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
"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).
Play's the Thing: A Framework to Study Videogames as Performance
"Play's the Thing" argues that videogames should be studied through the lens of performance studies rather than the looser metaphor of "interactive drama."
- The paper argues videogames should be studied through performance studies rather than the looser metaphor of 'interactive drama', drawing on Richard Schechner's definition of performance as 'showing doing'.
- Play, games, sports, theatre, and ritual are said to share four qualities: a special time set apart from everyday life, a non-productive purpose, a bounded performance space, and governing rules, with gambling and MMORPG economies identified as exceptions that complicate the fit.
- The central framework adapts a tri-partite theatrical model (Patrice Pavis's dramatic text, performance, and mise-en-scène, combined with Schechner's approach), aligning code, runtime, and interaction with these elements, supplemented by Hunicke, LeBlanc, and Zubek's MDA framework (mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics).
Meaningful Movement: The Labyrinth and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
This paper argues that the castle in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night structures the player-character's movement in a manner analogous to the treader of a classical labyrinth, one defined by turning back on oneself.
- The paper argues that the castle in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night functions as a labyrinth not through its visual layout but through a recursive pattern of movement that makes the player repeatedly turn back on themselves, producing a labyrinthine experience.
- The author holds that the meaning of a labyrinthine movement pattern depends on context, citing its different significance in the Theseus myth, the Troia dance in the Aeneid, and medieval English turf mazes before reinterpreting it in the game.
- Within the game, the recursive movement is read as a spatial expression of protagonist Alucard's ambivalence, linked to oedipal themes such as desire, self-control, repression, distorted memory, and the death instinct.
Agency Reconsidered
"Agency Reconsidered" argues that agency in games is not a fixed structural property of a work but an emergent phenomenon arising from the interaction between player and game.
- Agency in games is an emergent property of the interaction between player and game, arising only when the actions a player desires align with what the underlying computational model permits, rather than being a fixed structural feature of the work.
- The apparent intelligence of a system can mislead: the Eliza effect, where players overestimate a system's capabilities, produces only a fleeting illusion of agency, whereas genuine agency requires a playable software model of the fictional domain.
- More realistic, presence-heavy interfaces such as augmented reality can reduce agency by raising player expectations the system cannot meet, according to Steven Dow's research.
"I Like the Idea of Killing But Not the Idea of Cruelty": How New Zealand Youth Negotiate the Pleasures of Simulated Violence
This paper, authored by Gareth Schott of the University of Waikato, examines how adolescent game players in New Zealand understand and articulate their engagement with violent content in interactive digital games.
- The study argues that academic and public language about game violence is too narrow, and that young players are routinely denied a voice in debates about games' effects, a critique aimed directly at experimental psychology's causal and desensitization models.
- Based on a two-year project funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand, the research followed 61 students (53 male, 8 female) in weekly game clubs across five schools in the Waikato and Bay of Plenty regions over a full school year, supplemented by focus groups and interviews.
- Players consistently distinguished between 'violence' and 'cruelty': they endorsed combat and killing in heroic or defensive contexts while rejecting gratuitous or sadistic content.
Using an RFID Game to Phenomenologically Test a Theoretical Systemic Model for Describing Ambient Games
This DiGRA 2009 paper proposes a systemic domain model for describing "ambient games," a form of pervasive play in which players can freely vary their level of engagement, ignore the game entirely while still generating data, and control their own pacing rather than responding to game-imposed prompts.
- The paper proposes a systemic domain model for "ambient games" built around three elements: engaging, generating data, and perceiving feedback, contrasted with traditional games that demand sustained attention.
- The central empirical test was a qualitative study of Ambient Quest: Pedometer, an RFID and pedometer-based game, analyzed in NVivo using themes derived from a theoretical gameflow model.
- Findings were drawn mainly from interviews and researcher notes with one intensively studied player over eight weeks, and the authors report the model is broadly supported.
Researching Player Experiences Through the Use of Different Qualitative Methods
This study examines how three qualitative methods, a diary study, a video commentary model (VCM), and focus group interviews (FGIs), can be used to investigate player experiences and playing styles.
- The study argues that no single qualitative method suffices for studying player experience, and that methodological triangulation of diary studies, video commentary models (VCM), and focus group interviews (FGIs) yields a more accurate and complete picture of play than any one approach alone.
- Each method plays a distinct role: diaries capture motivations as they arise in everyday context, VCM reveals moment-to-moment player-game interaction, and focus groups surface the social interpretation of play.
- Participants rated focus group interviews as the most interesting method (M=6.07) and the diary as the most useful for understanding one's own playing style (M=5.66), while the VCM received the lowest and least consistent ratings (M=4.88, SD=1.32).
An Affordance Based Model for Gameplay
This paper presents a formal, affordance-based model for analyzing gameplay, arguing that the interactions players have with game worlds can be understood as a network of affordance relationships among objects.
- The paper proposes a formal, affordance-based model for analyzing gameplay, grounded in an analysis of 35 first-person games released between 1998 and 2008, and it is conceptual and taxonomic rather than empirical, offering no quantitative data.
- A core set of six gameplay affordances and two diegetic affordances is argued to account for all objects, including constraining movement, changing object or avatar parameters, altering the environment set, and supporting diegesis.
- Although first-person shooter worlds appear experientially varied, their underlying functional architecture is considerably simpler than their diegetic surface, with most environmental objects acting as controlled triggers enabling predefined, typically single-use interactions.
The New Gatekeepers: The Occupational Ideology of Game Journalism
Game journalism occupies a precarious position between the industry it covers and the readers it serves, and this study examines the occupational ideology shaping that relationship.
- Game journalism depends on advertising revenue and privileged access to games, creating a constant tension between reader loyalty and publisher influence, which the authors term the "carrot and the stick" dynamic.
- Publishers shape outlets through advertising spending and control over review copies and information, pressuring traditional journalistic independence.
- The games market is concentrated among a small number of publishers, and print outlets have struggled as they migrated online, with historical titles such as Computer & Video Games and Nintendo Power marking the field's roots.
Boys' Play in the Fourth Space: Freedom of Movement in a Tween Virtual World
Searle and Kafai's study examines how preadolescent boys, aged roughly 10 to 12, play in Whyville.net, a virtual world with about 1.5 million registered users.
- Virtual worlds give preadolescent boys a 'freedom of movement' similar to open-ended console play, but with a stronger emphasis on social interaction and avatar design, since players create their own paths rather than following a fixed storyline or end goal.
- The study draws on logfile data from 595 players on Whyville.net, a virtual world with about 1.5 million registered users, plus observations of an after-school gaming club of 21 tweens aged roughly 10 to 12.
- Chat, y-mail, and avatar-related activities were the most frequent boy pursuits, while projectile throwing and scamming were used to test masculine identities and social norms.
Ethically Notable Videogames: Moral Dilemmas and Gameplay
Ethically notable videogames are those that prompt players to reason and reflect on moral questions, typically through dilemmas that engage them both emotionally and intellectually.
- A game earns ethical notability when it makes players, not just their avatars, feel personally responsible for in-game choices and makes its ethical framework explicit enough to examine and challenge.
- Ultima IV's 'children's room' dilemma illustrates how a moral dilemma can provoke strong player investment, but playtester responses largely mirrored the game's built-in virtue-based character assignments rather than independent moral questioning.
- Ethical notability depends on consistent, discernible ethical frameworks and on dilemmas players genuinely experience as moral rather than as ordinary difficult gameplay decisions.