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
Love, Lust, Courtship and Affection as Evolution in Digital Play
Affection games, the digital play centered on kissing, hugging, flirting, and romantic interaction, represent an underexplored genre that this work argues deserves scholarly attention.
- Affection games (digital play centered on kissing, hugging, flirting, and romantic interaction) are framed as an underexplored genre deserving scholarly attention, grounded in courtship research and Maslow's love-and-belonging tier.
- Kissing is the dominant in-game verb in affection games, rising from 209 titles on Google Play and Kongregate in 2015 to 264 in 2017, and it is the only verb showing consistent growth on Google Play.
- Anecdotal reports suggest some adolescents use affection games to rehearse kissing before attempting it offline, but the report notes that systematic evidence for this is absent.
Playing With(out) Power: Negotiated Conventions of High Performance Networked Play Practices
Witkowski and Manning's paper examines high-performance networked play, namely speedrunning and esports, as a contested space where player rights, creative labour, and governance are continually negotiated among players, publishers, and platforms.
- The paper's central argument is that competitive players (speedrunners and esports professionals) hold a precarious position, as their careers depend on franchises they do not control, and power imbalances persist even when publishers promote co-creation rhetoric.
- Super Mario Maker level removals and the 2016 deletion of speedrunner GrandPOOBear's creations and progress by Nintendo, following inconsistent customer-service exchanges, serve as key case studies of opaque publisher control.
- Valve's 2016 ban on in-game coaching at major CS:GO tournaments is read as an exercise of developer control over competitive conditions that diminished player expertise and career sustainability.
Heritage Destruction and Videogames: A Perverse Relation
This paper examines the ethical tension between real-world heritage destruction and its representation in videogames, using the 1992 destruction of Sarajevo's National and University Library (Vijećnica) as a central case.
- The 1992 destruction of Sarajevo's National and University Library (Vijećnica) was deliberate, an attack on collective memory and multicultural identity, and its later reconstruction shifted its meaning toward ethnic fragmentation.
- Sensitive historical content is especially vulnerable to trivialization when placed in interactive entertainment, and the authors judge the pedagogical potential of such titles to be real but limited.
- In Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, the Vijećnica is rendered as a recognizable heritage site while largely omitting its political and symbolic significance, partly due to first-person shooter gameplay demands and realist simulation's poor handling of change over time.
I Predict a Riot: Making and Breaking Rules and Norms in League of Legends
Donaldson's study examines how League of Legends players judge deviant in-game behaviour when community-established strategic norms, known as the "meta," collide with developer-written conduct rules.
- Riot Games' vague and sometimes contradictory conduct rules left League of Legends players without a shared understanding of what counts as reportable "greed play," so players themselves must interpret deviance, and enforcement based on these unclear standards shapes how the community defines legitimate play.
- The pivotal case involved player AdellaideSkyhart, who used Singed in the Support role to roam and disrupt enemies; threatened with a permanent ban in November 2016, the player was ultimately banned in 2017, becoming a focal point for a community divided between strategic innovation and a predictable, enjoyable match.
- A similar punitive case in February 2017 suggests the tension between developer rulings and player expectations remains unresolved.
Making It Unfamiliar in the "Right" Way: An Empirical Study of Poetic Gameplay
This study investigates whether the defamiliarizing techniques theorized by Mitchell and Ensslin actually produce poetic effects in players, rather than remaining a matter of theoretical argument or close reading.
- Defamiliarization does not reliably produce reflection in players: in The Graveyard and Thirty Flights of Loving, contemplative engagement was often overshadowed by confusion over controls, objectives, and what was happening.
- The decisive factor is integration: difficulties must be meaningfully tied to a work's themes and free of extraneous obstacles that consume cognitive effort.
- The Stanley Parable was the exception, letting players reflect on its form and themes (limited agency, an unreliable narrator) while still experiencing it as a functioning game with clear goals.
The Space Between Debord and Pikachu
"The Space Between Debord and Pikachu" is a conceptual, qualitative analysis of Pokémon Go that argues the game's cultural significance has been overstated as entirely new.
- The report argues Pokémon Go's cultural significance has been overstated as wholly new, positioning it as building on location-based games (Mogi, Ingress, Shadow Cities) and older urban play traditions such as the Surrealist flâneur, the Situationist dérive, orienteering, letterboxing, and geocaching.
- The analysis is primarily conceptual and historical, drawing on theorists De Certeau and Debord and the authors' design experience rather than quantitative data on player populations or geographic usage.
- It proposes three analytical lenses for such games: play as response to environment, play as exploration of alternate reality, and play as decoding infrastructure.
A Typology of Players in the Game Physics Playground
This paper examines whether players of the educational physics game Physics Playground fall into distinct playstyle groups, motivated by the inconsistent learning and engagement outcomes that educators have observed when using games.
- The study applied latent class analysis to in-game log data from 138 players, covering more than six million individual actions, instead of relying on self-reported questionnaires.
- The three-class solution, which the authors argue best maps onto Bartle's player taxonomy, identified achievers (about 17% of players), explorers or 'tinkerers' (about 51%), and disengaged players (about 32%).
- Tinkerers built and revised complex machines while largely ignoring optimal badge-earning solutions, whereas achievers earned significantly more gold and silver badges and played more levels.
Towards Genre as a Game Design Research Approach
The document argues that video game genre can serve as a scholarly and design-oriented research approach, one that gives generative design research a grounded context rather than leaving it without a stable foundation.
- Genre should be treated as a tractable design language for describing kinds of games rather than as a rigid taxonomy, grouping games that share meaningful likeness in design values, structural patterns, and aesthetics.
- The authors argue that taxonomies suit information science, while game design benefits more from genre plurality and an aesthetic-centered understanding of genre.
- Genre is framed as socially constructed and mutable over time, since scholars disagree on whether gameplay, narrative, or visual style should define a genre.
Modeling and Designing for Key Elements of Curiosity: Risking Failure, Valuing Questions
This study develops a design model linking uncertainty, failure, and question-asking to curiosity, and tests it through Outbreak, a cooperative tabletop game for players aged 9 to 14.
- Curiosity-oriented game design hinges on managing players' perceived risk of failure rather than failure itself, since players often feared the risk more than the failure. The authors present this as an argument that could inform other games, though their data were qualitative.
- Aesthetic choices strongly shape anxiety: scary music and named at-risk characters heightened fear, while calmer presentations produced predominantly positive affect.
- Repeated play raised positive emotional responses to failure by roughly 27 percent, suggesting familiarity can ease the fear of failing.
From Video Games to Virtual Reality (and Back): Introducing HACS (Historical-Analytical Comparative System) for the Documentation of Experiential Configurations in Gaming History
The paper introduces HACS (Historical-Analytical Comparative System), a comparative framework for documenting how video game experiences model human agency across the medium's history.
- HACS (Historical-Analytical Comparative System) is proposed as a middle path between broad conceptual frameworks, which lack comparative resolution, and granular genre ontologies or mechanic taxonomies, which become unwieldy across hundreds of titles.
- The framework is organized around ten "interactive figures" describing recurring forms of player action, such as navigation, neutralisation, and resource management.
- A manipulation interface typology distinguishes corporeal, techno-mimetic, generic, and screen-augmented control schemes, critiquing the "transparency fallacy" that assumes interfaces disappear into the experience.
Considering Play: From Method to Analysis
"Considering Play: From Method to Analysis" argues that play is a central methodological problem in game studies, and that existing approaches either offer little concrete guidance or privilege the game as a fixed object over the game as a played process.
- The paper offers a taxonomy of research play methods, ranging from exhaustive play (impractical for large or continually patched titles) to heuristic strategies such as instrumental play guided by Leino's gameplay condition, a rational player model illustrated through ethical dilemmas, and a cooperative player model covering narrative, realistic, transtextual, and artistic functions.
- Free play, in which transgressive and transformative engagement reveals how players negotiate designed expectations in practice, is contrasted with object-focused methods as a complementary analytical approach.
- Deliberate rule-breaking, exploitation, and "going native" are endorsed as productive research strategies, citing Dibbell's virtual-economy trading in Ultima Online and Myers' work on rule-following in City of Heroes/Villains, provided they are guided by specific research questions.
Adapting Epic Theatre Principles for the Design of Games for Learning
This paper proposes a design framework for educational games intended for play outside formal classrooms, drawing on Brechtian and Piscatorian epic theatre to foster critical reflection on complex systems such as economics.
- The paper argues that educational games fail to transfer learning because they prioritize fun balancing and immersion, so learning itself should be the primary design goal, with critical reflection as the intended outcome.
- Its framework rests on three components: a controlled play context, explicit educational framing, and tightly scaffolded content free of extraneous elements.
- Play context strongly shapes whether reflection occurs: unsupervised students ignored the learning goal in The Oregon Trail, while teacher-structured play increased participation in a Morrowind classroom study, suggesting an educator or cooperative setting is often necessary.