Liège Game Lab
Liège Game Lab is a video game research group at the University of Liège in Belgium. It publishes academic research, including work on video game genres and how players talk about them.
Documents
"Is Donald Trump Woke?" and Other Trolling Questions: Rise and Fall of the Woke Content Detector Steam Group
This paper examines the Steam group "Woke Content Detector" (WCD), created in March 2024 with the stated aim of compiling a list of video games containing "woke content," and its transformation after the unexplained disappearance of its founder, Furin, in May 2025, when the group had reached about 3,500 members.
- The Steam group "Woke Content Detector" was created in March 2024 to compile video games it deemed to contain "woke content," and it grew to about 3,500 members before its founder, Furin, unexplainedly disappeared in May 2025.
- After Furin's departure, trolls invaded the group and used irony, mockery, and "flooding" rather than insults to disrupt serious discussion, producing debates that advanced little because each camp's premises remained irreconcilable.
- The group's central difficulty was defining "wokism": original members struggled to distinguish genuine allies from imitators, and some left while others sought to reassert control over the definition.
For an Understanding of Video Games Genres through the Discourse of Players
This doctoral research proposal, presented at DiGRA 2023 by Surinx François-Xavier of the Liège Game Lab at the University of Liège, examines how video game genre labels such as FPS, TPS, survival horror, and puzzle are created, propagated, and legitimised.
- Video game genre labels such as FPS, TPS, survival horror, and puzzle are no longer governed solely by developers or the press but are co-produced by players, whose collective discourse now carries substantial authority.
- Unlike relatively stable literary or cinematic genres, video game genres remain actively negotiated, making them a live site for studying how categories emerge.
- The proposed corpus draws on five internet-native formats (wikis, posts, forums, evaluations, and tags), restricted to French-language contributions, with corpus construction beginning from wiki genre labels and Steam Tags.