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
Sovversioni Videoludiche: Dalle Avanguardie Alle Pratiche Performative In-Game
This essay examines a growing category of subversive videogame practice that intervenes in gameplay rather than merely altering a game's visuals, as earlier countergaming work such as Velvet Strike and Super Mario Clouds did.
- The essay argues that a growing category of subversive game practice intervenes in gameplay itself rather than merely altering visuals, extending earlier countergaming work such as Velvet Strike and Super Mario Clouds.
- Brent Watanabe's Animal Crossing: All Mine (2020) and Total Refusal's Operation Jane Walk (2018) are cited as examples that use the medium's formal features to critique capitalism and militarism.
- The author proposes "situationist play" as a provisional analytical framework for in-game performances that repurpose existing game spaces without changing code or mechanics, drawing on Situationist détournement and Anna Watkins-Fisher's "parasitic resistance."
Games and Cathode Rays: Discourses on a New Medium in the Italian Specialized Magazines (1981-1988)
Diego Cavallotti's study examines how Italian specialized magazines framed video games between 1981 and 1988, arguing that the medium's cultural acceptance in Italy was shaped jointly by its material forms and the discourses that surrounded it.
- The Italian video game market kept expanding in 1983 and 1984 even as the American industry contracted sharply, with magazines presenting games as one part of a broader video and home-electronics ecosystem.
- Italian specialized magazines such as Video Magazine, Video, Sperimentare con l'elettronica e il computer, and Videogiochi were central to legitimizing games in Italy, well before the British magazine Zzap! gained its later success.
- Video Magazine ran regular game columns from 1981 and split them into news and reviews in 1983, reflecting steadily institutionalizing coverage of the medium.
The Many Facets of Culture in Digital Games Policy: The EU Dimension
The European Commission's approach to State aid for digital games reveals a pragmatic evolution in how the EU understands culture, moving from a narrow, film-centred framing toward a more industry-oriented recognition of games as cultural products.
- The European Commission now treats culture and economics as intertwined in State aid decisions under Article 107(3)(d) TFEU, framing State aid for games as a form of cultural policy rather than competition policy alone.
- The Commission's stance on digital games has shifted from excluding them in the 2013 Cinema Communication and requiring proof of market failure, to demanding demonstrable cultural value, and later to a more industrial, creative-cluster view.
- A 2006 French tax relief case questioned whether games qualified as cultural products at all, while national schemes in the UK, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Ireland were initially scrutinised for cultural value, often favouring artistic or educational titles.
Everything Is Going to Be Okay: Analysing Emotional Landscapes in Interactive Digital Narratives Through the Exploration of Complex Psychological Themes in Omori
This analysis argues that Omori (OMOCAT, 2020) demonstrates how Interactive Digital Narratives can render complex psychological experiences such as depression, anxiety, and trauma tangible and emotionally accessible to players.
- Omori (OMOCAT, 2020) is presented as a case study showing how interactive digital narratives can make psychological experiences such as depression, anxiety, and trauma emotionally accessible to players.
- The report's central thesis is that player agency combined with multimodal design across narrative, mechanics, and audiovisual elements intensifies emotional and cognitive engagement in ways passive media cannot.
- The dual-world structure, contrasting a whimsical dream realm with a grim reality, is read as a deliberate device mirroring trauma processing and fostering empathy with the protagonist, Sunny.
Ten Years of GAME: Games as Art, Media, Entertainment
GAME (Games as Art, Media, Entertainment) marks its tenth anniversary as an independent academic journal, operating without commercial publisher or single-institution affiliation.
- GAME (Games as Art, Media, Entertainment) marks its tenth anniversary as an independent academic journal founded in 2012, with no commercial publisher or single-institution affiliation.
- The journal positions itself as a bridge between game studies and established disciplines such as semiotics, film and media studies, and media archaeology, with an interdisciplinary, multilingual, and polycentric orientation that resists ludological purism.
- Its independence has depended on unpaid labour from editors, authors, and reviewers, preserving editorial freedom at the cost of considerable strain on its founders.
Ten Years of Historical Game Studies: Towards the Intersection with Memory Studies
Historical game studies has matured into an established interdisciplinary field over roughly the past decade, and this work argues that it is increasingly converging with memory studies.
- The field of historical game studies has matured over roughly the past decade and is converging with memory studies, with the 2014 "Challenge the Past/Diversify the Future" conference as an anchor point.
- The report argues that history and memory scholarship are complementary rather than opposed, and offers shared concepts such as Landsberg's prosthetic memory, Nora's sites of memory, and Chapman's "systems for historying" to analyze how digital games shape the past.
- Gameplay often undermines counter-hegemonic readings of historical games, reinforcing dominant narratives, as illustrated by Assassin's Creed: Freedom Cry, and many games reproduce established national narratives in line with Bodnar's account of public memory as justifying existing power structures.
Game Studies Meets Japanese Studies: Ten Years of Research
Luca Paolo Bruno's survey examines the intersection of Game Studies and Japanese Studies across 2012 to 2022, centering on a question that remains unresolved: what makes a digital game "Japanese"?
- The core unresolved question in the field is what makes a digital game "Japanese": the answer could rest on production location, aesthetic conventions, or perceived cultural identity, and Game Studies and Japanese Studies use these criteria differently without a shared vocabulary to reconcile them.
- Japanese-produced titles such as Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros., and Final Fantasy are among the most cited works in Game Studies journals, though scholarship has tended to focus on their global reach rather than more locally specific games.
- Japanese video game scholarship has often treated games as illustrations of "Japaneseness" and generalized about Japanese audiences, a tendency critics say confuses aesthetics designed for global markets with prevailing domestic attitudes.
Whose Narrative Is This? A Character's Expression of Identity to Counter a Hegemonic Narrative
This paper argues that interactive digital narratives frequently subordinate the protagonist's own story to the competing demands of author-imposed storyworld rules and the player's agency, leaving the character's arc unresolved or hollowed out.
- The paper's central thesis is that a protagonist can and should assert a distinct "character narrative" that negotiates with both the author's hegemonic control and the player's choices, rather than having their arc subordinated or left hollowed out.
- Interactive digital narratives often subordinate the protagonist's story to author-imposed storyworld rules and player agency, leaving character arcs unresolved; the authors argue interactive works should give characters closure on their own terms alongside author and player narratives.
- The analysis is a close comparative study of five works: the final episode of the serial She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Papers, Please, The Stanley Parable, and the interactive film Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
Playing with Your Research: Circulating Narratives and Cultivating Audiences Through Text-Based Games
This paper argues that interactive digital narratives (IDNs), particularly text-based games authored in Twine, offer researchers a practical means of circulating their findings to wider audiences while also deepening their own systems-level understanding of their subject matter.
- Interactive digital narratives (IDNs), defined as narratives with a goal, a character or role, and multiple endings, are proposed as a way for researchers to circulate findings beyond paywalled journals and expensive conferences.
- The paper argues Twine, a low-barrier and durable authoring tool, is well suited to building text-based IDNs for research communication.
- The empirical core examines first-year writing and undergraduate research courses where students converted research projects, including a turtle-research project and a largemouth bass game case study, into Twine-based IDNs.
Liminality, Embodiment, and Desire: "Vulnerable You" and "Vulnerable I"
This paper argues that narrative video games achieve their emotional power through "functional liminality," a fragile, in-between state in which player and character become intertwined through embodiment, vulnerability, and desire.
- The paper argues that narrative games produce immersion through "functional liminality": a fragile in-between state where player and character become intertwined through embodiment, vulnerability, and desire, rather than through gesture-based interface design alone.
- Its theoretical framework draws on Victor Turner's liminality, Janet Murray's dramatic agency, and Paul Ricœur's emplotment and narrative identity.
- In Death Stranding, controller mechanics such as rocking the controller to soothe the Bridge Baby BB-28, along with lasting terrain effects and bodily needs, ground protagonist Sam Porter Bridges as a fully realized dramatic agent, and the game's emotional climax, the incineration of BB, depends on this alignment of embodied vulnerability and desire.
These Routes Are Just as Worthy If You Give Them a Chance: Alternative Discourses in (Visual) Novel Games as a Means to Allow Safe Spaces of Exploration
This academic paper argues that visual novel games, especially the branching-narrative traditions of Japanese otome, yuri, and dating sims, can function as safe spaces where players explore identities underrepresented in mainstream games, including women, gay men, and broader queer identities.
- The paper argues that visual novels, especially Japanese otome, yuri, and dating sims with branching narratives, can serve as safe spaces for players to explore identities underrepresented in mainstream games, including women, gay men, and broader queer identities.
- Fieldwork with otome players in Tokyo found that players relate to their avatars either as partners with a distinct will or as virtual extensions of themselves, with individual perception shaping this relationship more than designers' intentions.
- Japanese otome games have targeted female consumers since the 1994 release of Angelique, a long-standing audience focus the authors position as context for the genre's openness to alternative narratives.
Trust, Confidence, and Hope in A Summer's End: Hong Kong 1986, A Reparative Reading
Samuel Poirier-Poulin's paper offers a reparative reading of A Summer's End: Hong Kong 1986, a visual novel centred on a queer romance between Michelle and Sam.
- The paper argues that A Summer's End: Hong Kong 1986 builds trust among characters, between player and characters, and between the queer player and the medium itself, with trust tied to time, hope, and the possibility of a queer future despite the game's largely linear structure and limited player agency.
- The author contends that ambience does much of the affective work: neon colours, music, Mong Kok's urban night, and intimate apartment scenes transmit feeling, while first-person narration and gradual unlocking of Michelle's inner life position the player as a supportive companion rather than a voyeur.
- The game's central pivot is Michelle's choice between a heteronormative future and a queer relationship, set against Hong Kong's uncertain transition to Chinese sovereignty.