Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture
Open-access peer-reviewed journal on computer game culture, published since 2007 (now via Septentrio Academic Publishing).
Documents
Playing with One's Self: Notions of Subjectivity and Agency in Digital Games
Alec Charles's 2009 article in Eludamos argues that digital games produce an illusion of player agency that functions as a mechanism of ideological interpellation.
- Charles argues that digital games create an illusion of player agency that functions as ideological interpellation, drawing on Althusser to explain how games shape player subjectivity through reactive, preset choices.
- The essay contends that the boundary between material history and its electronic mediation has largely collapsed, so the virtual is increasingly treated as the primary 'real' version of events, illustrated by the Gulf War, 9/11, and the America's Army recruitment tools.
- Using Barthes and the concept of the 'faux-scriptible' text, the author concludes that multiplayer games fragment authorship into parallel, solipsistic experiences rather than realizing Barthes's ideal of the reader as producer.
An Analysis of Persistent Non-Player Characters in the First-Person Gaming Genre 1998-2007: A Case for the Fusion of Mechanics and Diegetics
Dan Pinchbeck's 2009 Eludamos article examines persistent non-player characters (PNPCs) in first-person shooters, arguing that these characters are shaped primarily by gameplay and narrative economy rather than by technical limitation or surface demographics.
- Pinchbeck's 2009 Eludamos analysis of 34 first-person shooters released between 1998 and 2007 finds that persistent non-player characters (PNPCs) are shaped mainly by gameplay and narrative economy rather than technical limits or surface demographics.
- Most games in the sample include roughly three to nine PNPCs, and allies appear far more often than enemies, reflecting the genre's structural simplicity: allied characters and shifting allegiances demand more elaborate systems, so PNPCs typically serve epistemological and atmospheric roles rather than recurring nemesis functions.
- PNPCs are most often delivered through audio or cutscenes rather than as dynamic, persistent in-game entities, and only a few titles, including Half-Life 2, Condemned, and Quake 4, feature fully embodied characters.
'Just Gaming': On Being Differently Literate
Kendall and McDougall's "'Just Gaming': On Being Differently Literate" argues that video game play produces meaning through active, agentic engagement rather than the interpretive habits associated with reading, and that UK media literacy policy, shaped by regulatory and protectionist concerns such as the Byron Report, has…
- The authors argue that video game play generates meaning through active, agentic engagement rather than the interpretive habits associated with reading, and that UK media literacy policy, shaped by protectionist concerns such as the Byron Report, has failed to account for these practices.
- Based on a qualitative study of eight UK media students aged 16 to 17 who played Grand Theft Auto IV, blogged in a Facebook group, and gave half-hour interviews, the authors find players adopt performative, self-aware "story-teller" personas and treat the game as a fantasy distinct from their everyday selves.
- Participants' accounts repeatedly fracture the narrative with meta-aware commentary on mechanics, humour, moral discomfort, and gendered interactions, showing fluid movement between immersion and evaluative distance.
Letter from the Wilderness
Mark Mullen's 2009 essay "Letter from the Wilderness," published in Eludamos, argues that academic game research should be understood as speculative, public-minded inquiry rather than a service to industry profitability.
- Mullen's 2009 essay in Eludamos argues that academic game research should be seen as speculative, public-minded inquiry rather than a service to industry profitability, rejecting John Hopson's 2006 call for more practical, developer-facing research.
- Mullen contends that game studies, especially humanities-based scholarship, is essential to the medium's maturation, since relying on trial and error and treating players merely as consumers produces formulaic, forgettable output.
- The essay cites developers' heavy reliance on debugging and magazine reviews, drawing on Dovey and Kennedy, as evidence of an insular industry that could benefit from interpretive and hermeneutic research.
Chopin's Dream as Reality: A Critical Reading of Eternal Sonata
Quijano-Cruz's 2009 Eludamos essay argues that video games deserve recognition as cultural expression, a status that scholarship has largely withheld in favor of studies of mechanics, pedagogy, or gaming subculture.
- Quijano-Cruz's 2009 Eludamos essay argues that video games deserve recognition as cultural expression, a status scholarship has largely withheld in favor of studies of mechanics, pedagogy, or gaming subculture.
- The essay distinguishes "cultural artefacts," which reveal the culture of their creators, from mere "objects of culture" such as consoles or discs, and argues narrative-driven interactive works can meaningfully engage social concerns.
- Eternal Sonata (2007), a role-playing game framed around Chopin's deathbed dream, is presented as the strongest example of a game that both incorporates and critiques aspects of society.
Fahrenheit and the Premature Burial of Interactive Movies
Lessard's analysis argues that Quantic Dream's Fahrenheit (2005, released as Indigo Prophecy in some markets) should be understood not as an original innovation but as a refined descendant of the interactive movie genre, which many observers believed had died by the late 1990s.
- Lessard argues Quantic Dream's Fahrenheit (2005, released as Indigo Prophecy in some markets) is a refined descendant of the interactive movie genre, which many believed had died by the late 1990s, rather than an original innovation.
- The game is classified as a branching tree of pre-recorded scenes linked by Quick Time Events, built on motion-captured animation, fixed on-rails camera work, and pre-arranged framing, placing it apart from procedurally generated first-person shooters.
- Fahrenheit sold more than 700,000 copies and earned aggregate review scores in the mid-80s percent range, which the author cites as evidence that the genre's demise may have been premature.
Generations of Game Analytics, Achievements and High Scores
Medler's article examines how games have progressed from ephemeral, memoryless sessions toward persistent systems that record and preserve player activity.
- Medler's central thesis is that recorded gameplay data increasingly feeds back into present play, creating lasting player traces the author calls "ludivestigums," tracing a path from arcade high-score tables that linked players across time in shared physical locations to online achievements, saved games, and action-logging replays that connect players across time and distance.
- The article identifies a rise in game analytics and aggregation platforms, including Mochibot, Nonoba, and Maxis's Spore API, alongside adaptive matchmaking systems such as Microsoft's TrueSkill.
- The author speculates about "consciousness-binding" games in which AI agents modeled on recorded player behavior, as in the Restaurant Project, might eventually supplement or replace human-authored non-player characters.
Video Game Genre, Evolution and Innovation
Arsenault's analysis challenges the widely held notion that video game genres "evolve" in a linear, progressive fashion, arguing instead that the concept of genre itself is contested, fluid, and under-theorized when applied to games.
- Arsenault argues that video game genre is a contested, fluid, and under-theorized concept, and that industry taxonomies such as MobyGames, AllGameGuide, Metacritic, and GameSpot classify games inconsistently, often conflating gameplay, theme, and platform.
- The author rejects Darwinian, linear models of genre evolution, contending that because works are produced by human agents rather than reproducing organisms, genre change is better described as nonteleological variation than as progress toward improvement.
- Innovation within genres is described as an internal problem-solving logic in which imitation and revision of successful titles, such as the proliferation of 'Doom clones,' drive advancement, and the solutions often generate new problems.
Generations and Game Localization: An Interview with Alexander O. Smith, Steven Anderson and Matthew Alt
This interview with localizers Alexander O. Smith, Steven Anderson, and Matthew Alt, conducted for the 2009 Eludamos journal, examines the workflow, challenges, and creative judgment involved in translating video games from Japanese into English.
- Game localization is a demanding, non-linear discipline in which translators must work closely with developers, quality assurance teams, and corporate publishers rather than simply converting text.
- Poorly organized source material, non-standard file formats, and tight character limits are the principal obstacles to quality localization, while well-structured source text makes translation considerably easier.
- Voice scripts are especially labor-intensive: in Final Fantasy XII, roughly 7 percent of the text consumed nine months of work, compared with six months for the remaining 93 percent.
Doubly Real: Game Studies and Literary Anthropology; or, Why We Play Games
Philipp Schweighauser's "Doubly Real: Game Studies and Literary Anthropology; or, Why We Play Games" argues that video game scholarship has been shaped by strategies of disciplinary distinction, sometimes productively and sometimes as a means of claiming academic territory.
- Schweighauser argues that video game scholarship has been shaped by disciplinary distinction strategies, and that the ludology-narratology debate, including Gonzalo Frasca's conciliatory position, rests on a narrow reading of literary theory limited mostly to structuralist narratology.
- He proposes Wolfgang Iser's later literary anthropology, especially its triadic model of the fictive, the imaginary, and the real, as a richer framework for comparative video game criticism than the reader-response concepts earlier critics such as Espen Aarseth questioned.
- Fiction is framed as an anthropologically necessary compensation for human limitation, mediating between the real and the imaginary through a "fictional pact" and an "as-if" structure that lets readers and players inhabit two realities at once.
I Am Trying to Believe: Dystopia as Utopia in the Year Zero Alternate Reality Game
Alexander Hall's 2009 Eludamos article argues that dystopian narratives, though bleak in content, carry a "utopian energy" that compels audiences to think historically and imagine alternatives to the present order.
- Alexander Hall's 2009 Eludamos article argues that dystopian narratives carry a "utopian energy" that prompts audiences to think historically and imagine alternatives to the present order, a capacity Hall believes has weakened under postmodern late capitalism.
- Hall contends that interactive media, and games in particular, can help restore the critical and utopian impulses that dystopian fiction once sustained, and concludes that games are a legitimate and politically significant medium for dystopian cultural production.
- The paper is a theoretical rather than empirical study, so its claims rest on argument and interpretation drawn from Fredric Jameson, Keith Booker, and Ernst Bloch rather than on data.
Games and Self-Imagining: A Comparative Media Perspective
Van Looy's analysis of games and self-imagining rests on Kendall Walton's make-believe framework of representation, which he applies in place of Espen Aarseth's claim that games are ontologically separate from fiction.
- Van Looy applies Kendall Walton's make-believe theory of representation to games rather than accepting Espen Aarseth's view that games are ontologically separate from fiction, arguing that fiction and virtual worlds draw on the same imaginative faculties.
- The central contribution distinguishes subjective (de se) imagining, where the audience takes the perspective of a character, from objective (de re) imagining, where the audience observes from outside, and finds that representations combine both modes in shifting, non-binary ways.
- A comparative case study of three Alice in Wonderland versions (Carroll's 1865 novel, Disney's 1951 film, and the 2000 game American McGee's Alice) finds all three emphasise episodic, playful spectacle over tension-driven narrative, with appeal located in wordplay for the novel and color, music, and movement for the film.