Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture
Open-access peer-reviewed journal on computer game culture, published since 2007 (now via Septentrio Academic Publishing).
Documents
Fictional Games as Parody: Analysing the Fictional Game of Box Peek as Parody of the Animated Series of Transmedial Gaming Franchises
Rory Summerley's paper examines Box Peek, a 2018–2019 web miniseries by Kyle Bosman, as a parody of animated series tied to transmedial gaming franchises such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!.
- Box Peek (2018–2019), a web miniseries by Kyle Bosman, is analysed as a parody of animated series tied to transmedial gaming franchises such as Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, and its key distinction is being a serial show about a fictional game with no real-world product to promote.
- The paper argues that Box Peek's deliberately shallow game design, with matches often lasting under a minute, is a comedic strength that exposes how fictional games frequently leave their wider implications unexplored.
- Summerley characterises Box Peek as ludically consistent yet inherently ludicrous, contrasting its internal coherence with the rule inconsistencies found in Pokémon.
Fictional Videogames as Framing Devices: Suicide Communication in MMOs
In "Fictional Videogames as Framing Devices: Suicide Communication in MMOs," Gutiérrez Carrera argues that fictional massively multiplayer online games can function as framing devices that reveal online games as social spaces with their own communication norms, norms that can make direct talk about suicide easier to voice.
- The report argues that fictional MMOs can act as framing devices that expose online games as social spaces with their own communication norms, norms that can make direct talk about suicide easier to voice.
- Using three scenes from the fictional MMO Agony of a Dying MMO, whose premise is the final hours of a game's service, the study finds the dying-server framing simultaneously provides an alibi for jokes, an implicit channel for serious statements, and authenticity for players who speak openly.
- Chat logs, logging out, and guild, faction, and friend-list structures make serious remarks ambiguous or emotionally weighty, while the impending dissolution of a social network reduces the face-threatening nature of suicide statements.
Hollow Pursuits: Desire, Therapy, and 'Play' on Star Trek: The Next Generation's Holodeck
Leggatt's article, published in Eludamos in 2025, argues that the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Hollow Pursuits" is an unusual and revealing treatment of the holodeck.
- The article argues that the TNG episode "Hollow Pursuits" treats the holodeck unusually by centering on Reginald Barclay's obsessive use of holodeck programs, which it likens to contemporary VR gaming and its entanglements with desire, escape, therapy, and addiction.
- The analysis contends that the Federation's utopian self-image is exposed as limited, since Barclay's freely chosen play meets shame and social pressure rather than respect.
- Barclay's fantasies are read as signs of social anxiety rather than simple shyness, and the episode is shown to contain gendered double standards, with Riker treating Barclay's challenge to hierarchy as the more serious offense while finding the non-consensual eroticization of Deanna Troi amusing.
Transgender Emergence in Video Games: Intersections, Discourses, Directions
This commentary by Robin Longobardi Zingarelli, published in Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture (2024), surveys the emergence of transgender identities and representation in video games.
- The commentary's central argument is that video games offer meaningful spaces for transgender players and designers to explore gender identity, particularly through character customisation, embodiment, and the player-avatar relationship, yet these same spaces can reproduce transphobic tropes and exploit trans creators.
- Whitehouse et al. (2023), with 40 transgender participants, and McKenna et al. (2024) report that avatar creation offers affirmation and freedom from being deadnamed or questioned, while Liang et al. (2023) document dysphoria triggered by stereotypical representations.
- Thach's (2021) analysis of 63 scripted transgender characters from the 1980s to 2010s links trans identity recurrently to dysphoria, mental illness, and trauma.
"I Want to Play a Normal Game. I Don't Need All This.": Exploring Gender Diversity in Portuguese Esports
A 2024 study examines how members of the Overwatch Portugal community perceive gender diversity and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in Portuguese esports.
- Most of the ten Overwatch Portugal community members interviewed in 2023 viewed DEI initiatives as artificially imposed, unproductive, or unnecessary, often attributing them to public relations motives and questioning their compatibility with merit.
- Participants broadly agreed that mixed-gender teams are the ideal, while women-only leagues were accepted with caveats and valued mainly for visibility and growth.
- The study documents concrete discrimination in Portuguese esports, including nepotism in national team selection, widespread online toxicity, and tokenism.
Infrastructuralized Moderation on a Gaming-Adjacent Platform: The Platformization of a Youth Center
This study examines a Swedish-speaking youth center in Finland that operates on Discord, serving 13-to-20-year-olds and run by six youth workers.
- Moderation on this gaming-adjacent platform is infrastructural rather than incidental: Discord's computational rules, which administrators can configure but never fully control, determine what interaction is possible and who can participate.
- The Swedish-speaking Discord youth center, serving 13-to-20-year-olds and run by six youth workers, replicates a physical youth center's structure, with opening hours, rooms, and an adult present in each populated voice channel while youth socialize autonomously.
- Platform mechanics produce unequal participation that staff cannot fully counteract: differences in devices and connections create unequal access to conversation, overlapping parallel streams can become chaotic, and pseudonymity complicates accountability.
Deconstructing Esports: Why We Need to Acknowledge Bodies in a Move Toward More Equitable Esports Practices
The article argues that framing competitive gaming as "esports," by borrowing the sports paradigm and its meritocratic narratives, obscures structural inequities and reproduces exclusion along lines of gender, disability, class, race, age, and geography.
- The article argues that the core problem is not the 'esports' label itself but the uncritical borrowing of the sports paradigm and its meritocratic narratives, which obscures structural inequities; renaming the field alone would not change the exclusion it sustains.
- It identifies four ways bodies shape participation in esports: the normative masculine athletic body, the hypervisibility of women's bodies as deviant, the invisibility of disabled bodies through design, and embodied infrastructural barriers.
- Illustrative evidence includes women's exclusion from professional leagues, the 'Ellie' controversy, the cost and design barriers faced by disabled players, and the late arrival of a League of Legends server in Africa, reflecting the concentration of high-end PC esports in wealthier regions.
Changing the Game but Keeping to the Rules: Ambivalences Between Social Activism and Content Creation in the Brazilian Esports Scene
Beatriz Blanco's study examines how feminist and LGBTQ+ grassroots esports collectives in Brazil have been increasingly absorbed into corporate-sponsored equality initiatives and influencer-driven cause marketing.
- Cause marketing in Brazilian esports has expanded competitive pathways and enabled some women to work full-time in the sector, but it prioritizes visibility over structural change.
- The study's central finding is that alliances between feminist/LGBTQ+ grassroots collectives and corporate cause-driven marketing produce real ambivalences: gains in visibility, funding, and opportunity alongside displacement of community-driven practices.
- Sakuras Esports, a women's collective, was absorbed into the Projeto Invocadoras tournaments run by INTZ, with Riot Games and INTZ benefiting from its visibility while offering little or no compensation for its work.
(Re)producing Orientalism: Industry Logic of Chinese Mobile Game Reskins in the Global App Empire
This article examines Chinese mobile "palace games," reskinned titles such as Game of Sultans (Mechanist Games), which reuse near-identical mechanics while replacing their settings with Middle Eastern, Ottoman, or other Oriental motifs for Western audiences.
- The article argues that Chinese mobile "palace games" such as Game of Sultans (Mechanist Games) are reskins that keep near-identical mechanics while swapping in Middle Eastern, Ottoman, or Oriental settings for Western audiences, reproducing Orientalist tropes like fetishized harem imagery and amalgamated historical stereotypes.
- Drawing on Said, Bhabha, and Dirlik, the author frames reskinning as a ternary West–Middle East–Far East relationship in which Orientalist fantasies are produced in China for Western consumption, while Chinese shanzhai and copycat practices can also unsettle Western notions of originality.
- The study is based on thirteen months of autoethnographic fieldwork as a localizer at a Guangzhou mobile game company, supplemented by industry data.
Parties as Playful Experiences: Why Game Studies Should Study Partying
Masek and Stenros argue that partying deserves recognition as a legitimate and understudied subject within game studies, and that a dedicated "party studies" sub-field should be established.
- Masek and Stenros argue that partying deserves recognition as a legitimate, understudied subject within game studies and propose establishing a dedicated 'party studies' sub-field.
- They claim parties share structural features with games, including seemingly inefficient resource use, arbitrary rules, and 'as if' spaces where ordinary social norms temporarily shift, while also producing positive experiences and reinforcing cultural customs.
- Prior scholarship has framed partying mainly through risk, criminality, and marginalized subgroups without definitional precision, a framing the authors call misleading since parties of many kinds are normal across cultures and age groups.
Queer Gender Identities and Videogames: A Literature Review
Mark Maletska's narrative literature review (Eludamos, 2024) examines queer gender identities in videogames, arguing that queer game studies has moved from analyzing identity representation toward recognizing queerness as an inherent property of game design, while research on gender in games still largely centers binary genders…
- The field of queer game studies has shifted from analyzing identity representation toward recognizing queerness as an inherent property of game design, while research on gender in games still largely centers binary genders and often overlooks transgender and nonbinary people.
- Representation is the most heavily studied theme, and findings consistently show trans and nonbinary characters are rendered narrowly, within cis-heteronormative frameworks, or through stereotyped portrayals.
- Qualitative research on player-avatar relationships suggests avatar creation can be gender-affirming and that games may offer a comparatively safe space for exploring gender identity and easing gender dysphoria.
Game Worker Solidarity: Mapping Collective Actions in the Video Games Industry
The Game Worker Solidarity project, documented in this commentary, maps collective actions taken by game workers to improve working conditions, presenting its findings through a public website and searchable database.
- The project documented 155 unique game worker solidarity actions across 19 countries from 1955 to the present as of 2023, with the United States accounting for 76, followed by France (19), Canada (12), South Korea (10), and the United Kingdom (9).
- Recorded actions rose from 29 in 2018, the year Game Workers Unite launched, to a steady 20–24 per year from 2019 through 2022, a pattern the authors partly attribute to heightened news coverage after that launch.
- Campaigns have focused more on pay and union recognition than on control over work, such as crunch and the types of games produced, which the authors found were less often targeted.