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
Liberal Sims?: Simulated Difference and the Commodity of Social Diversity
Curlew's paper argues that The Sims, widely praised as socially progressive for its treatment of same-sex relationships, racial equality, and the non-sexualized presentation of women, owes its inclusiveness less to a genuine shift in cultural ideology than to a change in how marginalized consumers are marketed to under late…
- Curlew argues that The Sims' praised inclusiveness stems less from genuine ideological change than from late-capitalist marketing that targets marginalized consumers, drawing on Stuart Hall's concept of the commercial appropriation of difference.
- The paper contends that the 1990s expansion of gaming markets, combined with corporate embrace of diversity, led producers to incorporate marginalized groups for financial rather than principled reasons.
- On gender, the game gives male and female Sims equal capabilities and does not sexualize women, yet its emphasis on domesticity, shopping, child-rearing, and interior design is read as a strategy to attract women while reinforcing stereotyped feminine roles.
Challenge Balance and Diversity: Playing The Sims and The Sims 2
Sara Mosberg Iversen's paper uses the concept of challenge to examine The Sims (2000) and The Sims 2 (2004) as dynamic systems that motivate player activity, rather than as the ideological or cultural artifacts that much prior scholarship has focused on.
- The paper treats The Sims (2000) and The Sims 2 (2004) as dynamic systems that motivate player activity through challenge, rather than as ideological or cultural artifacts as much prior scholarship has done.
- The author classes these people-simulation games as 'borderline' games under a classical definition because they lack clear overall goals or winning conditions, yet argues challenge is a productive framework for understanding them and could support a broader definition of games.
- Challenge is defined experientially as a situation of resistance that calls for transformative action and requires non-trivial effort or has an uncertain outcome.
Theory as Game: Designing the Gamegame
Aki Järvinen's "Theory as Game: Designing the Gamegame" presents a card game that serves as both a tool for analyzing games and a method for generating design ideas.
- Järvinen's Gamegame is a card game that serves both as a tool for analysing games and as a method for generating design ideas, grounded in his doctoral theory of nine game elements grouped into systemic, behavioural, and compound classes.
- The paper argues that distinct game genres arise from particular configurations of the nine elements (goals, components, procedures, environments, players, contexts, rules, game mechanics, theme, and interface), and frames game design as a combinatorial task the Gamegame turns into play.
- The work is framed as research through design, producing a tangible artifact that embodies the theory, drawing on Frayling's distinction between research into, through, and for design.
What Happens If You Catch Whypox? Children's Learning Experiences of Infectious Disease in a Multi-User Virtual Environment
This study examines how sixth-grade students understand a virtual infectious disease, Whypox, which spread through Whyville.net, a multi-user virtual environment with more than 400,000 registered users at the time.
- Students' explanations of natural disease shifted significantly toward biological causal mechanisms after a ten-week, teacher-led infectious disease unit that embedded a virtual outbreak, with more comprehensive answers about causes and factors that increase spread.
- The study followed 46 sixth-grade students aged 10 to 12 from two science classes taught by the same teacher at a Los Angeles laboratory school, using pre- and post-unit surveys, a Whypox-specific survey, and coded analysis of videotaped class discussions (80% inter-rater agreement).
- The virtual disease Whypox spread through Whyville.net, a multi-user virtual environment with more than 400,000 registered users at the time, and students frequently described themselves as having Whypox, indicating strong immersion.
Game Fiction: Playing the Interface in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Asheron's Call
This paper argues that videogame play involves negotiating several simultaneous points of view, including cameras, avatars, interfaces, and cut-scenes, and that mastering these perspectives is central to completing a game's goals.
- Videogame play requires negotiating several simultaneous points of view (cameras, avatars, interfaces, and cut-scenes), and mastering these perspectives is central to completing a game's goals.
- The paper proposes "game fiction" as the imaginative devices games use as native rule elements, a framing that sidesteps the ludology-narratology debate and lets non-narrative games like Tetris or chess be analyzed for their fictional construction.
- In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the minimal on-screen interface (life bar, time circle, sand tanks, power tanks) functions like adjectives describing the Prince's state and location, with the time circle marking chronological position in the reversed-time narrative.
Designing Goals for Online Role-Players
This paper, by Markus Montola of the University of Tampere, examines how persistent online worlds can be designed to serve role-players, a growing audience whose motivations differ from those of regular gamers.
- Role-players construct subjective fictional worlds (diegeses) and pursue goals chosen by their characters rather than goals encoded in game rules, and they often treat winning or losing as meaningless.
- The paper distinguishes exogenous goals (the player's own reasons), endogenous goals (built into game rules), and diegetic goals (belonging to the character's imagined world), arguing role-players largely disregard endogenous goals.
- It proposes six criteria for effective online role-playing goals: diegetic desirability, plausibility, sensibility, consequentiality, relative optionality, and sociality.
End of Story? Quest, Narrative and Enactment in Computer Games
Anders Sundnes Løvlie challenges Espen Aarseth's claim that games labeled "narrative games" are better understood as "quest games," a position rooted in the ludology-narratology debate in computer game theory.
- Løvlie argues against Espen Aarseth's view that 'narrative games' are better understood as 'quest games,' using Remedy Entertainment's 2001 third-person shooter Max Payne as a counter-example whose linear, heavily narrated structure cannot be separated from its gameplay.
- The author proposes 'enactment' as a more fitting concept than acting or authorship, describing the player as reacting to a script of narrative and rules rather than performing a fixed script or freely authoring the experience.
- Max Payne's dream sequences deliberately break genre conventions, and the game's forced repetition of an unavoidable event with identical outcomes is read as an attempt to express metaphysical themes through new media, drawing on Manovich's database-interface model and Jakobson's paradigm-syntagm account of poetry.
Feel It, Don't Think: The Significance of Affect in the Study of Digital Games
Eugénie Shinkle's paper argues that game studies methodologies focused on visual, narrative, and semiotic content overlook the embodied, physiological dimensions that give digital games their meaning.
- Shinkle argues that game studies focused on visual, narrative, and semiotic content overlook the embodied, physiological 'feel' of gameplay, which she calls affect: a multisensory, temporally delocalized experience that operates partly outside linear time and conscious choice.
- The paper distinguishes affect from emotion and presents itself as a preliminary theoretical examination rather than an empirical study, drawing on Massumi, Grodal, Aarseth, and Poole.
- Sega's rave-inspired Rez is cited as an example whose appeal lies in a trance-like synchronicity between player and environment rather than in level completion.
A Cognitive Psychological Approach to Gameplay Emotions
This paper applies a cognitive psychological framework to the emotions arising from gameplay in story-driven video games, arguing that these gameplay emotions, distinct from fiction emotions and artefact emotions, deserve focused study.
- Gameplay emotions are treated as a distinct category from fiction emotions and artefact emotions, and the paper argues they deserve focused study in their own right.
- Drawing on Nico Frijda's appraisal and action-tendency theory and Ed Tan's work on film emotion, the author maps how players evaluate their coping potential in game situations and how emotions drive action.
- The paper's central contribution is a set of appraisal dimensions (motive consistency, expectedness, causal attribution, certainty, appetitive versus aversive orientation, and control potential), each illustrated with examples from titles such as Max Payne, Metal Gear Solid 3, Splinter Cell, Resident Evil 4, ICO, and XIII.
On the Ontology of MMORPG Beings: A Theoretical Model for Research
This theoretical paper argues that the ontology of MMORPG beings, the essential characteristics of online avatars, is a neglected fifth research theme in Game Studies.
- The paper argues that the ontology of MMORPG beings (the essential characteristics of online avatars) is a neglected fifth research theme in Game Studies, alongside the social, individual, narratological, and ludological traditions.
- Its core claim is that established Game Studies traditions implicitly rely on an ontological foundation that has never been made explicit, so ontological clarification is presented as a prerequisite for coherent MMORPG research.
- The proposed model is layered, starting from the player's pre-existing subjective content and developers' software, hardware, and design elements, then analyzing MMORPGs as game spaces, social spaces, and individual places, and culminating in player identity expressed through cyborg-like avatars.
The Ethics of Computer Game Design
Miguel Sicart's "The Ethics of Computer Game Design" argues that computer games should be understood as moral objects whose code and architecture embed ethical values and function as power structures shaping how players act and experience play.
- Miguel Sicart argues that computer games are moral objects whose code (rules) and architecture (experienced play space) embed ethical values and act as power structures that shape how players behave.
- Sicart treats games as agents with a degree of artificial agency, which grounds the claim that they can be genuine ethical objects rather than neutral entertainment.
- Because designers inevitably shape the choices available to players and the values those choices express, Sicart concludes that designing games is itself a moral act.
Beyond P-1: Who Plays Online?
This study examines who plays online games and how their preferences cluster, aiming to move beyond earlier qualitative typologies toward a quantitative, empirically grounded framework.
- Exploration and themes/plot (88.5% each), good characters (86.2%), and graphics (79.3%) were the most important game features to surveyed online gamers, while military themes (31.9%) and realism (41.3%) ranked lowest.
- Based on a survey of 1,178 online gamers recruited via websites and bulletin boards, the sample is self-selected, heavily engaged, and skewed toward dedicated and Western players, limiting generalizability.
- Gender preferences diverged: males rated weapons, technology, and competition more highly, while females were more often indifferent to these features.