Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture
Open-access peer-reviewed journal on computer game culture, published since 2007 (now via Septentrio Academic Publishing).
Documents
Using Literary Theory to Read Games: Power, Ideology, and Repression in Atlus' Growlanser: Heritage of War
This article argues that literary theory can be productively applied to video games, using Michel Foucault's and Louis Althusser's concepts of power, ideology, and repression to analyze Atlus' 2007 role-playing game Growlanser: Heritage of War.
- The paper argues literary theory, specifically Foucault's and Althusser's concepts of power, ideology, and repression, can be productively applied to video games, filling a gap where scholarship has largely treated games as examples of general concepts or focused on mechanics rather than narrative and ideological content.
- The analysis of Atlus' 2007 role-playing game Growlanser: Heritage of War centers on the fictional Peace Maintenance Brigade (PMB), which enforces peace through the threat of a massive floating weapon called the Admonisher, and reads it as both a repressive and an ideological state apparatus.
- The author contends the game's structure encourages players to accept and advance the carceral order of the PMB, and that player identification with PMB founders and commanders, along with the sacrifice of expendable soldiers over primary characters, reinforces the institution's legitimacy.
Signifying the West: Colonialist Design in Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs
Dillon's 2008 analysis in Eludamos argues that Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs embeds a colonialist, Western design logic that persists even when players take the side of Native characters.
- Dillon's 2008 Eludamos analysis argues that Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs embeds colonialist, Western design logic that persists even when players side with Native characters.
- The critique holds that core RTS mechanics of resource extraction, territorial expansion, and conquest treat land as ownable territory and unmapped land as effectively nonexistent, misrepresenting Indigenous relationships to land, time, and community.
- Native-faction features such as Fire Pit dances and a trade-based economy are constrained by gold-based progression and conquest, which the author views as incompatible with Indigenous principles of reciprocity with nature.
Two Halves of Play: Simulation versus Abstraction and Transformation in Sports Videogames Design
Kayali and Purgathofer's paper examines how sports videogames mediate between real athletic competition and play, arguing that they do so through three mechanisms: simulation, abstraction, and transformation.
- Sports videogames are best understood as simulations built for play rather than accuracy: developers depart from reality wherever doing so improves the experience, relying on players' willing suspension of disbelief.
- Kayali and Purgathofer identify three mediating mechanisms (simulation, abstraction, and transformation) and evaluate games across four categories: rules, player control, course of action, and presentation.
- Transformation keeps real-world elements functional while changing their form, as when judges' scores become collectable items, and control schemes on digital buttons almost always require it.
Digital Gaming: A Comparative International Study of Youth Leisure in a Peaceful and War Zone Country
A 2008 comparative study by Henderson, Eshet-Alkalai, and Klemes examines digital gaming among 716 13- to 14-year-olds in Australia and Israel, with the aim of testing whether living in a peaceful country versus a war-zone country shapes youth leisure.
- Nearly all surveyed 13- to 14-year-olds (98% of 716 respondents in Australia and Israel) reported playing digital games, a participation rate the authors note is markedly higher than most other national surveys, though differing age groups and definitions complicate direct comparison.
- Israeli teens averaged about 22 hours of gaming per week versus roughly 17.5 for Australians, and males played about twice as many hours as females, with about 60% of teens gaming daily or most days.
- The peace-versus-conflict context mattered less than the researchers expected, and the authors found no support for 'moral panic' claims that gaming causes fitness problems or social isolation, since most players gamed alone and their friends were not predominantly gamers.
Language Games/Game Languages: Examining Game Design Epistemologies Through a Wittgensteinian Lens
Bojin's study examines how the language, conventions, and "grammar" that designers use shape the epistemologies of game design, that is, the ways designers come to know and practice their craft.
- Bojin argues that game design is the construction of semiotic spaces with their own literacies, and that the language and conventions designers use both reflect and reinforce their epistemological assumptions, making Wittgenstein's contextual view of meaning well suited to analyzing design practice.
- Using Guild Wars as the central case, the study shows that grinding became central to play even though the game was initially marketed as grind-free, with later expansions (Factions, Nightfall, Eye of the North) adding point-based progression, unique "green" weapons, and prestige titles that made farming integral to advancement.
- The study concludes that shared terminology, which Richard Garriott called "nomenclature," reifies practices like grinding so that designers and players come to see them as defining features of play, often without clear justification.
Nintendo's "For Men" Advertising Campaign: Impact on a Potential Female Market
This study examines how Nintendo's "For Men" advertising campaign for the Game Boy Advance SP affected perceptions among a potential female market for handheld gaming.
- The study argues that Nintendo's gender-specific "For Men" campaign for the Game Boy Advance SP undermined the device's otherwise favourable reception among potential female buyers, who saw the handheld as a gender-neutral product with good usability.
- Female participants responded enthusiastically to the device and quickly became immersed in gameplay (The Legend of Zelda was used in the sessions), but their enthusiasm waned once they were exposed to the advertising.
- The research used focus groups in central London and surrounding counties with two samples: tertiary students aged 17 to 19 and women in their thirties whose lifestyles matched the device's intended professional market.
Real Boys Carry Girly Epics: Normalising Gender Bending in Online Games
This analysis argues that cross-gender avatar play in online games, particularly in massively multiplayer environments such as World of Warcraft, has become a normalised and widely accepted fan practice.
- The report argues that cross-gender avatar play in MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft has become a normalised, widely accepted fan practice rooted in earlier arcade conventions, where players chose characters like Chun Li in Street Fighter II for statistical strengths rather than gender preference.
- Citing Nick Yee, the work estimates that over 80 percent of male players cross gender, while only about one in a hundred women play male characters.
- Players commonly justify cross-gender avatars through aesthetic appeal and a sense of sexual empowerment, and most regard their avatars as constructed characters rather than reflections of their real identities.
Innovation NOT Opposition: The Logic of Distinction of Independent Games
This article by Andreas Jahn-Sudmann argues that independent games, unlike independent films, do not constitute a genuinely oppositional aesthetic practice against mainstream game culture.
- The article's central thesis is that independent games, unlike independent films, lack an explicit logic of negation or challenge toward conventional game forms, so they are innovative or visually distinct but not genuinely oppositional.
- Using Geoff King's three-part framework for identifying independence in film, the author tests whether independent games can be distinguished from commercial products along industrial, aesthetic, and socio-political lines, using American independent cinema as a comparative model.
- The computer game industry has become a transnational media business dominated by a handful of global publishers, leaving small developers with little room to compete in the console market.
Black and White: Attending the Games Convention 2007
The essay "Black and White: Attending the Games Convention 2007" is a first-person critical account of the Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany, which the author presents as the international gaming industry's leading fair following the demise of E3.
- The author judges Games Convention 2007 in Leipzig, presented as the industry's leading fair after E3's demise, to be disappointing, with offerings largely repetitive and few genuine advances in innovation.
- Crysis was shown in a demo the author found impressive, but it had not noticeably advanced since the previous year's showing, and Spore had no playable demo, with its release reportedly slipping to summer 2008.
- Take-Two showed no trailer for Mafia 2, and the Grand Theft Auto IV video offered little beyond material already online, though its reworked New York setting was seen as a promising step toward more authentic environments.
Translating Narrative into Code: Thoughts on a Technology-Centric Model of Digital Games as Programmable Media
Stefan Werning's 2007 article argues that digital game analysis has been fragmented by importing frameworks from film and literary theory that fail to account for games' interactive nature.
- Stefan Werning's 2007 article argues that digital game analysis has been fragmented by importing film and literary theory frameworks that fail to account for games' interactive nature, and proposes program code as a common foundation for understanding games.
- Werning's central proposal is an "object-oriented narrative" paradigm that borrows from object-oriented programming, treating environments, non-player characters, quests, and props as autonomous objects grouped into object classes, with recursive, symmetrical, and hierarchical structures of interactivity.
- The model aims to move beyond the long-standing ludology/narratology divide and is oriented toward interpretation, in contrast to Eladhari and Lindley's neo-structuralist tree-diagram methods, which prioritize production efficiency and avoiding narrative dead ends.
(Dis-)Integrative Effects of MUD-Usage as Seen by the Players
Susanne Keuneke's 2007 study examines whether participation in the German text-based multiplayer game Avalon integrates or disintegrates players' social lives, challenging the common assumption that online gaming fosters loneliness and social withdrawal.
- The study found that MUD participation neither clearly integrates nor isolates players: its effects vary by individual, with some players neglecting offline friendships for six months to a year, while most later restored those networks.
- Survey results leaned positive, with roughly 34 of 52 assessments favorable and about a fifth reporting negative effects, though the sample of 50 respondents skewed young, educated, and male.
- Positive assessments tied to new friendships, partnerships, and improved social skills, while negative ones centered on damage to offline relationships and conflicts within partnerships.
Ordinary Gamers: The Vanishing Violence in War Games and Its Influence on Male Gamers
Hartmut Gieselmann's essay, published in the 2007 inaugural issue of the journal 7eludamos, argues that war video games shape players' views of real conflict more powerfully than the sensational violence of horror or gangster titles, precisely because they conceal violence behind technically accurate simulations of weapons…
- Gieselmann's 2007 essay argues that war video games shape players' views of real conflict more than sensational horror or gangster titles, because they hide violence behind technically accurate simulations of weapons, vehicles, and tactics.
- The essay contends that war games present warfare as clean, sterile, and honorable, using examples such as Counter-Strike, the U.S. Army's recruitment shooter America's Army, and flight simulators tied to real defense contractors.
- Its central claim is that World War II shooters such as Day of Defeat and Call of Duty encourage young male players to romanticize their grandfathers' military service, sometimes sliding into sympathy for the SS and neo-Nazi revisionism.