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
Towards a Socio-Cultural Cartography of In-Game Protests
This paper by Dean Chan proposes an interpretive framework for mapping the socio-cultural dimensions of in-game protests, arguing that these acts of activism within virtual worlds merit analysis on their own terms rather than as mere extensions of offline political movements.
- The paper argues in-game protests should be analysed on their own terms rather than treated as simple extensions of offline political movements.
- Its central thesis is that participatory online culture stays rooted in locality and place-specificity despite its global reach, with political, social, and gaming practices revealing the contexts that provoke and enable protest.
- Two extended case studies anchor the analysis: Joseph DeLappe's U.S. online war memorial and protest project dead-in-iraq, and a mass protest in China triggered by a Japanese military flag appearing in the online game Fantasy Westward Journey.
Abstractions of a Meaningless Act: (Spending) Time in the Gaming World
This document is a short theoretical proposal by Vanessa Long of Brunel University, UK, examining how video games depict familiar real-world activities such as spending money, transporting oneself, trading goods, and making contact with others.
- Video games depict familiar real-world acts such as spending money, transporting oneself, trading goods, and making contact with others, and these acts carry meaning in-game only because players already understand them from everyday life.
- The author argues that once such acts are abstracted into a game system they risk becoming empty of their real-world meaning, even as they continue to draw on external understanding.
- The document frames this tension as a 'duality of circumstance,' in which game elements are separate entities that nonetheless depend on external interpretation, raising questions about how such abstractions are read.
Where the Women Are(n't): Gender and a North American 'Pro-Gaming' Scene
This paper examines how gender is enacted and policed within North American competitive gaming, using doctoral ethnographic research on a community of Halo 3 players followed to a local LAN tournament, the 2008 Major League Gaming (MLG) Toronto Open, and the 2008 World Cyber Games in Cologne, Germany.
- The study argues that Major League Gaming's promotion borrows the legitimating symbols and organizational models of mainstream North American sports media, and that linking gaming to sport, a domain where women remain marginal, makes female participation and its rewards precarious.
- Based on doctoral ethnographic fieldwork at a local Halo 3 LAN tournament, the 2008 MLG Toronto Open, and the 2008 World Cyber Games in Cologne, Germany, the author analyzes four audiovisual clips using the Multimodal Application Program.
- Two clips follow a single female player whose competence is undercut by misogynistic discourse among male players that has little to do with the game itself, showing how skill is discounted through gendered talk.
It's in the Game and Above the Game: An Analysis of the Players of Sports Videogames
This paper examines how players of sports videogames relate to the games they play, arguing that the experience extends well beyond the act of play itself into social and cultural domains.
- Playing sports videogames is framed as a cathartic, intertextual, and often social activity that extends well beyond the act of play itself into social and cultural domains.
- Players operate within a 'meta-game' in which social standing is won, lost, and bartered through interaction with peers, involving tactics to gain standing, displace rivals' status, and collaborate to sustain a shared flow state.
- The study, centered on football and titles such as FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer, shows how these games blur into the wider sport culture through official licenses, recreated player likenesses, and detailed statistical modeling.
Levels of Complexity: Cultural Diversity, Politics and Digital Games
This paper examines whether the concept of cultural diversity, which has a long history in traditional media and national cultural policy, can meaningfully be applied to digital games.
- The paper argues that cultural diversity, a concept rooted in traditional media and national cultural policy, must be rethought for digital games shaped by global production networks, transnational audiences, and user-generated content.
- European policymakers increasingly treat digital games as a cultural industry deserving public support, but the author contends that existing national policy frameworks are poorly matched to how games are produced and consumed.
- Support mechanisms cited include the French tax credit system and dedicated schemes in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Scandinavia, while Canada, South Korea, and China are noted as competitive pressures on European game industries.
Tabletop Augmented Reality Games: Play Outside the Display
This paper from Georgia Institute of Technology examines handheld augmented reality (HAR) games, arguing that recent gains in mobile processing and graphics have made it possible to blend large-scale AR techniques with handheld game design.
- Handheld augmented reality (HAR) games are presented as a new genre, enabled by recent gains in mobile processing and graphics, whose tight coupling of virtual content with physical objects creates distinctive forms of play that existing AR, mobile computing, and game design frameworks do not adequately account for.
- The paper focuses on self-contained, board-game-style "tabletop" HAR games, drawing on surveys, design portfolios, interviews, and playtests of more than a dozen such games created by the authors.
- The authors identify common elements of play and how these applications merge physical and virtual realities, and they propose a design continuum for classifying existing HAR titles and guiding new ones.
Keeping It Reel: Is Machinima a Form of Art?
Champion's paper, presented at DiGRA 2009, asks whether machinima, films produced inside game engines, can be regarded as art.
- The paper treats whether machinima (films made inside game engines) counts as art as an open question, noting that no agreed definition of art exists and that cinema-derived criteria fit games and machinima poorly.
- The author rejects the premise that games are inherently inferior to film, arguing that machinima's interactivity, procedural constraints, and parody of game conventions give it artistic potential of its own.
- Drawing on Fiedler and Heidegger, the paper holds that art is defined by intentional activity and the revealing of an object's "thingliness," and argues that machinima's blend of pre-scripted and real-time elements can produce reflective, artistic experience.
The Cheating Assemblage in MMORPGs: Toward a Sociotechnical Description of Cheating
This paper reframes cheating in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) as a sociotechnical assemblage rather than a simple set of player actions that confer unfair advantage.
- The paper reframes cheating in MMORPGs as a sociotechnical assemblage, drawing on DeLanda and Callon, in which players, EULAs, anti-cheating tools, forums, server and client code, and gameplay design interact non-linearly rather than cheating being a simple set of player actions.
- The authors argue cheating should be analyzed through multi-level relationships rather than solely through technical prevention, positioning the work as a bridge between technical anti-cheating literature and media literature that treats cheating as intentional play.
- The empirical basis is qualitative: a pilot study of Tibia (roughly 300,000 players, September to November 2008), participant observation, forum posts, and the EULAs and Terms of Service of several MMORPGs including World of Warcraft, with no quantitative findings reported.
Commoditization of Helping Players Play: Rise of the Service Paradigm
The game industry's shift from selling fixed products to delivering ongoing services is the central subject of this analysis, which situates the transformation within broader post-Fordist patterns of commodification.
- The central argument is that the game industry's shift from selling fixed products to delivering ongoing services lies less in the game artifact itself than in how games are sold, delivered, and sustained over time.
- Subscriptions, expansion packs, episodic content, and persistent worlds are framed as mechanisms for building long-term customer relationships, and the authors contend that prevailing 'games as services' economic models tend to overlook the player's own experience.
- Evidence centers on console and PC markets around 2007, when most top-selling console titles were licensed properties, sequels, or remakes and expansion packs dominated PC sales, showing a service orientation before subscription models became dominant.
The Gigue Is Up: High Culture Gets Game
"The Gigue Is Up: High Culture Gets Game" examines whether Baroque music education can succeed when delivered through interactive game design rather than conventional instruction.
- The project is a 2009 DiGRA exploratory design account: 'Tafelkids: The Quest for Arundo Donax,' a free Flash-based game for ages 8–14, teaches Baroque music through mini-games covering orchestra identification, musical inscription, and a rhythm-action-style Baroque dance game.
- Play-testing with more than 150 students aged 12–14 across three sessions showed high engagement but only mixed evidence of learning, as students often ignored instructions and curricular information bubbles.
- Post-play recall of dance types, instrument sounds, and historical facts was encouraging but not conclusive evidence that the game produced learning.
From Simulation to Imitation: New Controllers, New Forms of Play
This paper, by Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell, argues that the recent proliferation of new game controllers, such as the Wii remote, plastic guitars, microphones, dance pads, and the Nintendo DS touch screen, marks an epistemological shift in digital gameplay from simulation toward imitation.
- The paper argues that new controllers such as the Wii remote, plastic guitars, microphones, dance pads, and the Nintendo DS touch screen shift digital gameplay from simulation (translating button presses into on-screen actions) toward imitation (requiring players to physically mirror real-world movements).
- The authors propose the simulation-versus-imitation distinction as a conceptual tool for understanding digital game-based learning, grounding it in actor-network theory, educational theory, and philosophical accounts of mimesis from Aristotle and Adorno.
- A pilot study in summer 2007 with four young adults (two with musical training, two without) found that musically trained players picked up Guitar Hero II and American Idol-style karaoke games far more quickly than untrained players.
Teleporters, Tunnels & Time: Understanding Warp Devices in Videogames
Gazzard's paper examines the warp as a recurring "time/space" device in videogames, arguing that warps disrupt the fluidity of paths and remove the player's navigational control, converting open routes into predetermined "tracks."
- Warps break the one-to-one correspondence between play time and fictional time, and they disrupt the fluidity of paths by removing the player's navigational control, turning open routes into predetermined "tracks."
- The paper classifies puzzle warps into three types: jump warps (unidirectional, typically single-use, with visible or randomized destinations), return warps (bidirectional, sending players back to a prior location or elsewhere), and portals (the most flexible, with both endpoints fully visible).
- Warps can speed up exploration and shorten completion times, but they can also disrupt learning progression, strand players in dead ends, and enable cheating or temporal distortions.