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
Se i Sims vanno su Facebook
Agata Meneghelli's essay, published in the 2012 inaugural issue of the Italian journal Critical Notes, examines why The Sims Social, launched by Electronic Arts on Facebook in August 2011, achieved rapid success and then lost a substantial share of its audience within months.
- The Sims Social, launched by Electronic Arts on Facebook in August 2011, reached more than 60 million monthly active users and over 10 million daily active users within about a month of launch.
- The game's audience collapsed quickly: by January 2012 it had fallen to roughly 24 million monthly and 4 million daily active users, a loss of more than half its monthly and over 60% of its daily players.
- Meneghelli argues that the success and decline stem from how the franchise's core qualities of interactivity, personalization, and creativity were adapted to Facebook's social, real-time logic, rather than from a statistical measure of player behaviour, since the essay is a qualitative, theory-informed reading.
Gordon Calleja, In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation
Gordon Calleja's In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation (MIT Press, 2011) is presented here through a critical review in Italian, and the review's central interest lies in Calleja's effort to move discussion of immersion in digital games away from aesthetic and humanistic framings toward the specific characteristics of the…
- Gordon Calleja's In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation (MIT Press, 2011) shifts analysis of digital game involvement away from aesthetic and humanistic framings toward the medium's specific characteristics.
- Calleja replaces the term "immersion" with "incorporation," a double axis in which the player internalizes the game environment while being incorporated into it through the avatar.
- Calleja's taxonomy explains involvement as emerging from the interplay of kinesthetic, spatial, and ludic elements.
CriticalCity Upload: Intervista a Augusto Pirovano e Matteo Uguzzoni
CriticalCity Upload is an Italian urban transformation game, a variant of pervasive games created by Augusto Pirovano and Matteo Battaglia to stimulate young people's creativity by having them play in their own cities.
- CriticalCity Upload is an Italian urban pervasive game, created by Augusto Pirovano and Matteo Battaglia and run by the social cooperative Focus, that gets young people to complete creative missions in their own cities, documented with images, texts and audiovisual material.
- In its first year the project logged about 10,000 completed missions across Italy and occasionally abroad, with roughly 5,600 registered players in the first twelve months, figures the founders describe as modest next to mainstream social networks but significant for offline civic effects.
- The project is free to join, co-financed through a Fondazione Cariplo youth creativity grant, and favours sustainability over profitability, using a shareware-style model that invites the community to contribute time, donations or merchandise.
La Voce del Sonnambulismo Contemporaneo
Stefano Gualeni's essay, published in the 2012 issue of a Critical Notes journal, examines the long-running controversy over violence in video games by tracing it back to the origins of Mortal Kombat.
- Midway Games' graphically brutal Mortal Kombat, which imitated Capcom's Street Fighter II, triggered a congressional hearing in December 1993, and the political pressure that followed produced the ESRB rating system in 1994.
- Nearly two decades of debate over video game violence had produced no conclusive empirical evidence linking virtual violence to real-world aggression, according to Stefano Gualeni's 2012 essay.
- Industry defenses treat virtual worlds as separate, non-communicating realms in which depicted violence acts as a formal feedback mechanism, similar to an explosion in Asteroids.