Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture
Open-access peer-reviewed journal on computer game culture, published since 2007 (now via Septentrio Academic Publishing).
Documents
Young Video Game Players' Self-Identified Toxic Gaming Behaviour: An Interview Study
This interview study examines self-identified toxic gaming behaviour among 12 Finnish young players aged 16 to 27, recruited at a gaming festival and analysed through a lens of affect and affordances.
- Toxic gaming is framed as an ambiguous umbrella term arising from intense emotional interplay among players, game mechanics, and social norms, rather than from individual malice alone.
- Affordances such as anonymity, text and voice chat, ranked modes, and high-stakes 'clutch' moments heighten situational intensity and facilitate negative conduct, with outbursts often followed by regret.
- Gender is a significant axis: women and non-binary participants identified men's sexism and misogyny as a major problem and reported harassment, often using avoidance tactics like 'dodging', while men more often attributed negative behaviour to immaturity.
A Future Already Past? The Promises and Pitfalls of Cryptogames, Blockchain, and Speculative Play
The article argues that blockchain games, particularly "cryptogames" such as CryptoKitties and Axie Infinity, should be understood as an emerging social practice that uses the framing of play to attract financial speculation.
- Cryptogames such as CryptoKitties and Axie Infinity are framed as a social practice that uses the language of play to attract financial speculation, and the analysis classifies them as nested activities combining play with gambling and speculative finance rather than as ordinary games or gamification.
- Play-to-Earn economies skew toward early speculators and tend toward Ponzi-like collapse, with Axie Infinity's rapid rise followed by a loss of value offered as the principal case.
- Obfuscated, interdependent token systems push players into speculative roles and make exit difficult, exposing participants to financial risk even though marketing presents participation as voluntary play.
Playing on Life's Terms: Behavioral Strategies for Changing Situations
Wiik and Alha's study examines how adult gamers who have reduced their play due to life constraints, such as parenthood, demanding work, and limited free time, adapt rather than abandon gaming.
- Adult gamers who cut back due to parenthood, demanding work, or limited free time do not abandon gaming; instead they sustain engagement through adaptive behavioral strategies, which the authors frame using leisure studies' constraint-negotiation theory.
- Lapsed players rely on four strategies: shifting to lighter or shorter games, integrating play into everyday routines, redefining co-play to include tandem and remote forms (which gained prominence during Covid-19), and focusing on whatever play opportunities are available.
- Many players ration their gaming seasonally and select titles that remain satisfying within limited sessions, yet they often still miss the immersion that longer, more demanding games provide.
Time to Stop Playing: No Game Studies on a Dead Planet
"Time to Stop Playing: No Game Studies on a Dead Planet," published in Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture in 2023, argues that the games industry cannot be understood apart from the material and ecological crises of contemporary capitalism.
- The paper argues the games industry cannot be understood apart from the material and ecological crises of contemporary capitalism, framing industry patterns as symptoms of capitalist contradictions that also drive war, inequality, and climate change.
- Hardware and labor are outsourced from the Global South while profits concentrate in a small number of large corporations based in the United States, Japan, and increasingly China.
- The authors cite industry collaborations with the US military, the commercial success of military shooters such as Call of Duty, far-right harassment campaigns associated with "gamers," and greenwashing by major console manufacturers as evidence of harmful industry patterns.
Fancies Explained: Converting Symbolic Capital into NFTs
This study argues that symbolic capital in blockchain gaming, the cultural credibility and esteem players earn through skill, knowledge, and community contribution, is poorly convertible into financial value and is instead governed by those who already hold substantial financial capital.
- Symbolic capital (player esteem earned through skill, knowledge, and community contribution) in blockchain gaming is poorly convertible into financial value and remains community-specific, largely inaccessible to players without financial resources.
- Corporate publishers and investors ultimately appropriate most of the value players create in NFT-based play-to-earn models, according to the study's central claim.
- A market analysis of 112 CryptoKitties-related "fancy" tokens from June 2022 found rarity correlated with price only for the very rarest tokens, those with roughly 300 or fewer units in circulation.
Narrative Selfies and Player-Character Intimacy in Interface Games
This paper examines how selfies function within "interface games," narrative titles staged inside simulated computer, smartphone, or app environments, and how these images negotiate intimacy between player and character while constraining player agency.
- Selfies in interface games (narrative titles staged inside simulated computers, phones, or apps) act as a negotiation of intimacy between player and character, which the paper describes as a fragile tension between privacy and publicness.
- The paper applies Faimau's three frameworks (self-presentation, communication, and social critique) to three case studies: Cibele (2015), Bury Me, My Love, and A Normal Lost Phone.
- In Cibele, the curated desktop casts the player as a voyeur, a position partly excused by the autobiographical consent behind the work, and its restricted agency and linear structure are presented as purposeful rather than a design failure.
Categorizations of World War II in Videogames
Categorizations of World War II in Videogames examines how contemporary games frame the Second World War and invite players to take part in its virtual military action.
- The study analyzes 17 singleplayer titles released since 2000 across first-person shooters, strategy games, and flight simulations, using membership categorization analysis.
- The authors identify eight categorizations of WWII in games (historical, emotional, WWII of subjects, acting-out, aesthetic, managing, technological, and heroic), with each genre tending to favor particular ones while individual games often combine several.
- Games are argued to categorize rather than merely depict the war, and the order in which these categorizations appear shapes how players are led to engage with combat and the moral positions it offers.
Understanding Esports Teamplay as an Emergent Choreography: An Ethnomethodological Analysis
This study applies an ethnomethodological lens, enriched by Laban movement theory and dance-studies notions of choreography, to examine how competitive Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) teams coordinate play in real time.
- Esports teamplay is best understood as an emergent, collective choreography: round-opening plans are typically settled within about fifteen seconds or rest on shared expectations, with no fixed leader and shared agency over the plan.
- Coordination is largely implicit and situational, with mid-round adjustments arising from contingencies such as two players retreating to regroup after hearing flanking opponents.
- Coordination differs by side: Counter-Terrorist teams divide into key positions and react to callouts, while Terrorist teams use callouts to read the team's collective position relative to opponents.
Materiality, Nonlinearity, and Interpretive Openness in Contemporary Archaeogames
Caracciolo's article argues that contemporary "archaeogames" such as Heaven's Vault, Outer Wilds, The Forgotten City, and Elden Ring embody core archaeological concepts: the uncertain materiality of artifacts, a nonlinear "percolating" view of history, and open-ended interpretation.
- The article argues that contemporary "archaeogames" such as Heaven's Vault, Outer Wilds, The Forgotten City, and Elden Ring embed core archaeological concepts (uncertain artifact materiality, nonlinear "percolating" history, and open-ended interpretation) directly into their mechanics rather than merely depicting the discipline.
- Heaven's Vault leaves some inscriptions deliberately undecodable and renames locations based on players' guesses, so certain interpretations are never ratified by the game.
- Outer Wilds and The Forgotten City use time loops and adaptive narratives to critique linear, teleological history, requiring players to grasp the layered, interwoven character of the past to complete them.
A Game of Twisted Shouting: Ludo-Narrative Dissonance Revisited
Grabarczyk and Kampmann Walther's "A Game of Twisted Shouting: Ludo-Narrative Dissonance Revisited" (Eludamos, 2022) reconsiders ludo-narrative dissonance (LND), the perceived clash between a game's rules and gameplay on one hand and its narrative on the other, which is typically treated as a design flaw.
- Ludo-narrative dissonance (LND), the perceived clash between a game's rules/gameplay and its narrative, is typically treated as a design flaw, but Grabarczyk and Kampmann Walther argue it can be a productive resource that prompts meta-ludic reflection and ethical engagement.
- The authors frame LND through three senses of 'dissonance' (musical, spatial, and conceptual) and a Carnapian, cognitive-dissonance model in which LND arises from conflict between player-action sentences and narrative sentences.
- Their analysis is deliberately analytical rather than intent-based, tracing LND's origins to mechanical-narrative conflict and transgressive play, from 1980s text adventures to The Stanley Parable.
Playful Strategies in Print Advertising
Karels and de la Hera's study examines how playfulness is deployed in print advertising, situating its inquiry at the intersection of the ludification of culture and the competitive attention economy.
- The study analyzed 100 award-winning print ads from Ads of the World published in 2019 and 2020, selected via purposive sampling and maximal variation from roughly 58,000 candidates.
- Three principal playful strategies were identified: playful visual design (disruptive, eye-catching, topical or personal imagery), pleasurable interactive experience (delayed or implied punchlines that invite audiences to complete the meaning), and dark playfulness (treating serious subjects like sex trafficking and drunk driving with negative-valence experiences and subversive humor).
- The authors argue that delayed or implied punchlines, which require audiences to actively complete the meaning, aid message retention.
Playing Make-Believe with #homemadeDisney Pandemic Ride Videos
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when Disney theme parks closed in March 2020, fans began re-creating park rides at home using everyday objects, a phenomenon known as the #homemadeDisney trend.
- The #homemadeDisney trend emerged when Disney theme parks closed in March 2020, with fans re-creating park rides at home using everyday objects as a form of playful coping and collective creativity during isolation.
- The trend's origin is traced to Jess Siswick's viral re-creation of Soarin' Over California, which drew over 21,000 likes within days; the study analyzes a survey of 150 English-language videos.
- Low barriers to entry were central to the trend's spread: the 'ride aesthetic' relied more on props and simulated motion than on narrative elaboration or technical polish.