Playing For Keeps: Digital Games to Preserve Indigenous Languages & Traditions.

This paper examines the potential for digital games to be used as a conduit to preserve and share Indigenous languages and traditions. It does this by interviewing game industry and academic representatives from a variety of Indigenous communities around the world to ask their opinions on the topic via three questions. The paper aims to provide justification for a model of co-design utilizing the methodology of two-eyed seeing which allows Indigenous communities to be involved in every step of the design process and also to retain Sovereignty over their cultural practices and how they are portrayed and shared with the wider populace. The benefits of which may be felt by not only the Indigenous communities themselves but also communities like DiGRA as it will help to inform and build lasting bonds between the game industry/academia and Indigenous peoples.

Indie Game Developers in Germany: Between Creativity and Making Money

Designing a Digital Roleplaying Game to Foster Awareness of Hidden Disabilities

The Unintended Consequences of Using Twitch as a University Professor

Constructing Haenyeo: Defamiliarzation and Sensemaking in the Game Design Process

What do Game Developers Think about Loot Boxes?

On the Local Value of Game Jam Games: Beyond Learning from the Process

A Taxonomy of Game Engines and the Tools that Drive the Industry

Game engines are a vital part of a game production pipeline, but there is a vagueness of definitions regarding the boundaries of components in a game engine and the rest of the production tools used in a game development pipeline. The aim of this paper is to nuance the use of the term game engine and to put it into the context of a game development pipeline. Based on data from the current state of game production, a proposed taxonomy for tools in game development is presented. A distinction is made between user facing tools and product facing tools. A defining characteristic of the production pipeline and game engines is their plasticity. One of the conclusions is that a “game engine” as a single entity containing the whole game production pipeline is not desirable due to the large number of competences and needs involved in a game development project.

A Recipe for Disaster? The Emerging Ludo Mix and the Outsourcing of Narrative

Employing The Final Fantasy XV Universe as a case study, this article examines how the changing climate of game development, in tandem with established media mix strategies, contributes to the emergence of the ludo mix as media ecology. Through a comparative analysis of the climate of modern game development and the adoption of media mix strategies, as they relate to the franchise in question, the case is made that these two distinct phenomena intersect to create novel challenges and incentives for a particular kind of game development, wherein the mitigation of mounting production costs has resulted in the strategic outsourcing of Final Fantasy XV’s core narrative, negatively affecting the games critical reception. These findings posit challenges for the future of the ludo mix as the evolving technological, aesthetic and economic climate of game development continues further down the path that has led to this outcome.

In Situ: Researching corporate diversity initiatives with game developers

This paper explicates the design and development of a feminist action research pilot that studied and supported the launch of a diversity initiative within a major game development studio. Drawing on methods from design research including rapid ethnography and model making, we describe the stages our pilot study followed, including key models and high-level findings, as well as outline the ways in which we collaborated with our research partner in this initial stage. Use of these methods helped us build an integrated model that can be used as a strategic tool to direct the focus of ongoing work by our partner and other developers. By sharing our process, we hope to illustrate one way that researchers might engage design research methods in service of equity work of this nature in partnership with the game industry.