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
Cash Trade Within the Magic Circle: Free-to-Play Game Challenges and Massively Multiplayer Online Game Player Responses
This study examines how the cash trading of virtual items in free-to-play massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) affects players' sense of immersion, fairness, and the "magic circle," Huizinga's concept of a bounded play space.
- The study argues that cash trading of virtual items in free-to-play MMOGs shifts players from community members toward consumers, reshaping their norms of fairness, immersion, and self-image within the 'magic circle' of play.
- Focusing on Taiwanese players, who began migrating to free-to-play titles from 2004 onward, the authors estimate that about 20 percent reportedly bought virtual props with cash.
- The analysis codes 1,176 posts from Taiwanese forums such as Gamebase and Bahamut, where critics raise concerns about pay-to-win imbalances, a 'one game, two experiences' divide between paying and non-paying players, and declining community order.
Mobile Gaming with Children in Rural India: Contextual Factors in the Use of Game Design Patterns
This study examines whether game design patterns can produce engaging mobile games for children in rural India, a population that has received little attention in games research.
- The study tested whether games built with design patterns would be more enjoyable for rural Indian children, and the hypothesis was not supported: pattern use alone did not predict enjoyment.
- In a 10-day field study with 24 first- and second-grade children at a rural Indian school, the top-rated games, Floored and Critter Crossing (both 4.5), and Jump Bot (4.1), were not built using patterns, while pattern-based games varied widely from Floored's top score to Crocodile Rescue's 3.4.
- Enjoyment was measured with adapted Fun Toolkit instruments, comparing three pattern-based games against five off-the-shelf titles made by amateur and professional developers.
Gender in Play: Mapping a Girls' Gaming Club
This paper, by Nicholas Taylor, Jennifer Jenson, and Suzanne de Castell, examines how girls' access to gaming is shaped by material and discursive conditions that render their participation tenuous, even within spaces ostensibly dedicated to them.
- The study's core finding is that girls' participation in gaming, even in girls-only spaces, is tenuous: in a 30-second clip from a Greater Toronto Area elementary school, two boys' interruption of a girls-only session prompted immobility and silence from the girls, while one girl's gesture effectively invited the boys back into control.
- The authors argue that conventional textual ethnography flattens the multimodal communication involved in such interactions, and they introduce the MAP (Multimodal Analysis Program) tool to chart gesture, posture, speech, and proximity as coordinated "semiotic scores."
- Survey data cited in the paper show female participants typically describe their gaming as spectatorship or play with male relatives, rather than as independent play.
Serious Games in Language Learning and Teaching: A Theoretical Perspective
This paper, produced under the "Serious Games on a Global Market" project (2007–2010), advances a theoretical framework for designing serious games for language learning.
- The paper is a theoretical, conceptual work (produced under the 'Serious Games on a Global Market' project, 2007–2010) that presents its claims as hypotheses rather than empirically established findings, reporting no quantitative data beyond one cited survey.
- Its core argument is that serious language-learning games can support meaningful communicative language use, drawing on educational design theory, project pedagogy, and social semiotics, and framing language teaching's shift from drill-based structural approaches through cognitive models toward socio-cognitive and communicative paradigms.
- The main empirical anchor is a 2002 SAFT survey of 9- to 16-year-olds, which found children learn about the Internet mainly from friends, then parents, their own experimentation, and teachers last, leading the authors to argue that games should build on children's informal competitive, interactive, and social play.
Play: A Procrustean Probe
"Play: A Procrustean Probe" applies Marshall McLuhan's media "tetrad" to digital games, using it less as a rigorous scientific method than as an exploratory lens for situating play within its technological environment.
- The report applies McLuhan's media tetrad as an exploratory lens rather than a rigorous scientific method, arguing that computerization transforms play in ways that challenge prevailing critiques of gaming.
- Against claims by Berger and Putnam that gaming is inherently isolating, the analysis argues that digital games deepen solo play through computational complexity while also enabling large-scale multiplayer interaction, as in MMORPGs.
- The author traces solitary play back through board games, pinball, and solo role-playing books, contending that isolation is a longstanding feature of play rather than a novel digital corruption.
Team Structure in the Development of Game-Based Learning Environments
This study examines how development teams for digital game-based learning environments should be organized, arguing that such projects demand multidisciplinary expertise spanning learning theory, game design, art, programming, testing, and subject-matter knowledge, along with meaningful user participation.
- Learning, content-area, and game-design expertise was frequently insufficient or underused across three case projects (Gameli 1.0, Gameli 2.0, and the Social Responsibility and Peatland Adventure projects), with learning and content experts often relegated to consultancy roles rather than responsible positions.
- The authors propose a general early-stage team structure comprising a management team, pre-production and production teams that include game design and software engineering expertise, and a design partner team representing end users.
- Pre-production is framed as the period for building shared understanding of project goals and common ground for implementing the final product, which underpins the argument for giving learning and content experts substantive roles from the outset.
Gameplay Design Patterns for Believable Non-Player Characters
This paper argues that believable non-player characters in games depend on players adopting an intentional stance toward them, a condition that requires qualities such as self-awareness, self-impelled action, emotional expression, natural language use, and persistent traits.
- Believable NPCs depend on players adopting an intentional stance toward them, which requires qualities such as self-awareness, self-impelled action, emotional expression, natural language use, and persistent traits.
- The authors argue that gameplay believability must stay consistent with narrative believability, and they propose new gameplay design patterns, in the format of Lankoski and Björk's existing collection of nearly 300 patterns, to fill the gaps they identify.
- A close case study of Claudette Perrick, a shopkeeper in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, shows partial believability: she displays initiative and goal-directed responses to theft and a basic sense of self, but fails to react to unwitnessed thefts, ignores physical disruptions, shows no lasting physical consequences, and cannot meaningfully alter her life trajectory.
What Videogame Making Can Teach Us About Literacy and Learning: Alternative Pathways into Participatory Culture
Youth video game making in a Los Angeles Computer Clubhouse serves as the basis for an argument that building games offers an alternative route into participatory culture, one that addresses the participation gap, the transparency problem, and the ethics challenge identified in Jenkins' work.
- The study argues that building video games offers an alternative route into participatory culture, cultivating design skills and critical awareness as a counterpoint to passive media consumption, and addressing the participation gap, transparency problem, and ethics challenge identified in Jenkins' work.
- An archival analysis of 11,926 files collected over two years at a Los Angeles Computer Clubhouse found Scratch was the most-used design software, accounting for 643 files or 5.3 percent of the total after excluding saved web images, which dominated the corpus.
- Preliminary indications suggest programming complexity and community expertise grew in the second year, though the authors stress these trends are provisional because analyses of programming sophistication remain ongoing.
A Method for Discovering Values in Digital Games
"A Method for Discovering Values in Digital Games" presents the Values Cards exercise, a practical tool that helps game designers identify and discuss human values such as equality, justice, generosity, and competition that are embedded in game mechanics, representation, and players' prior experiences.
- Games inevitably embed human values such as equality, justice, generosity, and competition, in their mechanics, representation, and the prior experiences players bring, much as other media do.
- The Values Cards exercise is presented as a practical tool that lets game designers identify and discuss these embedded values, and it is positioned as the first step in the broader Values at Play methodology of discovery, translation, and verification.
- Designers can gain conscious control over the values their games convey by examining both the positive and negative expressions of those values.
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.