Debriefing tactics: A study of interaction in game-based military education

Lessons Learned in the Rise and Fall of Newsgames as a Genre

Play Arcs: Structuring Player Stories for CoDesign & Content Generation in Persistent Game Worlds

Players of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) consume content much faster than game designers can produce it. However, they also generate stories through their interaction, which can contribute to adding novel types of content in the game world. We introduce and demonstrate Play Arcs, a design strategy for structuring emergent stories that players can codesign and contribute as unique game content. We develop an MMO with tools for codesign and ‘history game mechanics’ and test as a technology probe with 49 players. We show that Play Arcs successfully structure coherent stories and support players in shaping new, unique content based on their own histories. We found that these stories can inform and guide players’ decisions, and also that, while players often share simpler stories directly, they keep more notable stories to themselves for retelling later. We conclude by discussing design challenges and directions for future work with Play Arcs.

Stories and Changing Social Norms: Representation of Gender in Video Games from 2007 to 2017

This paper focuses on how a games’ characters and story reflect changing cultural norms in the period during which a game series was developed and released. This is done through qualitative evaluation of the Dragon Age series (2009-2014) and compared to two other game franchises with similar release dates and production location: the Mass Effect Trilogy (2007-2012) and the Uncharted series (2007-2017). Stories reflect cultural and societal norms of the periods and places that crafted them, providing a unique avenue of second-person stories, containing bits and pieces of their creators and their sociocultural biases. Using these digital games as artifacts and texts of focus, a change in social and cultural values and norms of modern society appears when evaluating and comparing the content of previous games in a series to the current ones, as these works reflect the environment in which they were created.

On Pilgrimage: Post-Apocalyptic Wandering in Death Stranding and The Last of Us Part II

Speedruns as assemblage: Witnessing reterritorialization through developer reaction videos

Dating in Video Games: The Role of Game Features

Exploring Women´s Participation, Gender Discrimination, and Sexual Harassment in the Mexican Video Game Industry

Using Characterization Theory to Study the History of Video Game Characters

Reconceiving the Fictionality of Game Worlds: Money in Osadchuk’s Mirror World as an Affective Point of Entry