setting before developers absorbed them into official platforms.
- After absorption, these modes became more structured and competitive and generated substantial economic value for platform owners, according to the paper.
Debris: Exploring the Video Game Values That Can Help Reduce Mental Illness Stigma
This paper presents Debris, a commercial first-person 3D video game developed by Moonray Studios in collaboration with McMaster University researchers, designed to help young people recognize psychosis symptoms and reduce mental health stigma.
- Youths aged 14 to 24 face the highest risk of first-episode psychosis, yet treatment delays remain substantial, making early intervention critical.
- In Ontario, the median Duration of Untreated Psychosis was 22 weeks, and help-seeking was initiated by family or friends in 53% of cases, by police in 15%, and by the individuals themselves in 33%.
- Stigma and low awareness are key barriers to help-seeking, as young people often feel responsible for their illness and fail to recognize symptoms or navigate the mental health system.
Towards Diversity: Interventions in Curriculum and Pedagogy of an Introductory Game Design Course
This paper examines interventions made to an introductory game design course, "Key Concepts in Game Design," at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, with the aim of advancing curricular transformation and diversity in game education.
- The paper argues that systemic changes to teaching practice, rather than content alone, can meaningfully broaden participation in game design and produce more socially aware designers.
- The study is an action-research project on an introductory course, "Key Concepts in Game Design," at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, following cycles of observing, reflecting, and intervening.
- The paper contends that the games industry in South Africa and internationally remains dominated by particular demographics across gender, race, and economic lines, and that games are often wrongly perceived as an elite pursuit.
Ethics of Online Cheating: From Chess to Esports and Back
This paper offers a comparative analysis of cheating in two competitive online games, chess and League of Legends, examining both the technical methods used to cheat and the ethical attitudes and motivations of players.
- In chess, cheating is mostly done through third-party programs that calculate optimal moves under time pressure, reflecting a game of strategy without physical challenge.
- In League of Legends, the most common cheating methods are distributed denial-of-service attacks against opponents' connections and code manipulation through hacks and scripts, reflecting the game's real-time, team-based, kinesthetic demands.
- Both games share false accounts and intentional losing, which the authors attribute to their common use of Elo-based ranking systems.
Playful Animals: An Invitation to Participate
This paper is an exploratory essay that argues for establishing animal-inclusive playful design as a legitimate subfield within games studies.
- The paper argues for establishing animal-inclusive playful design as a legitimate subfield within games studies, grounded in the view that play is voluntary and shared and therefore a suitable framework for designing interactions with animals.
- Playful design principles can be applied to existing animal artefacts such as pet toys, zoo enrichment, and interactive tablets, which the author treats as current examples of this work.
- Posthumanist theories are proposed as tools for challenging anthropocentric worldviews and placing humans and nonhumans on more equal ontological footing.
For a Proportion Principle-based Gameplay Design
This paper argues that the Golden Mean, the mathematical proportion associated with the number Phi, can serve as a structural design principle for videogame gameplay, an area it describes as largely unexplored.
- The paper proposes using the Golden Mean (Phi) as a structural design principle for videogame gameplay, an area it describes as largely unexplored, and positions it alongside established frameworks such as the MDA model, Fullerton's Playcentric Approach, and Björk and Holopainen's design patterns.
- The central contribution is a method for structuring game elements through proportion so that levels and challenges grow in a controlled way, producing dynamic adaptation with potential relevance to procedural content generation and adaptive play.
- It specifically proposes Dynamic Symmetry and the Whirling Spiral from Hambidge's work to govern how levels and challenges scale, targeting mission- or stage-based platformers and casual games, drawing on Dormans' Mission/Space model and Smith and colleagues' rhythm-based and 2D platformer models.
On Becoming "Like eSports": Twitch as a Platform for the Speedrunning Community
This paper examines how Twitch, the live-streaming platform acquired by Amazon in 2014, has reshaped gameplay sharing and how the speedrunning community, players who attempt to complete games as quickly as possible without cheats, has adapted to it.
- Twitch, acquired by Amazon in 2014, has changed how gameplay is shared because streamers broadcast uncut and live rather than curating highlight reels as on YouTube.
- The paper asks what 'Twitch-worthy' speedrunning gameplay looks like, building on Postigo's concept of 'YouTube-worthy' play.
- Speedrunning (completing games as fast as possible without cheats) has migrated from video archives such as SpeedDemosArchive and YouTube to Twitch, where speedrunning streams now make up a notable share of creators and viewers.
Realism and the Everyday in Digital Games
Paul Martin's paper develops Alexander Galloway's theory of "social realism" in digital games, arguing that realism's critical potential becomes visible only when three elements are considered together: the mode of representation, the everyday, and what the Marxist critic György Lukács called the social totality.
- Martin revises Alexander Galloway's theory of 'social realism' in digital games, arguing that realism's critical potential emerges only when the mode of representation, the everyday, and Lukács's concept of the social totality are considered together.
- The paper critiques Galloway's account for neglecting representation, conflating realism with critique in general, and relying on a 'congruence requirement' that ties the everyday life depicted in a game to players' own everyday experience.
- Drawing on Lukács's defence of literary realism and Yuri Lotman's view of everyday life as a boundary zone where personal habits collide with dominant codes, Martin frames realism as a means of linking individual lives to the totality of social relations.
Little VR Pet Shop: A Reverse Turing Multiplayer Virtual Reality Game
Little VR Pet Shop is a two-player virtual reality game designed to explore control schemes and metaphors for games driven by head movement rather than traditional gamepads or keyboards.
- Little VR Pet Shop is a two-player VR game built for low-cost Google Cardboard headsets that use smartphones for head tracking, with one human player identifying the real human among seven AI-controlled animals while a disguised dog or fish player tries to avoid selection within five minutes.
- The game tests three head-driven control schemes: the human walks by gazing at ground markers and pressing the headset trigger, the dog tilts its head toward the ground and looks in its travel direction to mimic sniffing, and the fish swims toward the gaze direction through slow sideways head shaking.
- Across two user-testing iterations with 68 participants, the human control scheme was rated the most comfortable and accurate, while the fish scheme was rated the most entertaining even though fish players often felt insufficiently in control of their movement.
Smash Mods, Smash Creativity: Nintendo, Project M, and Enclosure
This paper examines video game modding through the case of Project M, a community modification of Nintendo's Super Smash Bros.
- The paper argues that creative play in games takes two linked forms, iterative play through modding and virtuosic play through a competitive scene, and that Nintendo's enclosure of the first ultimately curtails the second.
- Project M, a community modification of Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008) for the Wii, is used as the central case study of how player-made content interacts with corporate control of games.
- Nintendo initially ignored the competitive community around Melee and Project M, even though Brawl was designed to be non-competitive, before shifting toward engagement.
Ludification of Work or Labourisation of Play: On Work-Play Interferences
This paper examines the increasingly blurred boundary between play and work, arguing that existing concepts such as gamification and ludification capture only one direction of a two-way relationship.
- The paper argues that existing concepts like gamification and ludification capture only one direction of a two-way relationship, and proposes 'laborization' as the counterpart in which work practices permeate play.
- It introduces 'work/play interference,' borrowed from the physics of superposed waves, to describe the transformative and impure character of contemporary practices where play and work overlay rather than remain separate.
- The analysis is conceptual and theoretical, drawing on game studies, media theory, and philosophy of play, rather than on original empirical data.