G|A|M|E – The Italian Journal of Game Studies
Open-access peer-reviewed game studies journal published by the Italian cultural association Ludica since 2012, mostly in English.
Documents
Videogames World: Beyond Art, Culture and Design, an Introduction
This introduction to the special issue "Beyond Play" argues that the academic study of videogames has outgrown its instrumental framing as mere entertainment, education, or simulation tools.
- The introduction argues that game studies has outgrown its instrumental framing of games as mere entertainment, education, or simulation tools, and should treat games as expressive languages, artistic practices, and relational socio-cultural environments.
- The authors propose three mutually constitutive perspectives for the field: the artistic and expressive, the design-oriented, and the socio-cultural.
- The special issue "Beyond Play" gathers fourteen contributions examining topics such as sustainability in Chinese game design, participatory ethnography on Discord, fan labour in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and gendered harassment of female streamers on Twitch.
Digital Ethnographies on Discord: The Diaspora Between Hostile Spaces and Online Refuges
This article, authored by researchers at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, examines the epistemological and ethical challenges of conducting digital ethnography within gaming communities on Discord.
- The article argues that Discord's public gaming servers often reproduce hegemonic and antifeminist masculinities, pushing women and dissident identities into private, safer spaces, a dynamic it calls a "diaspora of otherness."
- The authors contend that conventional ethnographic "occupation" of a field is inadequate, and that researchers should instead "inhabit" online environments, recognising that platform affordances such as voice channels, permission hierarchies, and moderation bots shape social life.
- The study distinguishes hostile spaces, where researcher protection and possibly covert observation may be justified, from safe spaces, where an external academic gaze risks disrupting community intimacy.
Moral Learning and Ludic Responsibility: When Interactive Narrative Becomes an Educational Experience
This review argues that interactive storytelling, a hybrid of cinema and video games that pairs emotional engagement with player agency, can function as an educational medium for moral reflection rather than only as "serious game" instruction.
- Interactive storytelling is a hybrid of cinema and video games in which viewers' choices shape narrative progression, character development, and endings, turning the viewer from passive observer into co-creator.
- The author argues interactive storytelling can serve as an ethical laboratory: branching choices, perceived agency, and irreversibility can foster self-evaluation, moral reflection, and prosocial awareness in a safe setting.
- Morally relevant choices only produce learning when players perceive them as consequential, meaning the decision carries narrative weight, is irreversible, and allows time for reflection; otherwise the experience remains superficial.
Smitten with a Virtual Character: Bishōjo, Intimacy and Subjectivity in Slay the Princess
"Smitten with a Virtual Character" argues that Slay the Princess (Black Tabby Games, 2023) subverts the conventions of the bishōjo dating sim by reframing intimacy as a binding and injurious relation rather than a reassuring fantasy.
- The paper argues that Slay the Princess (Black Tabby Games, 2023) subverts the bishōjo dating sim by treating intimacy as a binding, injurious relation rather than a reassuring fantasy, producing a relational wound instead of realist loss.
- Drawing on Galbraith's techno-intimacy and Haraway's companion-species theory, the author treats bishōjo characters as nonhuman partners whose capacity to affect players deserves serious critical attention rather than dismissal as passive idealized objects.
- The author contrasts bishōjo games like All You Need Is Kill, Kimi to Kanojo to Kanojo no Koi, and LovePlus, whose affection is risk-free and loss reversible within a 'protective attitude of virtuality,' with Slay the Princess's 'fourth wound' of real power dynamics and consequence.
Entering the Battlegrounds: Fan Labour in PUBG and Its Connection to the Mega-Platform
Emmanouloudis's paper examines how the success of PUBG (PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds) relied substantially on unpaid fan labour, including modding, streaming, fan art, feedback, and tool-building, all channelled through a "mega-platform" of interconnected community sites and social media.
- Fan labour was central to PUBG's growth, with modding, streaming, fan art, feedback, and tool-building all contributing largely unpaid value that the publisher captured commercially.
- The relationship between players and publisher is characterised as symbiotic yet exploitative: fans gain belonging and recognition, while the company profits from contributions it neither compensates nor fully controls.
- PUBG reached over 60 million copies sold by 2019, and its streams attracted more than 70,000 viewers in early 2018, illustrating the scale of its audience and community.
A Reading Typology for Video Game Players: Bridging Cultural and Game Studies
This study develops a reading typology for how video game players interpret the games they play, bridging cultural studies reception theory with game studies frameworks.
- The paper proposes a non-exclusive reading typology for game players, comprising ideological, aesthetic, narrative, metatextual, and ludic readings, with the ludic category subdivided into challenge and difficulty, game mechanics, gameplay and control, and immersion.
- The authors argue that existing models such as MDA and Calleja's involvement model explain play mechanics and motivation well but underdevelop the interpretive work through which players construct meaning, which the new typology aims to address by drawing on reception theory from Hall, Fiske, and Morley.
- Ideological and metatextual concerns often reframe the other interpretive layers, shaping how players perceive a game's aesthetics, narrative, and mechanics.
Split at the Core: About Grief, Guilt, and Emotional Resonance in Split Fiction
Split at the Core positions Split Fiction as a sophisticated system of "affective control," arguing that the game uses branching structures, non-linear timelines, and minimalist emotional cues to make players perform emotional labor around grief, guilt, and fractured identity.
- Split Fiction is analysed as an 'affective governance system' in which branching structures, pacing, and dialogue shape players' moral choices, agency, and emotional labour around grief and guilt.
- The study codes 25 dialogue scenes from a single playthrough of the main storyline, and the author acknowledges that relying on one playthrough is a limitation.
- Both protagonists, Mio and Zoe, typically open with deflection or evasion and only gradually move toward disclosure and empathy, mirroring Herman's model of trauma disclosure.
The Challenges Female Streamers Face on Twitch and Their Strategies Within a Male-Dominated Gaming Environment
This study examines how female streamers on Twitch navigate sexism, harassment, and objectification within a gaming culture long shaped by male dominance.
- Harassment of women in gaming escalated into a coordinated campaign after the 2014 'Gamergate' episode, when developer Zoë Quinn was subjected to doxxing, threats and the publication of private photos, a pattern that spread to Brianna Wu, Anita Sarkeesian and other female industry figures.
- Twitch, launched in 2011 and bought by Amazon in 2014, saw its active channels rise from 3.75 million in February 2020 to 7.4 million in July 2020 during the pandemic, yet the platform remains closely tied to video games.
- Interviews with female streamers found that none considered Twitch's existing anti-harassment measures, including bots and AutoMod, effective in the long term, as harassers quickly learned to bypass them.
The Study of the Players' Pixel Aesthetics in Design-Driven Practices
This paper examines how pixel art aesthetics shape player experience and the design of physical gameroom environments, drawing on interior design, game psychology, and game studies.
- Pixel art aesthetics, especially in MapleStory, Super Mario Bros, Mega Man, and Crazy Arcade, are argued to shape players' emotional engagement, with game aesthetics significantly influencing players' willingness to engage with games and recommend them to others (Mai et al., 2025).
- The study frames game design through a mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics framework, positing that mechanics produce dynamics and dynamics produce players' aesthetic experiences.
- MapleStory is described as having over 100 million players worldwide and remaining popular for over 20 years thanks to its 2D side-scrolling pixel art and cutesy aesthetic, with self-determination theory (autonomy, competence, relatedness) cited as key to its engagement.
So How 'Bout It? Aren't You Getting Tired of the Grind? The Narrative Complexity of Kojima's Death Stranding
This analysis argues that existing scholarship on Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding has overlooked non-player characters, particularly antagonists, as organizing forces in narrative game design.
- The report argues that scholarship on Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding has neglected non-player characters, especially antagonists, as organizing forces in narrative game design.
- It proposes a hybrid film-and-game analytical framework, using the character Higgs Monaghan as its central case study to examine how cutscenes, gameplay, and character construction together produce narrative complexity.
- The study's method is primarily interpretive and close-reading based, combining cutscene film analysis, gameplay analysis, and Eder's character model.
"True Colours": Queering Gender, Monstrosity, and Humanity in Little Nightmares II
Katie Garrett's essay offers a queer "too-close reading" of Little Nightmares II, arguing that the game's ambiguous narrative, formalist aesthetics, and collaborative dual-protagonist mechanics contain queer meanings that player discourse and official paratext have largely overlooked.
- The paper applies a 'too-close reading' (Miller, Ruberg) to the indie horror game Little Nightmares II (2021) to surface queer readings of gender, monstrosity, and humanity that lie beneath its surface.
- Little Nightmares II has no dialogue or narration, so its implicit narrative is conveyed through formalist aesthetics, and character and place names come only from paratext such as Bandai Namco's website and developer interviews.
- Six's ambiguous, often ungendered design is read as a deliberate queer strategy: concept art depicts Six hidden by a hood and hair and always holding Mono's hand, suggesting Six is most 'themselves' when gender cannot be read.
Ecological Rationality and Cultural Innovation in China's Game Design
China's game industry, this analysis contends, has moved sustainability from peripheral corporate responsibility into a core design logic that operates as a form of governance, linking environmental objectives with state regulation, aesthetic conventions, and digital infrastructure.
- Sustainability in China's game design is framed as "design as governance," where environmental goals, aesthetics, and state regulation are embedded into both the technical and aesthetic layers of games rather than treated as optional corporate social responsibility.
- Regulatory compliance, not voluntary corporate virtue, acts as a mandatory design condition for market authorization, and the regulatory framework simultaneously enforces ecological goals and ideological/moral boundaries, such as gaming-time restrictions for minors.
- Online gaming data centers accounted for 2.7 percent of China's total electricity use in 2020, a share expected to more than double by 2030, driving innovation in cooling, server utilization, and cloud architecture.