Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture
Open-access peer-reviewed journal on computer game culture, published since 2007 (now via Septentrio Academic Publishing).
Documents
The Playful Affordances of Picture Book Apps for Children
Järvenpää's study, published in Eludamos in 2021, argues that children's picture book apps occupy a hybrid space between the traditions of illustrated and movable print books and the conventions of mobile games.
- The study argues that children's picture book apps sit between traditional illustrated/movable print books and mobile games, and that their playful affordances (interactivity, engagement, fun) merit analysis in their own right rather than being dismissed as gimmicks.
- Its analysis rests on close readings of five case studies, spanning near-traditional reading to game-like interaction, including branching narratives, tap-and-drag tasks gating story progression, an edutainment title with a persuasive mechanic on segregation, and a wordless app for adult-child co-creation.
- The central case study, the augmented reality-enhanced Mur, pairs a 2016 printed book with a 2017 app and shows how interactive features can extend reading rather than merely decorate it, requiring readers to understand how print and digital components work together.
Taking Playful Scholarship Seriously: Discursive Game Design as a Means of Tackling Intractable Controversies
This study argues that playful scholarship can be operationalized through "discursive game design" as a method for addressing intractable policy controversies, using the controlled legalization of MDMA and other drugs in the Netherlands as its central case.
- The authors argue that 'discursive game design' (co-designing game prototypes with stakeholders) can surface conflicting frames in intractable policy controversies, using the controlled legalization of MDMA and other drugs in the Netherlands as the central case.
- Drawing on Norton Long's concept of an 'ecology of games,' policy domains are framed as interlocking arenas where stakeholders pursue competing agendas, and co-design is proposed to open space for perspective change where conventional research has stalled.
- The empirical basis was a six-month transdisciplinary co-design project with academics, NGO workers, journalists, police officers, health workers, and the Poppi drugs museum, using boundary objects such as board games, role-play characters, and found objects like dried pasta and glasses.
Playing with Plants, Loving Computers: Queer Playfulness beyond the Human
Daniella Gáti's 2021 Eludamos essay, "Playing with Plants, Loving Computers: Queer Playfulness beyond the Human," argues that queer playfulness can decenter the human subject by reframing play as a vulnerable, nonhuman-inclusive form of love rather than a pursuit of mastery.
- Gáti's 2021 Eludamos essay argues that queer playfulness can decenter the human subject by reframing play as a vulnerable, nonhuman-inclusive form of love rather than a pursuit of mastery.
- The essay challenges the prevailing "refusal and failure" framing in queer game studies and proposes that pleasure in play can be distributed between humans and nonhumans.
- Games stripped of goals, instructions, and clear feedback invite players to relinquish control and encounter the nonhuman as a fully unknowable Other.
There Is No Immersion: Critical Intervention through Hypermediacy in Metagames
Thorne's article examines a subgenre of self-reflexive indie games, or "metagames," that use unreliable, antagonistic narrators and deliberate breaks in immersion to critique the commercial pressures of game development following the post-2008 indie boom.
- Thorne's article examines 'metagames', self-reflexive indie games that use unreliable antagonistic narrators and deliberate breaks in immersion to critique commercial pressures in game development following the post-2008 indie boom.
- The central case study, There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension (2020), is read alongside its earlier 'Jam Edition' and The Stanley Parable, with brief reference to Pony Island and The Beginner's Guide.
- Drawing on Bolter and Grusin's immediacy/hypermediacy distinction, the article argues the game foregrounds its medium (nested CRT monitors, a broken screen, a phone camera) so that immersion itself becomes the object of play.
Can Playfulness Be Designed? Understanding Playful Design through Agency in Astroneer
Bódi's article asks whether playfulness can be intentionally designed, using the survival-crafting game Astroneer as its case study.
- Playful design is analysed through 'agency,' defined as the possibility space for meaningful player action that a game's design affords and constrains, drawing on Murray and Salen and Zimmerman.
- Meaningful play is framed as a relational feedback loop in which players perceive the outcomes of their actions and see them integrated into the game world.
- Astroneer's open-ended goals and creative problem solving are classified as paidic, exploratory play rather than ludic, rule-bound, win-oriented play, following Caillois and Frasca.
Gaming Under Biopolitical Sovereign Power: The Chronotope of the Abject in The Binding of Isaac
Mike Piero's analysis of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth argues that the game's form is its critical content.
- Mike Piero's analysis argues that The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth's form is its critical content, using Bakhtin's threshold chronotope, Kristeva's abjection, and Agamben's homo sacer to frame the player as a biopolitical subject under permanent emergency.
- The randomly generated rooms, abject creatures, and repeated descents into the basement are read as devices that stage the player's experience of living under a state of exception that governs bare life.
- The analysis reworks the Abraham and Binding narrative within a Western religious frame, treating the game as a space to examine sovereignty, bare life, and subjectivity.
The Game Studies Crisis: What Are the Rules of Play?
Ouellette and Conway argue that Game Studies is a "pre-paradigmatic" field whose scholars work in isolated echo chambers, lacking the shared goals, tools, and theories needed for productive dialogue and cumulative knowledge.
- Game Studies is characterized as a 'pre-paradigmatic' field whose scholars work in isolated echo chambers, lacking shared goals, tools, and theories needed for cumulative knowledge.
- The authors argue the discipline must cooperate to establish common paradigms, definitions, and methodological rules before its findings can be taken seriously by scholars and external actors.
- Unresolved debates persist over whether games are 'real,' whether immersion and catharsis exist and how to understand them, and how conflicting moral and ontological frameworks have produced fragmentation rather than consensus.
Training for the Military? Some Historical Considerations Towards a Media Philosophical Computer Game Philosophy
Doug Stark's 2020 Eludamos article advances a media philosophical approach to computer games, grounded in Nietzsche's observation that writing tools "work on our thoughts" and developed through the work of Rambo, Barker, Crogan, and Claus Pias.
- Stark's 2020 Eludamos article argues, via a media philosophical approach rooted in Nietzsche's claim that writing tools "work on our thoughts," that action games descend from military and industrial projects and train players' sensorimotor capacities, enabling new modes of perception rather than merely constraining thought.
- The essay identifies four defining attributes of action games: real-time control, grammatized time and space, user measurement, and user optimization.
- Crogan argues that simulation and ergodic play reproduce a logistical desire to predict and control contingency rather than encounter it as genuine event, a view the essay largely shares while complicating it.
The Lifelike Death: Dark Souls and the Dialectics in Black
Daniel Illger's essay "The Lifelike Death: Dark Souls and the Dialectics in Black" argues that the Dark Souls trilogy produces its distinctive aesthetic power through a paradoxical fusion of opposites.
- Illger's central argument is that the Dark Souls trilogy's aesthetic power comes from fusing opposites through Alain Badiou's concept of 'dialectics in black,' where darkness signifies lack and excess at once.
- The games combine cyclical time (repeated deaths, respawns, reanimated enemies) with linear, forward-moving time of progression and exploration, producing a persistent sense of presentness in which suffering and pleasure are inseparably bound.
- Death is framed as an interruption rather than a reset, and the world appears in a state of 'ever-dying' life, which the author identifies as the source of the games' lively aesthetic.
"This Is a Story About Regeneration": Understanding The Missing: J. J. Macfield and the Island of Memories
Katherine Isbister's and Bonnie Ruberg's work on empathy and permalife grounds the analysis of The Missing: J. J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (2018), a game whose grotesque self-harm mechanics, distorted audio, and text-message narrative are read as deliberate tools for building empathy with its protagonist.
- The report argues that the brutal gameplay of The Missing: J. J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (2018), including its self-harm mechanics, distorted audio, and text-message narrative, is integral to its story rather than incidental, serving to build empathy with the protagonist.
- The analysis reads the game as a story of a trans woman's self-acceptance rather than a tragedy, reversing the tragic-ending trope common in transgender media.
- Through a phenomenological and queer phenomenological lens, the study frames J. J. Macfield's body dysmorphia, family rejection, and conversion-therapy pressure as the emotional core the game's mechanics are designed to make felt.
Steps Towards a Phenomenology of Video Games: Some Thoughts on Analyzing Aesthetics and Experience
Jan-Hendrik Bakels' paper develops an analytical phenomenology of video games, combining systematic analysis of game design with subjective, embodied accounts of play.
- The paper's central concept is kinaesthesia, the aesthetics of movement, which it uses to link game studies (notably Swalwell's work on altered, in-between embodied states) with phenomenology and aesthetic theory.
- The sense of weight, materiality, and embodiment in games comes mainly from the temporal and spatial shape of movement rather than from realistic representation.
- The author draws on Daniel Stern's theory of vitality affects to explain how players come to feel movements that are not their own, and on Michel Chion's concept of synchresis to explain how audio and visual movement combine into felt experience.
A Game on Time: The Witness and the Temporality of the Digital Image
"A Game on Time: The Witness and the Temporality of the Digital Image" argues that Thekla, Inc.'s The Witness (2016) should be understood as a game about time rather than a pure image of it.
- The report argues that Thekla, Inc.'s The Witness (2016) is best understood as a game about time rather than a mere image of it, drawing on Deleuze's account of the cinematic time image.
- Its artificial, non-progressing time (the sun never moves) functions as a phenomenological mirror that prompts players to reflect on how digitally mediated time is becoming their own, rather than offering an unmediated depiction of temporality.
- Drawing on Husserl, Stiegler, Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Hui, the analysis contends that digital media 'short-circuit' consciousness by placing the future into the present through 'tertiary protention,' giving video games a futural mode unlike narrative media.