Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture
Open-access peer-reviewed journal on computer game culture, published since 2007 (now via Septentrio Academic Publishing).
Documents
Game Characters as Narrative Devices: A Comparative Analysis of Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2
Kristine Jørgensen's 2010 analysis examines how Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 use companion characters and player characters to drive narrative, arguing that both games integrate storytelling with gameplay to produce emotionally engaging experiences.
- Jørgensen's 2010 analysis of Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2 argues that companion characters, rather than the player character alone, drive the narrative, with approval/loyalty mechanics and personal quests deepening these relationships.
- Dragon Age: Origins presents the Grey Warden as a relatively blank "tabula rasa" with origin stories that invite the player's own personality and allegiances, producing a stronger "bleed effect" between player and character.
- Mass Effect 2 presents Commander Shepard as a voiced, visually defined figure whose personality the player shapes within a clearer identity; Jørgensen treats the two protagonist approaches as a continuum rather than a strict dichotomy.
Digital Historicism: Archival Footage, Digital Interface, and Historiographic Effects in Call of Duty: World at War
Jaimie Baron's analysis examines how Call of Duty: World at War deploys embedded archival World War II footage to generate what she calls an "archive effect," lending its cut-scenes a powerful sense of historical authenticity.
- Jaimie Baron argues that Call of Duty: World at War uses embedded archival WWII footage to create an 'archive effect' of historical authenticity, but tightly controls that footage through editing, animated graphics, and voiceover.
- The game presents history as linear and teleological, with player interactivity unable to alter the outcome, which Baron contends reinforces a conservative historiographic model under the banner of 'digital historicism.'
- Baron contrasts the game's rapid, militaristic cut-scene rhythm, which forecloses reflection and implicitly legitimizes player violence, with the Labyrinth Project's Tracing the Decay of Fiction, which uses untimed, reflective interactivity, chance, and layered archives to present history as multiple and unstable.
Online Gaming and the Social Construction of Virtual Victimization
Downing's study examines how players in online games collectively determine which virtual harms count as genuine victimization, challenging a cybercrime literature that has concentrated on remote offenses such as child sexual exploitation and online fraud.
- The central thesis is that the gaming community itself, rather than external authorities, is the primary agent defining what counts as victimization within its own boundaries.
- Virtual theft of in-game property is generally regarded as more consequential than virtual assault, largely because of the time and emotional investment required to acquire items.
- Players judge whether a virtual harm is 'real' by weighing the investment involved, a play-versus-work distinction, and whether a human being is behind the avatar.
Exploring the Challenges in Designing and Implementing an Assessment Plan for a Virtual Engineering Materials Lab
This article examines the design, implementation, and assessment of MATERIALS-ISLE, a game-based virtual materials laboratory developed for engineering students at a large public university in the southwestern United States.
- The article is a methodological account of MATERIALS-ISLE, a game-based virtual materials lab for Mechanical Engineering students at a large public university in the southwestern US, and it does not present definitive comparative outcome results.
- The assessment plan follows five steps: writing learning outcomes from the existing lab syllabus, measuring prior knowledge with pre-tests and attitude surveys, assessing achievement via in-game transaction logs, virtual technician quizzes, and student poster presentations, and comparing pre-, mid-, and post-assessment data.
- Students were randomly assigned to a game-based simulation group or a no-simulation group, with the latter denied access until post-testing was complete.
Strange Reality: Glitches and Uncanny Play
Eben Holmes's 2010 essay "Strange Reality: Glitches and Uncanny Play," published in Eludamos, argues that the uncanny is a recurring and structurally central feature of videogames, arising from the medium's drive toward realistic virtual worlds.
- Holmes argues the uncanny is not an incidental malfunction in videogames but a structurally central feature and a form of gameplay in its own right, arising from the medium's drive toward realistic virtual worlds.
- The essay ties the industry's pursuit of photorealism and 'graphics violence' to the uncanny, citing the 1992 Mortal Kombat 'So Real It Hurts' advertisement and the rise of 3D titles such as Wolfenstein 3D and Alone in the Dark.
- The analysis divides uncanny experience into atmosphere, where horror titles like Silent Hill: Homecoming use dim lighting and mundane objects as 'reality-effects,' and glitches, classified as either 'presence' (e.g., the MissingNo. glitch in Pokémon) or 'vertigo' (disruptions that destabilize the scene).
Really Fake: The Magic Circle, the Mundane Circle, and the Everyday
Joshua Zimmerman's essay "Really Fake" examines how the boundary between play and everyday life erodes within massively multiplayer online role-playing games, using as its primary case study Everquest 2 and drawing comparative examples from The Sims, World of Warcraft, and Animal Crossing: Wild World.
- The essay argues that in persistent virtual worlds the magic circle (play) becomes entangled with the mundane circle (everyday routines like decorating, cooking, and paying recurring costs), so the two can no longer be cleanly separated.
- Using Everquest 2 as its primary case study, with comparisons to The Sims, World of Warcraft, and Animal Crossing: Wild World, the analysis rests on close readings of game design and game studies literature rather than quantitative data.
- Developers regulate player behavior through mechanisms such as non-player character guards, game masters, access quests, and reputation systems, mirroring how real-world infrastructure governs conduct.
Commodifying Scarcity: Society, Struggle, and Spectacle in World of Warcraft
Moberly's analysis argues that World of Warcraft is not the liberating information-age space that scholars such as Silverman and Simon have claimed, but a spectacular reproduction of late-capitalist antagonisms.
- Moberly argues that World of Warcraft is not the liberating information-age space that Silverman and Simon claimed, but a spectacular reproduction of late-capitalist antagonisms.
- The game's racial, religious, and economic conflicts appear as fantastical "spectacular antagonisms" that make the world feel real while concealing the logic of commodification beneath them.
- The interface, from terms-of-service acceptance through character creation, asks players to consent to commodified identities and to relinquish ownership of what they produce.
Removing the Checks and Balances That Hamper Democracy: Play and the Counter-hegemonic Contradictions of Grand Theft Auto IV
Marc Ouellette's analysis of Grand Theft Auto IV examines whether the game's satirical engagement with American ideology constitutes genuine cultural critique or merely entertainment that defuses its own dissent.
- The essay argues Grand Theft Auto IV's satire targets the American Dream, individualism, consumerism, authority, masculinity, and post-9/11 security culture through parody, détournement, and intertextual bricolage.
- The author treats the game's critique as real but internally contradictory, with the war-on-terror narrative and gameplay fusing in ways that blur the line between rules and cultural meaning.
- Examples such as the Jingoism Act (a parody of the USA PATRIOT Act) and brand-name puns like "Krapea" and "BAWSAQ" illustrate the ambition of the game's satire.
Strategy Computer Games and Discourses of Geopolitical Order
Nohr's article examines how strategy computer games such as Dune II, Age of Empires, Command & Conquer: Generals, Age of Empires III, Civilization IV, and 1701 A.D. encode geopolitical knowledge into their design.
- Nohr argues that strategy games such as Dune II, Age of Empires, Command & Conquer: Generals, Civilization IV, and 1701 A.D. present politics as the conquest and control of territory, and that this spatial logic is ideologically loaded rather than neutral.
- The article traces the games' geopolitical assumptions to classical German geopolitics, including Ratzel's Lebensraum and "big space," the "lore of blood and soil," and Christaller's central place theory, as well as Hellwig's 1780 war game.
- The games naturalize political hierarchies by framing politics as physical, territorial, and resource-driven rather than social or economic, and several reinforce a reductive "clash of civilizations" worldview paralleling Huntington's 1996 thesis.
Playing the Second World War: Call of Duty and the Telling of History
Harrison Gish's 2010 article in Eludamos examines how the Call of Duty franchise represents the Second World War within the first-person shooter genre, arguing that these games do more than entertain.
- Harrison Gish's 2010 Eludamos article argues that the Call of Duty franchise does more than entertain, using its World War II settings to shape collective memory of the war; six of the series' eight entries are set during the war.
- Gish contends the games position players within both individual combat and a nationalist, US-centered account of heroism, reinforcing the war's moral unassailability while also exposing history's constructed nature.
- The analysis rests on three narrative layers: the grand narrative of the war, cut scenes that personalize it through statistics, archival footage and voiceovers, and in-level gameplay that foregrounds violence and spatial conquest.
Screening Play: Rules, Wares, and Representations in Realistic Video Games
Reyes and Adams's "Screening Play" argues that video games are defined by the screening of the player from the field of play, and that this separation is constitutive of play rather than a barrier to it.
- Reyes and Adams argue that video games are constituted by screening the player from the field of play, and that this separation is essential to play rather than a barrier to it.
- The authors model the video game apparatus as three interlocking registers drawn from Lacan's Borromean knot: rules (Symbolic), audio-visual representations (Imaginary), and wares comprising hardware, software, and the embodied player (Real).
- Screen-play depends on the disavowal of the physical apparatus, and the authors contend that the Real and Symbolic, not only the Imaginary as prior game studies emphasized, are essential to playing rather than merely watching.
Hyper-Ludicity, Contra-Ludicity, and the Digital Game
Steven Conway's 2010 Eludamos article, "Hyper-Ludicity, Contra-Ludicity, and the Digital Game," proposes "ludicity" as an analytical spectrum for measuring how far a digital game permits players to act upon its world.
- Steven Conway's 2010 Eludamos article proposes "ludicity" as a spectrum measuring how far a digital game lets players act upon its world, ranging from hyper-ludicity (heightened player power via items, abilities, and tools) to contra-ludicity (resistance, restriction, and removal of means).
- Conway argues hyper-ludicity enhances effectance and sociability, but its value depends heavily on player skill and knowledge, and overuse can bore players while exploits like the Modern Warfare 2 "javelin glitch" can undermine fairness.
- Drawing on Roger Caillois's categories of agon and ilinx, Conway contends that these design tendencies shape the pleasures players experience and the social interactions that form around play.