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
Press Enter or Escape to Play: Deconstructing Escapism in Multiplayer Gaming
This study examines escapism in multiplayer gaming, arguing that the concept is widely used in game research yet remains loosely defined and unevenly evaluated, with its negative connotations often treated as the default.
- Escapism in multiplayer gaming is loosely defined and unevenly evaluated in research, with its negative connotations often treated as the default, though the authors argue it carries both healthy and unhealthy meanings.
- The authors propose a framework distinguishing four escapist motivations (mundane breaking, stress relief, pleasure seeking, and imagination conjuring) from activity types ranging from evasive and passive to active and extreme.
- In focus-group research with clan and guild gamers, pleasure seeking was the most important escapist motivation (4.54 on a 5-point scale), while imagination conjuring ranked lowest (2.71).
Abusing the Player, and Making Them Like it Too!
This paper, co-authored by Douglas Wilson and Miguel Sicart of the IT University of Copenhagen, argues against the prevailing assumption in game studies and design that games should be built for the player's pleasure, empowerment, and comfort.
- The paper argues that 'abusing the player' (intentionally disrespecting, antagonizing, or punishing players) is a legitimate, under-explored creative and aesthetic practice that can enrich the political and ethical dimensions of gameplay.
- Authors Douglas Wilson and Miguel Sicart of the IT University of Copenhagen challenge the dominant view that games should be built for player pleasure, empowerment, and comfort, and that design is primarily about balancing frustration and pleasure.
- The authors reframe game design as an aesthetic craft in which the designer becomes a visible implied author whose intent the player must contend with alongside the system's logic.
Some Notes on the Nature of Game Design
Kuittinen and Holopainen's paper argues that game design should be understood as a situated, reflective, and non-linear activity, rather than as rigid, goal-oriented problem solving or a sequence of fixed stages.
- Game design is best understood as a situated, reflective, non-linear activity in which designers continually reshape both the problem and its solution as their understanding evolves, rather than as rigid, stage-based problem solving.
- An analysis of six major game design books found heavy reliance on precedents, prototypes, and conceptual frameworks, but little in-depth examination of representation or the role of references.
- Reflection-on-action is implicit throughout most of the design literature and is explicitly treated only by Schell.
Fake Rules, Real Fiction: Professional Wrestling and Videogames
"Fake Rules, Real Fiction" argues that professional wrestling, having shifted from a legitimate contest to a scripted form of "sport entertainment," is best understood through a narrative framework that combines Chatman's story and discourse theory with game studies concepts such as scripted narrative and alterbiography.
- The report's central thesis is that wrestlers are active producers of meaning within pre-scripted gimmicks, so match quality depends on their skill in making the scripted narrative intelligible to audiences.
- Professional wrestling shifted from a legitimate contest to scripted 'sport entertainment', with fixing and the kayfabe illusion becoming established during the 1908 to 1911 Hackenschmidt–Gotch matches.
- The authors argue that kayfabe functions as serialized fiction operating at a 1:1 ratio between real and story time, blurring the boundary between performer and character.
Playability and Player Experience Research
This panel paper, presented at DiGRA 2009, argues that playability and player experience are distinct but complementary research domains: playability evaluates the game itself to improve design, while player experience evaluates players to improve gaming.
- Playability and player experience are presented as distinct but complementary research domains: playability evaluates the game itself to improve design, while player experience evaluates players to improve gaming.
- The paper frames playability and player experience research as a developmental stage rather than a settled discipline, aiming to move the field toward empirical standards and clearer definitions.
- Expert review and heuristic evaluation are cost-effective, iterative methods for finding playability problems, but general usability heuristics must be adapted with game-specific sets.
Understanding 21st Century's Mobile Device-Based Games Within Boundaries
This paper examines two mobile device-based game forms from the 21st century that have achieved strong user popularity yet remain peripheral to mainstream game research: geocaching and SMS-to-TV human-hosted interactive television games.
- Geocaching is treated as a global, socially organized mixed-reality game, with over 740,000 active participants and more than 747,000 caches worldwide by early 2009, supported by a central web platform and regional forums.
- The paper argues that marginal mobile game forms such as geocaching and SMS-to-TV interactive games deserve academic attention because their popularity and boundary-blurring characteristics challenge traditional game studies.
- The study uses a qualitative case-study design combining interviews with geocachers, analysis of geocaching websites and forums, and content analysis of roughly 35 hours of interactive TV broadcasts from 2004 to 2009.
Playing Your Network: Gaming in Social Network Sites
Luca Rossi's paper examines gaming within social network sites, focusing on Facebook as the dominant platform in most Western countries, and uses the UK-based company Playfish as its central case.
- Games on Facebook are built around existing social relationships, shifting gaming from a standalone or shared-passion activity toward one grounded in friendships, a distinct branch of online gaming the paper calls SNS gaming.
- The paper uses UK-based Playfish as its central case, observing a catalogue of about eight titles with over eleven million monthly players, and draws on qualitative, exploratory methods plus preliminary player interviews.
- Skill and knowledge games such as Who Has the Biggest Brain? and Geo Challenge rank players on friend, country, and global ladders, and players use these rankings to assert status within their social circles.
Using Microgenetic Methods to Investigate Problem Solving in Video Games
This paper presents formative research for the Possible Worlds project, a five-year initiative developing middle school life science game modules that use Nintendo DS mini-games and web activities.
- The paper is methodological: it shows how microgenetic methods, which track small-scale, repeated observations of change over time, can be adapted to study how young players solve problems and revise strategies during video game play.
- The study observed 22 students aged 9 to 12 playing commercial puzzle games, primarily World of Goo, with sessions video- and audio-recorded during think-aloud protocols and researcher probing questions about goals, plans, and interpretations of feedback.
- The coding framework works at four levels, from 20-second action clips to one-minute strategy descriptions and whole-level learning summaries, and is designed to map individual learning trajectories against Kuhn and Pease's model of strategic inquiry competence.
Peer Puppeteers: Alternate Reality Gaming in Primary School Settings
Peer Puppeteers examines an alternate reality game (ARG) designed by thirty Year 6 pupils at a South London primary school for thirty Year 5 pupils, using Philip Ridley's novel The Mighty Fizz Chilla as the narrative foundation.
- An alternate reality game (ARG) was designed by thirty Year 6 pupils at a South London primary school for thirty Year 5 pupils, using Philip Ridley's novel The Mighty Fizz Chilla as its narrative foundation.
- The study proposes that children can act as game-makers, storytellers, and covert "puppeteers" who distribute narrative clues through everyday channels such as websites, message boards, films, phone calls, and physical artifacts.
- The authors offer a design framework called the "web of clues" along with a detailed case study of one team's character creation.
Effects of Sensory Immersion on Behavioural Indicators of Player Experience: Movement Synchrony and Controller Pressure
This study examines whether sensory immersion in a racing game shapes behavioural indicators of player experience, specifically controller tilt synchrony with in-game turns and the force applied to gamepad buttons.
- Louder sound (80 dBA versus 60 dBA) produced the strongest effects in the study, significantly increasing self-reported presence, arousal, and dominance as well as the pressure players applied to controller buttons.
- Screen size (20-inch versus 42-inch, corresponding to 14.2° versus 27.5° field of view) affected only self-reported presence, with the larger display producing higher presence ratings.
- Interface pressure on gamepad buttons is proposed as a promising real-time behavioural indicator of player arousal and presence.
"I'm Overburdened!": An Empirical Study of the Player, the Avatar, and the Gameworld
Jørgensen's study investigates how players understand their relationship to controllable figures within video games, challenging the adequacy of existing terminology such as "avatar" and "character" to describe that relationship.
- The study is based on interviews with 22 respondents (17 individual interviews and one five-person group interview) across four games: Crysis, Diablo 2, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, and The Sims 2.
- The central distinction it draws is between a direct, one-to-one relationship between player and figure and an indirect, mediated one, which it argues existing terms like 'avatar' and 'character' fail to capture.
- Only Crysis's first-person perspective consistently led players to merge with their figure, experiencing player and character viewpoints as unified and identifying most strongly with the avatar.
A Study on New Gameplay Based on Brain-Computer Interface
This study examines whether brain-computer interface (BCI) devices can serve as a viable new gaming input, approaching the question from a game design perspective rather than purely technical or medical application.
- The study treats brain-computer interface (BCI) input as a game design question rather than a purely technical or medical one, noting that cheaper, smaller consumer BCI hardware has opened it to entertainment while design-oriented BCI game research remains scarce.
- The prototype maps two brainwave-derived states onto game mechanics: attention reduces crosshair jitter for steadier aiming, while meditation speeds character recovery and aids searching for hidden objects.
- In a comparison of two versions of the same game with 20 participants split evenly, the BCI version scored higher on convenience, fun, and intuitiveness (149 total vs. 102; means 14.9 vs. 10.2), a difference reported as statistically significant (t ≈ 5.605 at the 0.05 level).