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
Tra Advergame e Mappe Online: Contaminazioni tra Street View e Discorso Pubblicitario
This issue of Critical Notes (Issue 02, 2013) contains two essays on how online mapping services and video games intersect, both written in Italian.
- Gabriele Ferri analyses three 2011–2012 advergames—Mercedes-Benz's Escape the Map, Unilever's Magnum Pleasure Hunt 2, and State Farm's Chaos in Your Town—that borrow the 360-degree panoramic aesthetic of Google Street View.
- The advergames remediate online-map visual language, reusing blurred faces, interface elements, and immobile street passersby, while representing movement through the map's instantaneous feedback as teleportation.
- Ferri judges the games effective as persuasive advertising because they embed brands in compelling narratives and anchor play in a familiar everyday practice.
The Two Dimensions as a Metaphor of Control in Gaming Landscapes
This critical essay by Enrico Gandolfi argues that two-dimensional visualization remains a central and meaningful mode of control in digital games, despite the dominance of 3D engines in the mainstream industry.
- The essay argues that 2D visualization remains a central, meaningful mode of control in digital games even in AAA productions dominated by 3D engines, rather than being merely a nostalgic or indie-only format.
- Drawing on Stuart Hall's theory of representation, the author frames game interfaces as configurative systems that orient players' intentions and actions through map-like cognitive representations.
- The essay proposes a typology of situational maps: contingent dispositifs (immediate urgency indicators such as health bars or inventory screens), temporal tracks (records of past performance such as kill counts or goal completion linked to gamification), and dioramas (meta-level maps that symbolize the whole gaming situation and act as active play instruments).
Video Game Education: Studi e Percorsi di Formazione
The book review examines "Video game education.
- The book 'Video game education. Studi e percorsi di formazione', edited by Damiano Felini, argues that video games can be meaningful tools for education and personal growth rather than isolating or violence-inducing influences on teenagers.
- The authors identify educational benefits of games including skill development, stimulation of creativity and imagination, exposure to real-world-like challenges, decision-making practice, and the transmission of societal values, whether positive or negative.
- The book contends that adolescent dependence on games often arises when players treat them purely as recreational objects instead of understanding their underlying structures.
Voglia di vincere/Extra Lives
"Voglia di vincere/Extra Lives" is a 2013 book review by Ambra Agnoletto, published in the Italian game studies journal Critical Notes, of Tom Bissell's book "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter," translated into Italian as "Voglia di vincere: perché i videogiochi sono importanti."
- Agnoletto's 2013 review in the Italian game studies journal Critical Notes assesses Tom Bissell's book "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter" (Italian title "Voglia di vincere") and is generally favorable.
- Bissell's central argument is that video games, despite being consumed on a mass scale, are fundamentally individual experiences, each lived in a unique and personal way.
- Bissell argues that video games are a dominant medium and a potentially powerful interactive art form, with immersive qualities that bring both opportunities and responsibilities.
Come Diventare Rockstar: Gli Houser e l'Evoluzione del Franchise Grand Theft Auto
This Italian-language review, published in the 2013 issue of Critical Notes, assesses David Kushner's 2012 book "Wanted: The Criminal History of Grand Theft Auto," which examines Rockstar Games and the Houser brothers, Sam and Dan, along with the broader development of the Grand Theft Auto franchise.
- The review assesses David Kushner's 2012 book "Wanted: The Criminal History of Grand Theft Auto," which examines Rockstar Games, the Houser brothers Sam and Dan, and the development of the GTA franchise, and argues it is an important text for video game studies despite its non-academic framing.
- Kushner's method relies on extensive interviews with Rockstar employees and people affected by the company, combined with primary written sources, and uses a novelistic, character-driven narrative rather than explicit authorial judgment.
- The book identifies two sides to Rockstar's ethos: an idealistic push for artistic freedom, mature realism, a distinctive New York-inflected brand identity, and guerrilla marketing, alongside harsh management, schedules of up to sixteen hours a day, favoritism, and a lawsuit from Rockstar San Diego workers.
D. Compagno. Dezmond. Una lettura di Assassin's Creed 2
This book review, published in the 2013 issue of Critical Notes, assesses D. Compagno's semiotic analysis of Assassin's Creed 2, the eighteenth volume in the "Ludologica.
- The book is D. Compagno's semiotic analysis of Assassin's Creed 2, the eighteenth volume in the "Ludologica. Videogames d'autore" series edited by Matteo Bittanti and Gianni Canova and published by Unicopli, and it was reviewed in the 2013 issue of Critical Notes.
- Compagno applies Roland Barthes's S/Z method, dividing the game's text into roughly two hundred lexias, to treat the game as a language and examine how its narrative produces meaning.
- The central interpretive claim is that Assassin's Creed 2 works as a metaphor for psychoanalysis: the Animus becomes a therapist's couch, and Desmond's journey through his ancestors' memories parallels a search through his own past, including conflicts with his parents.
1001 Videogiochi da Non Perdere
"1001 videogiochi da non perdere" is an Italian-language encyclopedic guide to videogames, the Italian edition of a volume curated by Tony Mott, editor-in-chief of EDGE, and adapted by Andrea Dresseno.
- The book is the Italian edition of "1001 Videogiochi da Non Perdere", a roughly 960-page encyclopedic guide cataloguing 1001 titles released between 1979 and 2010, priced at €35.
- The volume was curated by Tony Mott, editor-in-chief of EDGE, adapted by Andrea Dresseno, and draws on nearly 40 contributing authors.
- Each entry lists title, release date, platform, developer, and genre, plus a brief critical review and an in-game screenshot rather than cover art.
Neoludica: Arte e Gioco
The document is a critical book review, published in Issue 02 of the Italian journal Game Journal in 2013, of "Arte e Videogames.
- The book "Arte e Videogames. Neoludica 2011-1966" (Skira, 2011), edited by Debora Ferrari, is the catalogue of an exhibition held as a side event of the 54th Venice Biennale.
- The reviewer presents Neoludica as the successor to "Play, il mondo dei videogiochi" (Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 2002), the first major European and Italian exhibition devoted to videogames, and notes that a decade passed before a comparable event.
- Neoludica's curatorial approach shifts from presenting the videogame "as such" to examining specific details, marginal cases, and internal elements of games.
Dal sesso al gioco: Un'ossessione per il XXI° secolo?
This book review, published in the 2013 issue of Critical Notes, examines Peppino Ortoleva's pamphlet "Dal sesso al gioco: Un'ossessione per il XXI° secolo?" as a continuation of his earlier work Il secolo dei media (2008).
- Ortoleva's central thesis is that play has replaced sex as the dominant social obsession of the Western world, marking a shift from the twentieth-century homo eroticus to the twenty-first-century homo ludicus.
- The book traces a trajectory from sexual liberation and the spread of pornography in the second half of the twentieth century to the contemporary 'ludicizzazione del reale' (ludicization of reality), starting from Freud's psychoanalytic practice in the early 1900s.
- Online dating sites are presented as the pivot between sex and play, which the French sociologist Lardellier interprets as spaces of ludic relationships.
Click, Click, Click, Click: Zynga and the Gamification of Clicking
This paper by Melinda Jacobs, published as a peer-reviewed journal article, argues that Zynga's success in social network gaming cannot be fully explained by the three factors commonly cited in industry and scholarly discussion: being free-to-play, being social, and offering engaging gameplay.
- Melinda Jacobs argues that Zynga's success in social network gaming cannot be fully explained by the commonly cited factors of being free-to-play, social, and engaging, using a case study of FrontierVille (later renamed The Pioneer Trail).
- The paper contends Zynga's games operate as a hybrid between free-to-play and pay-to-play, letting players pay either with money or with "media value" earned by referring friends through word-of-mouth marketing.
- The author argues the social dimension of these games is largely external, resting on pre-existing friendships, and that interactions with friends often resemble interactions with non-player characters.
+10! Gamification and deGamification
Ivan Mosca's "+10! Gamification and deGamification" examines the contested meaning of gamification and argues that its prevalence carries significant cultural and ethical costs.
- Gamification is contested in meaning: the report distinguishes it as market expansion for the video game industry, as "pointsification" (adding points, badges, and rewards to non-game contexts), and as a broader cultural shift in which serious practices become ludic and play becomes serious.
- The central thesis is that gamification inherently produces "degamification": as game mechanics spread, play loses its autotelic, self-directed character and is replaced by goal-oriented systems designed to foster dependency and drive consumption.
- Drawing on cognitive science findings, the author notes that external rewards can reduce intrinsic interest in an activity, and cites social network games as cases where engagement shades into compulsion.
Digital Games and the Communication of Health Problems: A Review of Games Against the Concept of Procedural Rhetoric
This review examines serious digital games as a tool for communicating health problems to teenagers, using Ian Bogost's theory of procedural rhetoric as its analytical framework.
- The review uses Ian Bogost's procedural rhetoric theory to argue that games persuade through their rules and processes rather than through narrative or content alone.
- Effective health-communication games must align winning conditions and mechanics directly with the understanding or behavior they target, since mismatched mechanics fail to persuade.
- Faithful simulations of off-game processes and oversimplified models can both undermine persuasion, so designers should build rhetorically persuasive models of unhealthy behaviors instead.