Digital games are increasingly recognised as cultural artefacts that encode worldviews, power and possibilities through play. However, dominant frameworks for game analysis do not sufficiently account for power, epistemology and labour, limiting feminist critique to representation alone. This paper proposes the SPIRAL framework (Situated Production, Identity, Rules, Agency and Labour) as a feminist analytic intervention, extending beyond existing frameworks in some dimensions and reworking their categories in others, organising game analysis around epistemology, care and embodied practice to make visible how power is organised procedurally through play. Grounded in feminist technoscience, affect theory, decolonial feminism and procedural feminism, the framework is demonstrated through close readings of Mutazione , Flower and Stardew Valley . Comparative analysis then shows how feminist potential emerges relationally along dimensions. SPIRAL offers a framework for designers and scholars to guide both the development and evaluation of how games shape power and relations through systems.
This article examines how Potion Craft: Alchemist Simulator stages craft-like play through reflection-in-action. Drawing on Donald Schön's concept, it argues that the game makes mastery playable by turning potion-making into situated adjustment. The study combines reflective gameplay analysis with qualitative analysis of Steam reviews. Results show that mastery emerges through small real-time adjustments. Also, that these actions feel satisfying when they lead to discovery, improvement or self-authored solutions. However, when the same actions no longer generate new knowledge, they become labour-intensive. The analysis suggests that reflection-in-action is sustained while established knowledge remains useful but insufficient. It may become less necessary as increasing familiarity turns previously uncertain situations into routine practice. Potion Craft feels like craft when repetition remains reflective, and like labour when repetition becomes routine. When the game demands routine practice without meaningful variation or new judgement, the alchemist fantasy begins to break down and potion-making can become grind.
Saudi Arabia has made esports a centerpiece of its Vision 2030 transformation. In 2025, it hosted the Esports World Cup, the largest event in the sport's history, in Riyadh. This article asks how the Saudi press constructs the Kingdom through its coverage of that event. Using constructivist grounded theory, we analyzed 57 Arabic-language newspaper articles published during the tournament. We find that the coverage does not simply report the competition. It repositions the Kingdom from the host that receives the world to the author and leader of a global field. A process we call “ hosting as authorship ,” built by magnifying the event, nationalizing it through the leader and the nation, and reframing esports as a field worth leading. The construction is genre-bound and addressed inward, to a domestic public. We relate this inward narration to debates on nation branding, soft power and political legitimacy, showing how esports hosting can be narrated as a source of domestic legitimacy and not only external image-building.
For three decades, one question has organised scholarship on perspective in horror games: Which configuration produces stronger horror, first-person or third-person? Comparison across games cannot settle it, because character, space and affordance vary along with the setting. Resident Evil Requiem holds them still: one game, two protagonists, both perspectives and a toggle available throughout . This article reads that design through close playing across four configurations. The perspective never alters what a player-character can do. It alters what the player is permitted to know about the body she is operating: its condition, its capability and its bearing. The same setting carries opposite affective values across the two protagonists, and across Grace herself once she is armed. The reach of the setting narrows as the range of action widens. Perspective is a compositional apparatus, and what it produces is set by the point of action it frames.
In a recruitment ad for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a screenshot from the video game Halo was overlaid with the text “destroy the flood,” presenting an invitation to take part in exterminatory border violence as a form of play. Observing the disquieting glee with which border violence is promoted and conducted in the United States, this paper proposes that fascism should be read as a form of play. This paper looks to games studies as a means to examine how the racialized violence of American policing is given mechanics and procedures that render such violence as pleasurable. Through a case study of the 2023 SWAT-themed video game Ready or Not , this article discusses how thought patterns of fascism are simulated through game mechanics that present fascist praxis as desirable.
