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
Games and Science Fiction: Contributing to Define Hybrid Spaces in Location-Aware Games
This paper, authored by Fátima Regis and Letícia Perani of the CiberCog research group at Rio de Janeiro State University, argues that location-aware games, which combine geographic exploration with mobile digital technologies such as GPS-enabled phones, create hybrid spaces that resemble the heterotopias frequently depicted in…
- The paper argues that location-aware games, which combine GPS-enabled mobile devices with geographic exploration, create hybrid spaces that resemble the heterotopias often depicted in science fiction.
- The authors contend science fiction offers a productive conceptual framework for understanding how these games blend physical and digital environments.
- The paper traces a historical progression from Newtonian physical space through cyberspace and graphical user interfaces to today's integration of locative media with urban settings, with each stage further dissolving the boundary between material and informational space.
Scienze Cognitive e Game Design: Progettare Dinamiche di Gioco non Finalizzate a un Obiettivo
Pietro Righi Riva's article, published in the 2012 issue of an Italian peer-reviewed game studies journal, argues that game designers can build engaging experiences without relying on goals, rewards, and achievement structures that dominate contemporary gamification and game design thinking.
- Pietro Righi Riva argues in a 2012 Italian peer-reviewed game studies article that engaging play can be designed without explicit goals, rewards, or achievement structures that dominate gamification thinking.
- The core mechanism proposed is cognitive contrast: play becomes compelling when there is a gap between the player's expectations and the reality the game presents, analogous to how optical illusions reveal perceptual processes.
- The theoretical basis combines Ramachandran and Hirstein's neuroaesthetics (perceptual problem-solving), Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory, and Brehm's free-choice paradigm, with dissonance proposed as a concrete tool for shaping player behavior.
Computer Games as a Tool for Language Education
Computer games for language education, as this work argues, should be treated not as a supplementary classroom gimmick but as a genuine approach to learning a foreign language.
- The work argues computer games should be treated as a genuine approach to foreign language learning rather than a supplementary classroom gimmick, proposing an integrated "ludic methodology" that is playful, learner-centred, multi-sensory, and culturally sensitive.
- Traditional edutainment has declined commercially, with U.S. revenue falling from $495.8 million in 2000 to $152 million in 2004, and the author contends its behaviourist, drill-and-practice methods failed to produce meaningful language acquisition.
- The framework reconceives the teacher as an "edurector", a facilitator and director of learning rather than a transmitter of knowledge, which the work says requires dedicated teacher training.
Gamification Is Broken: An Interview with Steven Poole
This document is an interview with journalist and author Steven Poole, conducted by Marco Benoît Carbone and Paolo Ruffino and published in a 2012 issue of a peer-reviewed games studies journal.
- Games are argued to be a genuinely new art form that should be judged on their own terms rather than by imitating cinema, and the interviewee warns against "cinema envy" in game design and criticism.
- Steven Poole's central critique is that "gamification" has been oversold, exemplified by his rebuttal of Jane McGonigal's Reality Is Broken, whose claims that reality is "too easy" and that games could solve global warming and poverty he calls hyperbolic and trivializing.
- Poole notes that London transit "gamification" was driven more by selling advertising than by civic benefit, illustrating how gamification is often commercially motivated.
Apocalypse Postponed: Discourses on Video Games from Noxious Objects to Redemptive Devices
Carbone and Ruffino's "Apocalypse Postponed: Discourses on Video Games from Noxious Objects to Redemptive Devices" examines how public and scholarly discussion of video games has shifted over roughly the past two decades.
- The book traces a shift in public discourse on video games from early-2000s blame for violence, intensified after the 1999 Columbine shooting, to newer claims that games benefit cognitive skills, maturity, and social problem-solving.
- The authors argue that these redemptive narratives are no more rigorous than the apocalyptic ones they replaced, since both rely on technological determinism that reverses polarity without deepening understanding.
- Industry-linked statistics, such as Entertainment Software Association data on player age and gender and market-size figures from Newzoo, are shown not to logically establish psychological, social, or aesthetic benefits.
Gamification, Arduino
Fabio Viola's 2011 book "Gamification, Arduino" is a popularly oriented overview of the video game industry, written in a style closer to journalism than academic scholarship.
- The book argues the video game market is shifting away from PC gaming and physical distribution toward console, digital, and casual play, driven by mass-market interfaces such as motion controls and retail sales in general stores.
- Viola attributes the decline of the PC as a gaming platform partly to Microsoft's acquisitions of Bungie and Lionhead and its resulting focus on consoles, as well as to the closure of established PC developers.
- The author contends that console titles sell more easily than PC games because they avoid the system-requirement explanations PC titles demand, and that large retail chains have reduced sales-floor staff expertise.
Pissing in the Fountain: Videogames and Expressive Performance
Karhulahti's essay examines whether single-player videogames can be considered art, using the ongoing philosophical debate about sport as art as its framework.
- Karhulahti's essay asks whether single-player videogames can be art by applying the philosophical debate over whether sport is art, prompted in 2011 by the US National Endowment for the Arts adding digital games to its supported art forms and by Brian Moriarty's rebuttal of Roger Ebert's dismissal of games as art.
- The author argues the central question is not whether games are beautiful or entertaining, but whether they have a unique mode of expression and a distinctive relationship between artist and audience.
- Most single-player games sidestep the competitive element that disqualifies sport from being art, since their play is driven by purpose without being competitively purposive.
Getglue e Miso: La Gamification Contagia il Consumo Televisivo
Simona Biancalana's article examines how the social TV applications Getglue and Miso apply gamification mechanics to television viewing, arguing that these platforms extend the long-standing participatory habits of TV audiences into a playful, collectible, and socially shared experience.
- Getglue and Miso apply gamification mechanics (check-ins, points, badges, collectibles) to TV viewing, extending audiences' long-standing participatory habits into a playful, socially shared experience.
- Getglue, backed by investors including Union Square Ventures and Time Warner, reported over two million active users and roughly one hundred million check-ins in 2011, with partnerships with major networks and studios.
- Miso, funded by Google Ventures and Khosla Ventures, is a newer entrant with fewer users but has recently announced partnerships with Fox and AT&T U-verse, and offers a synchronized slideshow mode with trivia and polls alongside broadcasts.
Gioco e Tecnologia: Elementi Chiave per una Nuova Pedagogia Museale
This document is a two-part collection of critical notes from the 2012 issue of an Italian game studies journal, examining how gamification and playful design are reshaping cultural institutions and media consumption.
- Science museums and technology-based children's play centers are shifting from passive, school-trip destinations into participatory spaces where learning is fused with play, with the visitor treated as an active co-constructor of knowledge.
- Carastro proposes a three-phase engagement model combining sensory-motor, emotional-immersive, and rational-cognitive stages, grounded in user experience design and supported by a 'hands-on' methodology.
- Technotown, a municipal technology play center in Rome serving children aged 8 to 17, has hosted robotics, media, and interaction design activities since 2006 and is used as the main illustrative case.
Phone Story: Un Mobile Game Discute La Mobile Phone Industry
Gabriele Ferri's essay examines Phone Story, a satirical mobile game created by Paolo Pedercini of the Molleindustria collective in collaboration with the Yes Lab, which is associated with the activist group the Yes Men.
- Phone Story, a satirical mobile game by Paolo Pedercini of the Molleindustria collective with the Yes Lab (associated with the Yes Men), was removed from Apple's App Store in September 2011 after only four days, and media coverage focused mainly on censorship rather than the game's critical content.
- The game is built as a narrated story plus four mini-games covering coltan mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, suicides at a Chinese electronics factory, consumer marketing, and electronic waste.
- Ferri argues the game's rhetorical strategy is distinctive because it stages its critique on the smartphone the player is using, implicating the player directly rather than only through a corporate simulation.
Molte vite in multiversi. Nuovi media e arte quotidiana
Giuseppe Frazzetto's Molte vite in multiversi.
- Frazzetto's 2011 book (Mimesis Edizioni) is a philosophical and aesthetic treatise that treats video games as one element within a broader theory of contemporary art, rather than as its central subject.
- The central thesis is that contemporary art and culture are shaped by the multiplication and fragmentation of identities, which the author frames as a 'remix' or 'mash-up' society.
- Frazzetto introduces the 'Entreverse,' an entertainment universe in which everything becomes aestheticized, hierarchies dissolve, and media generate events.
Prosumer e star dei videogiochi
This Italian-language essay by Giuseppe Frazzetto, published in the inaugural 2012 issue of a games journal, examines the concept of the "prosumer" (a blend of producer and consumer) in relation to video games.
- Frazzetto's 2012 essay argues that the 'prosumer' (producer-consumer) remains central to the Web 2.0 landscape even though early scholarly enthusiasm for user-generated content, associated with Alvin Toffler and Henry Jenkins, has cooled.
- The author frames the core debate as whether user-generated content on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia amounts to exploited labor or merely reprocesses industrial culture.
- The essay engages the 'long tail' theory, in which digital production enables extremely small runs of cultural goods and fragments markets.