Iain Banks’ Complicity (1993) features a fictional ‘world-builder’ game called Despot that actively watches and emulates the player. This fictional game emerges as part of the Scottish Fantastic, a literary tradition that explores split selves and divided identities. Despot plays into this literary tradition as it creates a violent ludic other for the otherwise passive protagonist that plays it. Yet as a closer examination of Despot reveals, the game does not ‘uncover’ or ‘mirror’ the protagonist’s latent violence so much as it refracts it through its procedural logic. Despot prophetically predicts and critiques the rise of the quantified self within games, as features like morality meters, achievements, reputation systems and Elo ratings all ‘watch’ and create ludic versions of the player. Towards the end of the novel, the protagonist leaves Despot running and returns to find a radically altered version of the game. Without the protagonist’s interference, his empire has crumbled and been reclaimed by nature. Through this, Banks also provides a lens through which the quantified self can be subverted and repurposed in ways not limited by the cultural logics that produced it.
This paper explores the portrayal of an obfuscated female protagonist in the minimalist videogame Unpacking, which narrates its story entirely through its mise-en-scène. Adopting a social semiotics approach, the study delves into how the socially constructed elements of the game's mise-en-scène assist players in ‘unpacking’ the protagonist's identity and narrative. Unpacking introduces a novel approach to ludonarratology by intentionally omitting the direct presence of the protagonist, instead focusing on the spaces and objects that players interact with. As players progress through the protagonist's life, these spaces and objects become laden with social significance, creating a shared history between the player and the protagonist. The game diverges from traditional storytelling methods, offering an environment where the story is pieced together through the objects unpacked in each new space the protagonist inhabits. These objects serve as signifiers of her memories, aspirations, and life stages, evolving beyond mere gameplay elements into artefacts that shape her life story. A significant aspect of this paper is its discussion of the novel portrayal of a female protagonist who is omitted from visual representation. Rather than focusing on her physical appearance, the game emphasises unearthing her identity through gameplay, allowing players to discover who she is. The game exemplifies how minimalist narrative techniques, rooted in social semiotics, can foster rich and engaging storytelling experiences. By omitting a visible protagonist, Unpacking allows players to explore and interpret the narrative through the spaces and objects they encounter and the connections they establish between them. This article's significance lies in its examination of Unpacking as a case study for understanding how minimalist narrative techniques can effectively convey a complex and emotionally resonant story through unconventional means.
Nostalgia as a longing for a place or time can simultaneously act as an invitation toward belonging and also as a barrier that divides. Utilizing Svetlana Boym’s (2001) framework of restorative and reflective nostalgia, this study undertakes an analysis of press coverage (n=8) and fan comments on YouTube videos (n=400) addressing the digital videogame Lies of P (2023) as a nostalgic trigger. Understanding Lies of P, both in press coverage and fan discussion was often laden with nostalgia for the 2014 videogame Bloodborne and various adaptions of the children’s story The Adventures of Pinocchio. In the case of fan comments in particular, reflective nostalgia, which allows for the possibility of both longing and critical thought to manifest together, emerges strongly as fans contest their understandings of videogames and childhood stories. Lies of P as a nostalgic trigger precipitates fan participation in analysis and critical reflection of media they might otherwise consider above critique. Understanding such gaming and gaming-adjacent spaces where critique and affection blends offers further insight into the social and technical structures that facilitates boundary maintenance.
This paper investigates how players engage with and reflect on the construction of the nation and its place in history in the turn-based strategy game series Civilization (1991–2025). The Civilization series has been studied extensively concerning portrayals of history and nationhood within the games, mainly through their rule systems. This study’s purpose is to add a player-centered perspective to this body of scholarship and thereby critically challenge assumptions about players’ reception of the games’ portrayals of the nation throughout history. For this purpose, a structuring qualitative content analysis was conducted to analyze player discussions on the largest German-speaking Civilization forum. As this study demonstrates, players neither simply internalize nor ignore the games’ ideological underpinnings inherent to the structure of their rules as previous literature assumes. Rather, players negotiate Civilization’s portrayal of the nation throughout history in complex ways that are, most of all, dependent on their own national identities and feelings of belonging. The study thereby speaks to broader disciplinary discourses within game studies by critically investigating whether or how ideologies ingrained within games’ rule systems are perceived, discussed, negotiated, or sometimes even subverted by players.
This article examines a particular relationship between game authors and players: the possibility for game authors to co-opt the role of players in the very game they created. Among the various ways in which this can occur, the article concentrates on ‘antagonistic game design’: the creation of games meant to frustrate and provoke their players. Player engagement, I argue, does not solely arise from the pleasure of overcoming in-game obstacles, participating in the unfolding of the game’s narrative or defeating other players, but can also emerge from resisting and opposing an imagined persona: the off-putting and often sadistic (implied) author behind the work. By projecting an unsympathetic and adversarial attitude towards players, antagonistically designed games can establish an asynchronous adversarial relationship with them and foster distinctive avenues for meaning-making and the self-validation of players.
Metroidvania games are characterized by highly interconnected levels that open up as the player acquires new skills or knowledge of the game world. In this article, we argue that the spatial interconnectedness of the Metroidvania genre strongly resonates with ecological theories foregrounding human–nonhuman enmeshment as well as nonhuman autonomy. Discussing two recent Metroidvania titles, Hollow Knight (Team Cherry, 2017) and Rain World (Videocult, 2017), we show how these games consistently challenge the player’s environmental imagination, and particularly notions of human mastery over the nonhuman world. They do so on multiple levels: by evoking rich postapocalyptic settings that resist the player’s attempts to project anthropocentric assumptions onto the games; by confronting players with nonhuman characters and lore that remain unreadable and opaque; and by creating dynamically evolving game worlds in which nonhuman behavior feels unruly and unpredictable. Most importantly, though, the two games suggest ecosystemic interconnectedness by defamiliarizing the players’ understanding of exploration as the linear traversal of spaces that can be fully controlled and depleted. Through this discussion, we aim to situate Metroidvania games within the growing archive of ecogaming, explaining what is so unique about the genre’s approach to the environmental imagination.
Video games and their history are mostly seen from a masculine standpoint. Most traces, commentary, workers, communities, significant events or people, etc., are linked to a masculine lens that tends to ignore or marginalize women in video games and their culture. Even if they were clearly minorized in a masculine and sometimes hostile environment, there is a need to observe a part of history that gives us more information on the thought, the production, the influence, and the discourses of women without limiting them to the status of passive victims or to the margins of history. This article uses methods inspired by cultural history and textual analysis to investigate women’s discourses about women protagonists present in the game reviews of the specialized press covering video game culture and the video game industry. By doing so, we will observe a complex situation where different, and sometimes contradicting, intentions can be linked to how women characters are described, criticized, or mentioned in the reviews. As such, this analysis will show a cultural context where women’s writings are sometime influenced by the masculine hegemonic discourses made by or for a mostly gender restricted definition of the ‘gamers’, while other women’s text openly resist this hegemony by criticizing the way the many protagonists and women are represented. Women, their writing, and traces of their intention, can be seen in multiple magazines from 1981 to 2021. As such these public discourses are a small but important part of a more general and diverse history of video games and their communities.
Cozy games, risen in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic, are generally characterized by their easy mechanics, prosocial narratives, lack of violence, and overall feelings of comfort, safety, abundance, and softness. While academic research primarily focuses on defining cozy games and exploring their impact during the pandemic, little is known about who plays them and why. Therefore, we conducted an online survey of 277 cozy game players, examining players’ game motives and their Light and Dark Triad personality traits. Results show key reasons to play cozy games, including moral self-reflection (i.e., seeing cozy gameplay as a morally sensible activity), agency (i.e., having the freedom and control to make decisions and pursue actions according to players’ own desires or goals), escapism (i.e., escaping from daily reality into a safe virtual environment), experiencing eudaimonic emotions (i.e., feeling moved, awe, and having elevating or heartwarming or feelings), and an interest in the game’s narrative. Additionally, players scored significantly higher on Light Triad personality traits, with those scoring high on Humanism being more motivated by eudaimonic and social reasons. This study provides novel insights into the study of cozy games, the (eudaimonic) motives to play them, and cozy game players’ personality traits.
Multiplayer gaming highly depends on teamwork, making the spatial arrangement of players an important design factor. This study examines how two seating configurations—linear seating and stellate polygonal seating—affect multiplayer performance, communication, and overall collaborative experience. Twenty-four participants played in teams under both arrangements, followed by surveys from sixteen participants evaluating eight aspects of teamwork and interaction. While linear seating resulted in higher kill counts and thus stronger quantitative performance, players consistently rated stellate polygonal seating more positively, emphasizing its advantages for communication and team-centric engagement. These findings note the complex relationship between spatial layout and team effectiveness in gaming environments and suggest that optimal multiplayer setups require balancing functional performance with social and spatial dynamics. Future work should explore additional spatial variables that may further enhance collaborative gameplay.
A review of Sarah Stang, Mikko Meriläinen, Joleen Blom, and Lobna Hassan’s edited volume Monstrosity in Games and Play: A Multidisciplinary Examination of the Monstrous in Contemporary Cultures. Published by Amsterdam University Press, 2024. ISBN: 978-9-46372-568-2, 294 pages.
Traditionally, theories of play and games have drawn a clear distinction between two different forms of activity; play and labour. Over the last two decades, the concept of playbour has challenged this division, with empirical studies and observations showing the intertwining of play and labour. This article offers an analysis of playbour through different perspectives of Critical Theory and explores its theoretical implications. The novel concept of reified gameplay is presented to understand the alienating tendencies of playbour, using the games EVE Online and CryptoKitties as key examples. Reified gameplay is a form of gameplay action shaped by processes of reification and rationalisation within and as part of the culture industry.
This commentary examines the state of Native representation in videogames from a Native perspective. Also, this commentary offers examples of Native Representation in Videogames from 1971 to 2025. Furthermore, I provide decolonizing and indigenizing examples of Natives in videogames. The paper also contains recommendations for further research and suggests good practices for videogame developers to facilitate design of positive Native representation as a decolonizing practice of indigeneity. This commentary closes with a call for positive representation, as seen in Never Alone (Upper One Games, 2014), the first videogame made by an indigenous-owned videogame studio.
Videogames invite players to inhabit virtual worlds that often represent or simulate ecologies. Existing conceptual frameworks for understanding these dynamics and experiences as they arise from play emphasise the role of the videogame text in structuring such meaning. This article introduces the concept of emergent ecological dynamics to explain how, within the situated and ephemeral experience of playing a videogame, new ecocritical meaning can emerge, and can be captured in user-created paratexts. Undertheorised in ecocritical game studies are player experiences of ecologies and environments that emerge in ways unanticipated and unintended by gamemakers. By drawing on explanations of assemblage, emergence, and the materiality of digital media, this article suggests a latent potential for all videogame texts to convey ecocriticality. The methodological value of addressing player paratexts—as a means for scholars to access and analyse otherwise transitory emergent ecological dynamics—is also explored. The capacity of such user-created artefacts to manifest players’ revelations of ecological entanglement, development of ecological awareness and encounters with potent sensations of affect drawn upon as examples.
Nowadays, an increasing number of videogames have incorporated cultural heritage elements that belong to a wide variety of regions. This has prompted a growing body of academic research regarding this topic. This paper presents the results of a systematic literature review, investigating how different aspects of cultural heritage are represented in entertainment videogames. A thematic analysis of 80 publications was conducted, categorising the studied cultural heritage elements into tangible and intangible themes of cultural heritage. Our review revealed that existing publications have extensively explored the representation of tangible cultural heritage in games, especially architecture and artefacts. In contrast, the representation of intangible cultural heritage has received significantly less attention, such as religious rituals, folklore, and symbolic references. Moreover, we observed that game designers tend to select cultural heritage elements familiar to their target audiences, which lied in depictions of historical periods, notable historical figures, and architectural styles. Finally, this review highlights gaps in current research including a narrow focus on certain game genres and a lack of in-depth study on the representation of intangible cultural heritage.
This paper provides an introduction to fake games. Based on the concept of fictional games, or non-actual games that are presented to be imagined, I define fake games as non-actual games that are presented with the intention to trigger false beliefs in the existence of the game or its presented mechanics and story. First, I clarify the notion of fake games by comparing it to fictional games. I discuss how some representations of non-existent games blur the boundaries between fiction and lies. Such games are not clearly embedded within works of fiction and are presented without a clear context to help readers decide whether they should believe or imagine the game to exist. I discuss games that are represented through fake/fictional gameplay, paraludic material, or metaludic material. Lastly, I clarify the potential purposes fake games can serve. I distinguish darkly designed fake game representations from deceptively designed ones. The former have the intention of deceiving people into making certain decisions. Fake game advertisements, for example, aim to trick people into downloading mobile games that lack the features showcased in the ad. Deceptively designed fake game representations, on the other hand, deceive players with the aim of giving rise to aesthetically valuable experiences. Players’ false beliefs could, for example, give rise to interesting emotional responses.
This paper examines the dystopian Italian science-fiction film I guerrieri dell’anno 2072 (Fulci, 1984), with a particular focus on the Battle of the Damned, a deadly televised contest in which condemned prisoners fight to the death in the reconstructed Colosseum in Rome. A consideration of this fictional game within the film’s dystopian future Rome will open onto three intertwined lines of analysis: the classicist impulse to conceive of a continuity between imperial Rome and contemporary Italy, the adoption of this classicism in fascist Italy, and media consolidation in the context of neoliberalism and political corruption in the 1980s. By pursuing these lines of analysis, the paper will argue that Fulci’s film functions as a critique of the national cultural moment from which it looks towards both Italy’s past and future as a continuity of authoritarianism and oppression.
This essay will focus on a case study, a particular fictional game that has given rise to variants across both literature and film: the Hellraiser puzzle box. We focus on Clive Barker’s short story The Hellbound Heart and two films from the film franchise: the 1987 Hellraiser and its reboot, the 2022 Hellraiser, which fleshes out (pun intended) the mythos. In addition to discussing the overt horror genre framing and themes through the lenses of literary analysis and film studies, we also propose an analogy with the literary genre that most notably straddles the same nexus of body-puzzle-space, closely intertwining the three: that of detective fiction. Its similarities with and differences from the Hellraiser puzzle box will be used to elaborate the interpretation of its design, functioning, and (il?)logic.
This article proposes a widened view of fictional games by considering the game guidebook Vermis I – Lost Dungeons and Forbidden Woods (2023) by Plastiboo. Through a kaleidoscope of theoretical concepts hailing from playfulness, aesthetics, design, narratology, and literary reception, the authors engage with the issues of literary play and imaginary games. This conclusion is drawn: Vermis exemplifies a fictional game existing both parallel to a secondary world and within its own secondary world created by a factual book. Its format invites a literary play activity showcasing the playful power inherent in fictional games.
This paper explores the arena of The Hunger Games series (2008–2010) as game space, focusing on power dynamics between the Capitol and the tributes. The Hunger Games, as a televised deathmatch, exemplifies a battle royale setting orchestrated by a totalitarian regime to maintain control over subjugated districts through a brutal spectacle. This analysis examines the Capitol’s oppressive control, reflected in the meticulously designed arena—a setting where tributes are subjected to constant surveillance and manipulated by the Gamemakers to maximize entertainment value. Using Michael Nitsche’s framework of video game spaces, the analysis dissects the arena as rule-based, mediated, fictional, social, and play space, each aspect reinforcing the Capitol’s authority. In spite of this, tributes like Katniss Everdeen reclaim limited agency through acts of defiance and exploitation of the arena’s inherent flaws, allowing resistance from within the game system through cheating and deception.
This paper conducts a textual analysis of the animated comedic web miniseries Box Peek, analysing it as a general parody of transmedial gaming franchises, particularly the Pokémon TV series. The show features the fictional game of Box Peek, which is used as a device to not only provide drama and motivation for the show’s characters, but also to parody the games and associated conceits that are central to these franchises, often for the sake of humour. This discussion makes use of theories of fiction and parody, cultural analyses of Pokémon and children’s media, as well as Box Peek’s creator’s own commentary to understand how fictional[ised] games create meaning for an audience. It concludes having discussed two major threads of analysis. The first concerning the rules of the game, which implies questions of strategy and technology, which eventually concerns fictional world-building, exploiting the fictional and ludic inconsistencies that exist in transmedial game franchises for humour. The second is the way in which Box Peek, after formally parodying shows like Pokémon, then extends this parody by answering the questions it raises. In so doing it is argued that Box Peek is simultaneously imitating the childlike tone of Pokémon before progressing to a more reflective, adult perspective on the enjoyment of these series by the audience themselves. This leads the (presumed millennial) audience to a retrospective self-assessment of how, now in adulthood, they regard transmedial gaming franchises of their childhood in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
