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 Philosophy of Computer Games: Introduction
This introduction to the Eludamos special issue on the philosophy of computer games argues that philosophical inquiry and game studies have entered a productive phase of renewed exchange, centered on phenomenology, ethics, politics, and the concept of gameplay.
- Philosophy of games has entered a renewed phase of exchange with game studies, centered on phenomenology, ethics, politics, and the concept of gameplay, after a first wave led by the Game Philosophy Network (launched 2005) and the 2012 Sageng, Fossheim, and Larsen volume peaked roughly a decade earlier.
- Newer holistic accounts treat subjective experience as a subject of study in its own right rather than a side effect of narrative or rule systems, and they connect game studies to cultural, political, and gender studies.
- The author argues games are paradigmatic cases for understanding digital life, since phenomena like second-order cybernetics, smart technology, and gamification overlap with core game studies questions even though objects like refrigerators or fitness trackers are not games.
A Conceptual Critique of the Use of Moral Disengagement Theory in Research on Violent Video Games
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen's critique argues that moral disengagement theory, as Bandura developed it and as applied in a growing body of violent video game research, is conceptually misapplied to games.
- Kjeldgaard-Christiansen argues that moral disengagement theory, as developed by Bandura and applied to violent video game research, is conceptually misapplied because it presupposes a gap between a transgressive reality and a deceptive reinterpretation of it, which games like Left 4 Dead and Operation Flashpoint do not construct.
- In these games, violence is presented as genuinely justified within the fiction, with enemies that are unfeeling or villainous by definition, so findings such as Hartmann and Vorderer's (2010) report of reduced guilt in "justified" conditions are, on this view, inconclusive.
- The critique contends that existing studies conflate diegetic and non-diegetic representation and misread context-dependent features, such as sanitized language or allied characters, as disengagement cues.
Playing with Fear: The Aesthetics of Horror in Recent Indie Games
Jan-Noël Thon's "Playing with Fear: The Aesthetics of Horror in Recent Indie Games" argues that "indie" is best understood as a discursive construct grounded in three analytical dimensions of aesthetics, audiovisual, ludic, and narrative, rather than as a shorthand for retro pixel graphics.
- Jan-Noël Thon argues that 'indie' is best understood as a discursive construct built on three analytical dimensions (audiovisual, ludic, and narrative aesthetics) rather than as shorthand for retro pixel graphics.
- Fear in horror games operates both as a fiction emotion, tied to atmosphere and narrative framing, and as a gameplay emotion, tied to the player's sense of control and the threat posed to game goals.
- The balance between fiction and gameplay fear varies across titles: Amnesia: The Dark Descent produces intense fear through tight integration of audiovisual design, sanity mechanics, and narrative, while Neverending Nightmares' uncanny visuals and dream narrative soften lethal consequences and reduce gameplay fear.
Understanding the User Experience of AI Through the Lens of Game Studies
This paper offers a framework for understanding how players experience artificial intelligence in games, drawing together human-computer interaction theory and game studies.
- AI's usefulness in games depends on whether players can perceive its affordances, and the gap between designer intent and player perception is a critical design concern.
- False affordances, cues suggesting actions that do not work, are especially damaging and are linked in cited empirical work to player frustration and reduced enjoyment.
- Hedonic (enjoyment) and pragmatic (clarity) qualities are tightly intertwined in games, so AI design decisions must account for both.
Alive: A Case Study of the Design of an AI Conversation Simulator
Walsh's case study examines the design of Alive, an AI conversation simulator intended to prompt critical reflection on artificial intelligence.
- Games are presented as an effective lens for examining AI's benefits and risks, with conversation-driven play cultivating empathy toward an artificial character and, by extension, reflection on AI's societal stakes.
- The paper cites DeepMind's 2018 AlphaStar defeat of a top StarCraft II professional, contrasting it with the system's heavy training requirements, poor adaptability, and inability to transfer skills across games.
- Urgency is framed by the Bank of England's estimate that robots could displace over 95 million jobs by 2035, and by survey evidence that 67% of AI experts saw AI development accelerating.
Games, AI, and Systems
Michael Straeubig's 2019 essay in Eludamos examines the relationship between games and artificial intelligence, arguing that the two fields have developed largely in parallel and that game-based perspectives offer a more grounded way to think about AI than prevailing speculative debates.
- Recent AI progress rests largely on decades-old algorithms made practical by dramatic declines in computing cost, with the price of a teraflop falling from an inflation-adjusted US$156.8 trillion in 1961 to roughly US$30 in 2017, alongside the availability of large datasets.
- Straeubig argues that game AI and academic AI have developed largely in parallel, and that game-based perspectives offer a more grounded way to think about AI than prevailing speculative debates about an 'AI revolution.'
- The paper proposes a framework of seven roles AI can play in games: Mechanic, Alter/Ego, Observer, Protector, Player, Creator, and a speculative seventh role, the 'God,' an AI integrating all the others.
Design Foundations for Emotional Game Characters
"Design Foundations for Emotional Game Characters" argues that non-player characters in games lack emotional depth, and that automated emotion systems can enhance player engagement while easing the authorial burden on designers.
- The report argues that non-player characters in games lack emotional depth and proposes automated emotion systems to enhance player engagement while easing designers' authorial burden.
- Its core contribution is an architecture combining Plutchik's eight primary emotions with Scherer-style appraisal dimensions, where events map to emotions via primary appraisals (relevance, congruence) and secondary appraisals (accountability, coping, future expectancy).
- Each emotion is assigned a distinctive pattern of appraisal dimensions, and the model specifies emotion decay, expression thresholds, and separate outputs for behavior, animation, and audio.
The Ontology of Incremental Games: Thinking Like the Computer in Frank Lantz's Universal Paperclips
Schmalzer's article examines incremental games, a genre defined by a currency that accrues at a set rate with minimal player effort and can be spent to accelerate that rate, with Frank Lantz's browser game Universal Paperclips as its central case.
- Incremental games are defined by a currency that accrues at a set rate with minimal player effort and can be spent to accelerate that rate, so play is largely waiting while the computer performs most of the action.
- The article's central thesis is that incremental games require players to "think like the computer," entering a cybernetic relationship in which they align with the machine's algorithmic logic.
- Frank Lantz's Universal Paperclips is the central case study, where an apparent economic simulation gradually gives way to a computer acting autonomously, echoing Nick Bostrom's paperclip maximizer thought experiment.
The Development of Decision Support Systems in the 1960s as Antecedent of "AI-Rationality"
Nohr's article argues that decision support systems and business simulation games developed in the 1950s and 1960s established a mechanistic, reductive conception of decision-making that later became a foundational epistemology for contemporary artificial intelligence.
- The article argues that 1950s–60s decision support systems and business simulation games established a mechanistic, reductive conception of decision-making that became a foundational epistemology for contemporary AI.
- Military and corporate projects treated human operators as replaceable switching elements or black boxes, and cyberneticians such as Wiener, Beer, and Forrester encouraged the belief that subjective judgment could be made objective and calculable.
- Projects such as Newell and Simon's General Problem Solver and RAND's System Development Corporation efforts typically cost millions of dollars and drew large interdisciplinary teams, a level of investment the article links to the framework's persistence despite its flaws.
Gamified Flow and the Sociotechnical Production of AI
Gamified Flow and the Sociotechnical Production of AI argues that the most consequential artificial intelligence systems depend on keeping human users continuously engaged, and that this engagement is itself a form of unpaid labor that feeds corporate data networks.
- The report argues that the most consequential AI systems depend on keeping human users continuously engaged, and that this engagement functions as unpaid labor feeding corporate data networks.
- Its central thesis is that AI progress rests less on transhuman leaps in machine intelligence than on the sustained, largely uncompensated participation of people.
- DeepMind's AlphaStar, trained on StarCraft II replays generated by human players, is cited as an example of seemingly autonomous systems built on human-generated behavioral data.
Study of Artificial Intelligent Algorithms Applied in Procedural Content Generation in Video Games
This study examines how artificial intelligence and algorithmic techniques can be applied to procedural content generation (PCG) in video games, a response to the rising cost of producing game content.
- The study frames procedural content generation (PCG) as a response to the rising cost of producing game content, and evaluates PCG methods through four freely available working prototypes measured on consumer hardware.
- On an Android smartphone, Prim's algorithm was the most reliable maze generator at about 1206 ms for 50×50 labyrinths, while Depth First Search was slowest at about 1581 ms.
- A dungeon generator using space binary partitioning and a seven-step lock-placement method produced guaranteed-solvable layouts, generating dungeons of up to 16 rooms in under one second.
How Gamification Affects Crowdsourcing: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk
This paper, a 2019 article in Eludamos, argues that paid microwork platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) represent a distinct form of IT outsourcing rather than a generic instance of crowdsourcing.
- Paid microwork platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk are argued to be a distinct form of IT outsourcing rather than a generic type of crowdsourcing, and the paper narrows its focus accordingly.
- Paid microwork fragments labor into small tasks, reduces costs, and gives requesters full control to accept or reject submissions, with much of the output used to produce, analyze, and process data for training machine learning systems.
- Gamification mechanisms such as points, leaderboards, and qualification tests are used to motivate microworkers and raise productivity.