Flow theory has been applied to wide-ranging disciplines including sports, music, creativity and board game play. Within ludology, it has been applied to players’ experiences while gaming, but not yet to characters’ affective experiences of flow; likewise, how a portrayal of a character’s flow state might impact players has not been examined. This essay explores the 2017 Nintendo title The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild ( BotW ) and its 2023 sequel The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom ( TotK ), whose protagonist Link utilizes an augmented version of the flow state. Giving Link access to flow state creates a point of connection between player and game; doing so ultimately promotes Nintendo’s mission to strengthen the player’s sense of identification with Link.
This article examines how linear mobile role-playing games (RPGs) generate a sense of agency without branching story outcomes. Focusing on Ashes of the Kingdom , a serialized, female-oriented mobile RPG operating under a games-as-a-service (GaaS) model, the study introduces the concept of operative signifiers: small, system-generated feedback cues such as dynamic forms of address, tonal shifts in dialogue delivery and unlockable memory scenes that acknowledge player input without altering the canonical plot. Methodologically, the study combines interactional textual analysis with an online survey ( N = 110) and fifteen semi-structured interviews. Survey results show that players report high perceived narrative agency and emotional resonance despite strong awareness of narrative fixity. Qualitative findings further reveal how players interpret micro-feedback as meaningful recognition, while also articulating moments of affective fatigue and deliberate resistance through what participants described as ‘testing’ or ‘playing against’ the system. Rather than framing constrained narratives as failures of agency, the analysis demonstrates how agency in this context operates as expressive and performative, grounded in how consistently the system responds to player actions at the level of tone, intimacy and interface feedback. The article contributes a transferable typology of operative signifiers that can be applied to other linear or micro-customized narrative games, offering design-oriented insight into how meaningful player experience can be produced without branching plot structures. More broadly, the findings situate these techniques within the economic logic of GaaS, where sustaining emotional engagement becomes a central design objective.
This study explores how female players, positioned as peripheral members of gaming communities, negotiate and construct their identities while navigating both skill-based and geographical scales in the online game Hearthstone . The findings indicate that female players often remain silent and struggle to reconcile their identities as both women and gamers. This silence manifests in three distinct forms: internalized silence, enforced silence and selective silence. In the local dimension, female players internalize the discourse norms and acquiesce to the male identity ascribed by others. In the international dimension, female esports professionals are forced to be silent due to the lack of voicing channel; only a few renowned champions near the core can choose whether to use their voice or remain silent. The findings reveal the systemic barriers female gamers face and expose the complex interplay of internal and external factors behind their silence.
Building on trauma studies and affect theory, this article examines the representation and the affective experience of queer trauma in This Bed We Made (Lowbirth Games, 2023), a game set in Montreal in 1958. More specifically, it explores the ways queer trauma circulates within this game and moves queer players. To do so, it first approaches queer trauma through the lens of everyday experience, focusing on material culture and the feelings attached to various personal objects. Then, it analyses This Bed We Made in relation to surveillance, suggesting that the game places the player within a sensibility familiar to many queer people in the 1950s and still resonant today, thereby capturing part of the affective experience of queer trauma. While trauma continues to be primarily understood in popular culture and academic discourse as the result of extreme violence or sexual abuse, this article contributes to an emerging body of research that examines more subtle and cumulative trauma-inducing experiences like microaggressions and structural violence, and how they can be conveyed through different artistic media.
Anti-heroines have become prominent in popular culture, yet their presence in video games remains underexplored. This article examines Queen Marika, the Eternal, from the video game Elden Ring as a case study in anti-heroinism. Drawing on media, literary and narratological theories, as well as Deleuzian-Derridean perspectives, the study situates Marika in a post-heroic world in which traditional moral binaries of good and evil are destabilized. The analysis reveals that while heroism in Elden Ring serves as an unattainable ideal, it shapes the contours of anti-heroism and anti-heroinism, offering a contrastive axis for understanding Marika’s character. Defined by violence and trauma, Marika’s actions reflect a paradoxical pursuit of heroic ideals through morally complex choices. This study concludes that Marika embodies an anti-heroine whose efforts to transcend her flaws are perpetually undermined by the post-heroic sociopolitical context of Elden Ring .
Review of: Mytholudics: Games and Myth , Dom Ford (2025) Berlin and Leiden: De Gruyter Brill, 358 pp., ISBN 978-3-11134-127-9, h/bk, USD 140
This article considers the inverse of world building in video games, which I call (adapting David Herman’s term) ‘world disruption’. I argue that world disruption in games speaks to contemporary anxieties surrounding ecological crisis, resonating with arguments in the environmental humanities on the need to rethink the destructive ontology (or ‘worlding’) of western modernity. I distinguish between two radical forms of world disruption in games involving (respectively) apocalyptic and metareferential framings. In the former, the end of the game world ushers in an entirely new ontological setup that is reflected in the game’s lore and narrative. In the latter, a metareferential device (an ontological metalepsis) reframes the game world as a fictional creation originating from another world. I illustrate these strategies by discussing a wide range of games, including Dragon’s Dogma 2 (Capcom, 2024), Hollow Knight: Silksong (Team Cherry, 2025) and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive, 2025). I show how, in different ways, these games negotiate environmental precarity and possible collapse, offering community building as an alternative to ontological stability.
Traditionally, the works of Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois are recognized as the foundational texts of English-language game studies. This article, however, aims to demonstrate that French-speaking scholars Jean Ch & acirc;teau and Jacques Henriot, though overshadowed by the aforementioned authors, made equally significant contributions to the discipline's development. Through an examination of their works, the author identifies key commonalities and distinctions between pre-1997 French play studies and English-language game studies, with the latter experiencing rapid growth since the 1990s. These differences encompass contrasting approaches to the ontology of play/games (predominant in English-language game studies) versus the social dimensions and applications of play (the central focus of French-language studies by Henriot and Ch & acirc;teau). The author advocates for the inclusion of Ch & acirc;teau and Henriot in the historiography of theoretical reflections on games, thus broadening our understanding of the field's intellectual foundations.
Mark Fisher's foundational work, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction, introduced and examined the concept of flatline constructs (FCs): non-human virtual entities that interact in lifelike ways with humans. Despite FCs being functionally dead, they operate in a descriptive grey area, embodying an uncanny juxtaposition of unlife-undeath identity. This scholarship reinterprets Fisher's FC notions as archetypes of the technogothic, applying this concept to examine Night School Studio's 2016 video game Oxenfree. I argue Oxenfree deliberately 'oscillates the flatline' manipulates in-game characters and digital sprite performances in ways that cycle between emotive portrayals imbued with 'alive' hyperhuman symbols, contrasting with alternating portrayals of these same characters as 'dead' hypertechnological entities. Oscillations manufacture an uncanny and discordant yet enthralling player's experience. By applying technogothic symbolism to Oxenfree, reinterpretation of Fisher's foundational theorizing and linkages between translational meaning and power themes are revealed. A pathway for applying theoretical perspectives to future research is presented.
When things go wrong, the opacity of the games industry means that developers must manage the frustrations of a playerbase whose understanding of game development is largely ignorant and misguided. A poor game launch is a time when such frustrations are heightened as players clamour to assign blame and point the way forward, and developers risk reputational or financial damage. Despite this, little research explores poor game launches. This article uses the example of Cities: Skylines II, analysing 4578 comments from the game's subreddit, to outline how players understand game development, who they blame for the poor launch, and how they understand their own role. The two key findings are that players understand themselves as consumers of a product and wield power accordingly, and perceive two classes of digital game workers opposed to one another: 'suits' and 'devs'.
Review of: The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sex and Sexuality in Game Studies , Matthew Wysocki and Steffi Shook (eds) (2025) New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 392 pp., ISBN 978-1-50139-403-4, h/bk, USD 133
Review of: Ecogames: Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis , Laura op de Beke, Joost, Raessens Stefan Werning and Gerald Farca (eds) (2024) Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 612 pp., ISBN 978-9-46372-119-6, h/bk, USD 202.00 ISBN 978-1-00369-450-2, eBook, open access
Review of: Twitch , Mark R. Johnson (2024) Cambridge: Polity Press, 228 pp., ISBN 978-1-50955-860-5, e-book, USD 18.00
This editorial introduces the Special Issue on ‘Time, Play and Games’. Time is a complex, multifaceted concept with physical, psychological, cultural and political dimensions. The articles that make up this collection are suitably diverse. They delve into different aspects of play and game temporality from a wide array of perspectives, offering insights into the temporalities of nostalgia, retrogaming, representation, game design structures, live-service games and more.
This article analyses the various temporal logics governing the functioning and play offered by modern live-service-games. It examines the different ways in which such games build underlying mechanics to engage the player and enable building repetitive commitments to in-game processes like grinding where time and acts of labour are repeatedly extracted. By using the ALNI framework to examine three live-service-games: Hitwicket, Skull and Bones, and Zenless Zone Zero, the article identifies both standard and unique approaches to developing audiences and sustaining the time players spend in-game. The article juxtaposes these measures against success criteria for live-service-games, to highlight the homogeneity in everyday play mechanics and ways in which time-bound content and incentives are delivered. It questions how players' time and efforts can be protected when games' engagement strategies fail and calls for adopting nuanced perspectives that rebalance play and access in game design.
This article identifies the queer potentials of slow play by analysing the results of seven semi-structured interviews with players of the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). During interviews, players acknowledged that a key element of playing D&D was slowness: they took their time exploring loca-tions, engaged in lengthy turn-based combat sessions and had in-depth discus-sions. Here players and their characters move slowly, in what I term 'slow play'. In playing slowly, players created a queer experience of time through a resistance to heteronormative temporal orders defined by productivity and linear progres-sion. I focus particularly on how interviewees wandered away from pre-established goals to produce a method of play that delayed resolution and formed new spatial locations. Ultimately, I contend that slowing down the pace of play queers time through its resistance to normative play movements.
This article introduces the concept of ludo-solastalgia to describe the distress players experience due to changes in video games over time, drawing on place attachment and solastalgia from environmental psychology. Ludo-solastalgia is proposed as a framework for understanding how game updates, developer deci-sions and community actions can disrupt a player's connection to virtual worlds and prompt protective actions. Through a review of industry and academic liter-ature and case studies of Destiny 2 and MapleStory, this study highlights key markers across virtual environments to establish a foundation for future research into ludo-solastalgia. Technological and cultural markers of ludo-solastalgia are identified as areas for developers to address in order to promote sustainable player engagement and to help players better understand their dissatisfaction with evolv-ing virtual worlds
This article examines the analog horror web video series Super Mario 64: Classified as a reinterpretation of the influential N64 title Super Mario 64. It begins by discussing the concept of analog horror, a genre that employs the aesthetics of older media formats to evoke both nostalgia and unease. This sets the foundation for exploring the connection between the web series and the origi-nal game. The series reimagines familiar game elements to generate an uncanny sense of horror. Central to this is the idea of 'emergent gameplay and narrative', which ensures that players remember and engage with diverse gameplay moments and story elements through creative interaction with game mechanics. The article investigates how the series draws on these aspects to maintain ties to the original game while crafting new narratives, highlighting the enduring influence and adaptability of Super Mario 64 in contemporary media.
Following a platform studies approach to video games, this article explores Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), a cluster of machine learning-based upscaling and anti-aliasing techniques designed to make graphically intensive games run faster and in higher resolutions. Its inclusion as an optional setting in video games influences how players sense time, in terms of increased frame rates and temporal artefacts, and the visual instabilities, flickerings and 'ghosted' images that this technology creates. To offer a closer look at the visual manifestations of temporal manipulation at play in contemporary upscaling technologies, this article focuses on the video game Control (Remedy Entertainment 2019). While Control is not mechanically concerned with time management or manipulation, this article argues that the game thematically addresses the takeover of futures by medial pasts in a way that rhymes with the temporal manipulation inherent in DLSS's use of machine learning models.
Hegemonic game time and slow game time represent opposing video game design paradigms. The former emphasizes commercialized gameplay rhythms that link pleasure and power to speed and control, and the latter focuses on process, stillness and waste, challenging the naturalized connections between play, power and time. The independent video game Before Your Eyes (GoodbyeWorld Games, 2021) exemplifies the tensions between these paradigms through its innovative blink-ing mechanic, where players control the game by staring and blinking to navigate the protagonist's memories. This article examines how Before Your Eyes uses its narrative and mechanics to explore the fleeting nature of time, positioning time as both a precious, ever-dwindling resource that demands control and as something to be cherished in the moment. The game confounds the temporal binary between hegemonic and slow game time, presenting a unique case study in the complex interplay of these oppositional design approaches
