Gaming for All: Discourse and Identity amongst Difabel Gamers in Indonesia

This article aims to study the use of digital games as interactive media among "difabel"; Indonesianized portmanteau of differently abled, gamers in Indonesia, including but not limited to the use of digital games as a platform for socialization, as sociotechnical artefacts to gain collective support and provide better access to community and social interaction, in addition to involvements in digital gaming competitions. This article aims to explain developments of "difabel" individuals’ discourse and their construction of identities during social interaction with digital games.

What is a Game Autrice? The Auteur Theory and Female Game Developers (Muriel Tramis’s Example)

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.

Posthumanist Attitude Towards Animals in Digital Games

From Trash to Treasure: Exploring how video games are moving from popular culture to cultural heritage

Video games are now recognized as an important part of our culture and history. However, this redefinition of the cultural value of video games has received scant academic attention. In this paper I explore the transformation video games have, and are undergoing by: 1) drawing on the event of the first excavation searching for video game history in the Alamogordo Landfill in New Mexico and 2) interviews with collection and exhibition experts in charge of video games in two U.S. museums: MoMA, New York and MADE, Oakland. Results explore how video games have gone from trash to treasure as exemplified by the excavation of the 1982 Atari game E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. As video games enter museums they become valued using traditional western ideals on how cultural heritage is defined, based on ideals of age, materiality, monumentality, and aesthetics. Yet, the interactivity imperative of video games makes new evaluation structures relevant.

Gender Asymmetries in the Digital Games Sector in Portugal

In this paper, we describe the results of a research in progress that seeks to analyze gender asymmetries in the digital games sector in Portugal. The results of its first phase indicated that the percentage of girls enrolled in digital games courses is significantly lower than the percentage of boys. This suggests that tertiary training in digital games is not attractive for girls in Portugal. We also examined physical characteristics of characters with human traits in digital games produced in the country between 2014 and 2018 through a gender perspective. Finally, we analyzed the results of the focus groups made with higher education students. Many of them argued that the underrepresentation of women in gaming industry is a matter of sensitivities of interest. This research points to the need to develop in-depth studies on a theme that has been neglected for years in the game studies.

Boal on a Boat – Teaching Critical Game Making

This paper presents and evaluates a plan for a 2-weeks teaching moment with a series of lectures and a seminar in a Game Design course on advanced level that teaches students to critically examine their design task as game designers. This means that this is a critical intervention that can be used to educate critical makers or reflexive professionals. The center piece of the course is an assignment that asks the students to create a design prototype that is highly problematic from moral and ethical perspectives that are discussed in the course literature and lectures. The paper explains in detail the setup of the lectures and seminars and shows the results of a first trial. Any game design education (and potentially even other digital making like IT or Information Systems) that aims at educating reflexive professionals or critical researchers should be able to adapt this teaching moment.

Animal ethics in digital games

Is this still participation? A case study of the disempowerment of player labourers

Critical research into games and player labour has shown that player creators remain disempowered despite the impact of their work. On the other hand, player-creators enjoy their work, they freely and in an informed manner consent to working without pay, and they can use their unpaid labour as experience and CV-entries. This paper aims to critically discuss these arguments in the light of a specifically chosen case study. The analysis is informed by expert interviews of player creators and it uses Carpentier’s (2016) analytic framework for participatory processes. This analysis of the power relationship between player creators and game developer is elemental for the discussion around unpaid player labour. In this case the company has enough power to purposefully keep the involvement of players secret which supports the notion of exploitation of free labour. The discussion suggests possible ways forward and connects to the ongoing unionization movement in the industry.

How to Reference a Digital Game

The question of what constitutes a game as a social object is famously problematic. The alleged impossibility of formulating a complete analytical definition for what constitutes a game is perhaps the most evident symptom of that difficulty. One expression of this problem that has been entirely overlooked by academia is the scholarly practice of referencing games. This paper addresses game referencing as a practice that is implicated with- and constitutive for- the ways in which we conceptualize and assign cultural value to games. Focusing on the conceptual framing of games, on game authorship, and on the historical dimensions of both, we will discuss referencing games as an act that is inevitably political. On these premises, we will provide foundational guidelines for thinking about one’s decisions concerning referencing and about the meaning and relevance of those decisions.