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
Troubling 'Games for Girls': Notes from the Edge of Game Design
Mary Flanagan's paper, presented at the 2005 DiGRA conference, examines the challenges of designing games for girls, focusing on the RAPUNSEL project, an experimental game intended to teach middle school girls Java programming.
- Women make up only about 10 percent of US game industry workers and rarely shape design decisions, a gap the paper links to the design choices made for girls.
- Flanagan argues that 'girls' should not be treated as a uniform category with fixed preferences, since grouping them together risks reinforcing the stereotypes designers aim to challenge.
- Fieldwork with roughly 60 mostly African American girls aged 11 to 13 from New York housing projects found stated preferences leaning toward action, challenge, competition, and fear, with Grand Theft Auto and Mortal Kombat favored over traditional caregiving titles.
Research as Design-Design as Research
This paper introduces Research as Design-Design as Research (RADDAR), a methodology for investigating game design that emerged from a doctoral inquiry into designing a game to promote conceptual learning of special relativity among undergraduate physics students.
- RADDAR (Research as Design-Design as Research) is a methodology that emerged from a doctoral inquiry into designing a game to teach conceptual understanding of special relativity to undergraduate physics students.
- The paper argues that design and research share a synthesizing character and a cyclical, reflective structure, and that design can be treated as action research once emancipatory collaboration and systematic reflection are addressed.
- The author adopts Fourth Generation Evaluation, a constructivist, hermeneutic-dialectic methodology, and extends the notion of 'participant' to include design materials such as sketches, prototypes, code, and documents as collaborators alongside human respondents.
Game Graphics Beyond Realism: Then, Now, and Tomorrow
This paper, by Maic Masuch and Niklas Röber of the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, argues that game graphics should not be limited to photorealism and that developers should explore alternative, artistic rendering styles, particularly non-photorealistic rendering (NPR).
- The authors argue game graphics should not be limited to photorealism and that developers should explore non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) and other artistic styles.
- They contend that gameplay and story drive player enjoyment far more than graphical fidelity, and that as photorealism becomes costlier to achieve, graphics will lose effectiveness as a unique selling point.
- Immersion depends on believability and consistency rather than strict realism: small inconsistencies such as an incorrect shadow can break the illusion of a photorealistic game, while NPR styles tolerate such imperfections more readily.
Neomancer: An Exercise in Interdisciplinary Academic Game Development
The paper presents Neomancer, an interdisciplinary academic game development project that brought together roughly 50 participants from the University of Western Ontario and Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology, with a lead designer based in Seattle.
- Neomancer is an interdisciplinary academic action-adventure RPG built on Epic's Unreal engine, set in the fantasy archipelago of Kintorr, and sized to be comparable to a commercial title in its genre.
- The project involves roughly 50 participants from the University of Western Ontario and Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology, with a lead designer based in Seattle, pooling Western's programming strengths with Seneca's artistic and design capabilities.
- The project began in fall 2004 with a planned two to three year timeline, and its first two milestones were reported as met.
Bringing New HOPE to Networked Games: Using Optimistic Execution to Improve Quality of Service
This paper introduces New HOPE, an adaptation of the optimistic execution framework originally developed for transaction-oriented systems, aimed at mitigating latency in real-time networked multiplayer games.
- New HOPE adapts optimistic execution, a framework originally built for transaction-oriented systems, to let predictable game actions proceed without waiting for remote confirmation, hiding synchronization delay from players.
- Unlike original HOPE, which relied on full rollback when predictions failed, New HOPE substitutes controlled recovery procedures that restore a consistent state while keeping gameplay moving forward.
- New HOPE introduces padding (distracting animation that masks latency) and synchronization points (limits on how far speculative execution can proceed) as core primitives.
Frame and Metaphor in Political Games
Ian Bogost's paper "Frame and Metaphor in Political Games," presented at the 2005 DiGRA conference, argues that videogames can carry ideological bias by operating through procedural rather than verbal rhetoric.
- Ian Bogost's 2005 DiGRA paper argues that videogames can carry ideological bias through procedural rhetoric, operating via rules and systems rather than verbal argument, drawing on George Lakoff's cognitive linguistics and Frank Luntz's message-development work for conservatives.
- Bogost classifies games' relation to ideological frames into three modes: reinforcing them, contesting them, or exposing them.
- The paper's reinforcement example is the Republican National Committee's Tax Invaders, a Space Invaders variant in which a Bush head fires at tax increases framed as invaders, turning the metaphor of taxation as theft into a playable form.
Interactive Story Writing in the Classroom: Using Computer Games
The document presents ScriptEase, a pattern-based authoring tool built for Neverwinter Nights that allows non-programmers to create interactive stories without writing NWScript, a low-level scripting language.
- ScriptEase is a pattern-based authoring tool for Neverwinter Nights that lets non-programmers build interactive stories without writing NWScript, using menu-driven, customizable story patterns that generate the underlying script automatically.
- The authors motivate the tool with the volume of scripting-related help requests in the game's community forums, which reached nearly 150,000 posts, arguing that manual scripting is slow, error-prone, and a barrier to wider participation.
- A pilot with 21 Grade 10 English students in Alberta produced graded interactive stories; participants were highly motivated, spontaneously collaborated in ways resembling pair programming, and lower-achieving students became notably engaged.
Digital Games: A Motivational Perspective
This literature review examines why players engage persistently with commercial digital games while educational games struggle to attract comparable interest, using motivation theory as its analytical lens.
- Commercial digital games have grown steadily while educational games remain marginal, and the review argues that understanding the motivational differences between the two can help designers combine their strengths to build more effective learning tools.
- The review grounds its analysis in three frameworks: Mitchell's situational interest model (CATCH versus HOLD), intrinsic motivation theory (challenge, fantasy, curiosity, control), and self-determination theory (competence, autonomy, relatedness).
- Lepper and Cordova's arithmetic game experiments found that personalized fantasy and player choice improved intrinsic motivation, time on task, and learning, with personalized fantasy producing the strongest results.
Consumer Driven Computer Game Design
This study, presented at the DiGRA 2005 conference, proposes a methodology for consumer-driven computer game design that uses the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to ground game development in player experiences rather than designers' assumptions.
- The paper proposes consumer-driven game design using the Critical Incident Technique, grounding development in players' reported satisfying and dissatisfying experiences rather than designers' assumptions, with player narratives handed to creative designers as a reference for new games.
- The study drew on 61 active players (about 70% male, 30% female, roughly 70% students, ages 13 to 29, average 22), each writing one best and one worst game experience account.
- Two trained analysts coded the incidents with a third checking reliability, reaching 88% inter-judge agreement for positive incidents and 86% for negative ones.
Configuring the Player: Subversive Behavior in Project Entropia
This paper applies the Science and Technology Studies concept of the "black box" to Project Entropia, a virtual world developed by the Swedish company MindArk, examining how developers embed assumptions into the game to shape player behavior and how players work to open that black box and pursue roles the publisher did not…
- Project Entropia, developed by Swedish company MindArk, is free to download and earns revenue through a micro-payment model in which players buy its in-game currency, PED, at roughly 10 PED per US dollar, unlike most MMOs that rely on monthly subscriptions.
- The paper argues that the game's hidden rules make working as a hunter, miner, or crafter effectively costly, since tool upkeep and repairs often exceed earnings, which pushes players toward paying.
- Using the Science and Technology Studies concept of the 'black box,' the authors show how developers embed assumptions into the game to shape player behavior, and how players work to open that box and pursue roles the publisher did not intend.
Shadowplay: Simulated Illumination in Game Worlds
This paper argues that game studies lacks a vocabulary for discussing simulated illumination, and that such a vocabulary can be built by surveying existing lighting practices from three sources: computer-generated animation and film, architectural lighting, and the interactive properties of games themselves.
- Light in games is argued to be far more than decoration: illumination shapes narrative meaning, directs player attention, modulates mood and risk, and can directly drive gameplay and NPC behavior.
- Silent Hill 2 and Thief serve as the paper's primary case studies, with Silent Hill 2 examined through its pre-rendered cut scenes and low-key horror lighting, and Thief through its tuned sensory system governing AI visibility.
- The author builds a lighting vocabulary by adapting Sharon Callahan's five objectives of digital animation lighting, while noting that free navigation in games exceeds the fixed-frame assumptions of film.
Cognitive Callisthenics: Do FPS Computer Games Enhance the Player's Cognitive Abilities?
This study, a 2005 DiGRA conference paper by Paul Kearney of Unitec New Zealand, investigates whether playing the first-person shooter Counter-Strike can enhance cognitive abilities, particularly multitasking.
- A 2005 DiGRA study by Paul Kearney (Unitec New Zealand) found that two hours of multiplayer Counter-Strike play raised the mean composite multitasking score of 14 participants by 110.2 points, a statistically significant gain (P < 0.05) measured with the SynWin synthetic work-environment software.
- The control group of eight largely non-gaming participants, tested three times without any intervention, showed only modest gains that were not statistically significant (P > 0.3), consistent with ordinary practice effects.
- The author attributes the gains to immersion, collaborative play, and realism, but the study had no control condition in which participants played a non-game activity, so the game itself cannot be isolated as the cause.