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
Pervasive Persuasive: A Rhetorical Design Approach to a Location-Based Spell-Casting Game for Tourists
"Pervasive Persuasive" presents REXplorer, a location-based pervasive spell-casting game launched in June 2007 in Regensburg, Germany, and argues for a rhetorical design approach to persuading tourists toward situated history learning and city exploration.
- REXplorer, a location-based pervasive spell-casting game, launched in June 2007 in Regensburg, Germany, using the city's roughly 1,000 medieval and Gothic landmarks (many UNESCO-listed) as its stage to persuade tourists toward situated history learning and exploration.
- The authors define persuasion as the intentional shaping of player behavior and build their "pervasive persuasive tactics" on formal and dramaturgical design rather than on conventional game mechanics alone.
- The design uses a GPS-equipped smartphone in a shell with a custom gesture-based detector device, a personalized geo-weblog, and a walkable city-core layout in which 29 paranormally charged sites serve as graph vertices, with an on-screen control fallback for older players.
Human, All Too Non-Human: Coop AI and the Conversation of Action
Bart Simon's paper examines how cooperative artificial intelligence in contemporary digital games, particularly Activision's Call of Duty 2, reshapes the relationship between players and machines compared with the competitive human-versus-computer framing established by chess and the 1997 Deep Blue–Kasparov match.
- Simon argues that single-player games often preserve a "humanist remains" by hiding machine labor behind an illusion of individual human mastery, whereas cooperative AI foregrounds a "conversation of actions" in which players must continually track and adapt to non-human comrades.
- The paper frames cooperative AI as a move toward critical posthumanism, drawing on Haraway, Latour, Hayles, and Baudrillard, and uses Mori's uncanny valley to describe the unsettling yet productive tension it creates.
- Simon contends that cooperative AI opens exploratory space that competitive, Turing-style AI (exemplified by chess and the 1997 Deep Blue–Kasparov match) has largely closed off.
Ghastly Multiplication: Fatal Frame II and the Videogame Uncanny
This paper offers a close-play and close-reading analysis of Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly, a 2003 PlayStation 2 survival horror game developed by Tecmo, to argue that the videogame uncanny is produced not merely by borrowing literary or filmic techniques but through the interplay of operational demands and affective…
- The videogame uncanny, per this paper, arises not just from borrowed literary or filmic techniques but from the interplay of operational demands (controls, camera, mechanics) and affective experience, producing a distinctly ludic form of the familiar made unfamiliar.
- Using Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly (Tecmo, 2003, PlayStation 2) as its case study, the authors show how camera-based combat, shifts between third- and first-person perspectives, and restricted movement during camera mode generate uncanny effects.
- The twin avatars Mio and Mayu and the Crimson Sacrifice ritual, in which one twin kills the other, are read as doubles that mirror the player's own uncertain identification with the avatar.
Mapping Time in Video Games
Michael Nitsche's paper "Mapping Time in Video Games" argues that players are situated in both space and time when playing, and that our understanding of temporal structures in games depends on our comprehension of their spatial relationships.
- Michael Nitsche's paper argues that players are situated in both space and time during play, and that understanding temporal structures in games depends on understanding their spatial relationships.
- The paper proposes combining the formalist model (Jesper Juul's mapping of play time onto event time, including direct mapping, loading time, cut-scenes, level changes, and back-referencing) with the experiential model (Espen Aarseth's negotiation time and players' cognitive and emotional engagement with temporal situations).
- Space is identified as the connecting element between the formalist and experiential models, with players projecting movement into virtual spaces so that consistent spatial layout keeps complex temporal arrangements legible.
Understanding Pervasive Games through Gameplay Design Patterns
The 2007 study "Understanding Pervasive Games through Gameplay Design Patterns" examines how pervasive games, those that extend play into everyday physical and social spaces, can be characterized and organized through a shared vocabulary of design patterns.
- The study analyzed 120 pervasive game examples against 75 gameplay design patterns, of which 53 were newly developed for pervasive contexts and 24 carried over from an earlier study of mobile games.
- Rather than classifying games by genre, the authors used a bottom-up approach, grouping patterns with a custom clustering program and treating cluster names as hypotheses about each group's core character.
- The resulting cluster hierarchy maps the pervasive game design space, with GPS Games the most distinct grouping, separated mainly by its lack of social-interaction patterns.
Designing a Game to Model Consumer Misbehavior
This paper argues that computer games, grounded in game design theory, offer a controlled, ethical, and engaging means of studying consumer misbehavior, a phenomenon driven largely by emotion that is difficult to examine through self-reports, direct observation, or role-play.
- The paper proposes a graphical, single-player game as a controlled, ethical way to study consumer misbehavior, a largely emotion-driven phenomenon that is hard to examine through self-reports, direct observation, or role-play.
- The design relies on real-time constraints, a clear winning state, and deliberately withheld information or feedback to induce stress and frustration that may provoke misbehavior.
- Emotionally responsive, context-specific non-player character dialogue is intended to sustain realism, while strong immersion and player control are meant to keep participants engaged.
Peep-Boxes to Pixels: An Alternative History of Video Game Space
Philip Sharp's "Peep-Boxes to Pixels: An Alternative History of Video Game Space" argues that video game arcades emerged from the convergence of leisure practices, technological innovation, and cultural identity rather than from a single line of technical progress.
- Philip Sharp argues that video game arcades arose from the convergence of leisure practices, technological innovation, and cultural identity rather than a single line of technical progress, with roots in nineteenth-century optical toys such as Dutch peep-boxes and Japanese magic lanterns, plus pinball and pachinko.
- Sharp contends Japan absorbed Western mechanical and optical devices and framed them as commercial leisure spaces, a pattern he sees continuing in modern arcades, while Japan's arcade and pachinko culture endured in contrast to the American shift toward home gaming and family entertainment centers.
- The report situates arcades within a recurring history of moral panic over amusement spaces, citing American pinball bans as an early stigma that anticipated later reactions to video game arcades.
Temporal Frames: A Unifying Framework for the Analysis of Game Temporality
"Temporal Frames" proposes a formal analytical tool for studying how time operates in games, grounded in a relationist view in which temporal properties arise from relationships among events rather than from time as an independent container.
- Games rarely operate within a single temporal frame; the authors identify four recurring frames (real-world time, gameworld time, coordination time, and fictive time) that often coexist or succeed one another, and meaningful analysis depends on identifying each and how they interact.
- The paper critiques the familiar real-time versus turn-based binary as obscuring distinct temporal phenomena produced by frame interactions, and reconceives both as interactions between frames rather than fixed categories.
- Sequential and embedded arrangements of temporal frames generate temporal anomalies such as temporal bubbles, warping, and non-uniform temporality, illustrated with cases from Final Fantasy XII, Animal Crossing, Civilization, and Grand Theft Auto III.
The Lambent Reactive: Exploring the Audiovisual Kinesthetic Playform
This paper presents the Lambent Reactive, an audiovisual kinesthetic gaming environment built around a 36-tile networked floor of pressure-sensitive, individually addressable light-emitting tiles, paired with a 5.1-channel speaker system and music software.
- The central thesis is that fusing auditory, visual, and kinesthetic feedback in a single interactive space produces a more rewarding and flow-inducing play experience than any single modality alone.
- The Lambent Reactive uses a 36-tile networked floor of pressure-sensitive, individually addressable light-emitting tiles, paired with a 5.1-channel speaker system and music software, with pressure detection down to roughly two pixels (8 inches).
- Pressure data is converted into MIDI signals to trigger sound, tying each footstep's location and force directly to musical output.
The Impact of Experience: The Influences of User and Online Review Ratings on the Performance of Video Games in the US Market
Published research on the US video game market examines whether user and online press ratings function as signals of perceived quality that shape commercial outcomes for experience goods, which buyers cannot fully evaluate before purchase.
- Ratings show a moderate positive relationship with sales, with Pearson correlations of roughly 0.26 to 0.36, and user ratings and online press ratings are the strongest predictors.
- User and online press ratings both load onto a latent perceived-quality construct, which explains about 13 to 15 percent of the variance in penetration rate, with a standardized direct effect of 0.39.
- High ratings do not guarantee commercial success, as many critically acclaimed titles failed to reach one million units sold.
The Unbound Network of Product and Service Interaction of the MMOG Industry: With a Case Study of China
The MMOG industry is presented as a rapidly expanding, knowledge-intensive service sector whose competitive dynamics cannot be fully explained by studying individual firms in isolation.
- The MMOG industry is best understood as an 'unbound network' of tightly interdependent relationships spanning technology infrastructure, outsourced development, and continuous customer service, so studying individual firms in isolation cannot fully explain competition.
- The Asian online game market was reportedly worth $3.4 billion in 2005 and projected to reach $13 billion by 2011, with Asia outside Japan accounting for more than half of the market.
- Chinese online game companies built their competitiveness on cost-efficient customer service, extensive distribution such as point-card sales through internet cafés, and early reliance on licensed foreign titles, financed largely through venture capital and stock market listings.
The Contextual Game Experience: On the Socio-Cultural Contexts for Meaning in Digital Play
Frans Mäyrä's paper argues that the existing SCI model of gameplay experience, which focuses on immersion during active play, is insufficient for capturing the full range of how people encounter digital games.
- Frans Mäyrä argues that the SCI model of gameplay experience, which centers on immersion during active play, is insufficient for capturing the full range of how people encounter digital games.
- The proposed contextual game experience model draws on Richard Johnson's "Circuits of Culture" framework from cultural studies to situate play within layered social, cultural, and historical contexts.
- A game's significance, on this view, extends beyond its formal rules and core gameplay to include production conditions, social relations, personal histories, and wider societal values.