Games and Culture

While the terms “cozy” and “eco” have become common in recent game culture, the combined term “cozy ecogame” is rarely used and has not been fully defined as a concept. The study identifies how cozy ecogames engage players with environmental issues through a game analysis of two cozy and two noncozy ecogames, using a DiGAP-inspired protocol. Further included is a content analysis of 400 player reviews for two cozy ecogames and two noncozy ecogames. The findings reveal how cozy ecogames avoid highlighting harmful effects or dystopian futures, to instead utilize cozy design elements to construct hopeful climate communication, creating an experience where players feel relaxed and safe to participate in climate action, leading to noticeable betterments of in-game environments. Players of noncozy ecogames are also identified as having different motivations for playing than those of the cozy ecogames.

Research in ludolinguistics (language and gaming) often does not engage with how players respond to the language within videogames. This study explores prominent phraseology within a corpus of c.650,000 words collected from 11 Legend of Zelda games and how players respond to this. We discover that instructions (which enable developers to communicate gameplay mechanics) tend to use similar lexical bundles. We identify that these instructions are either direct or characterized. These lexical bundles are then used as the basis for materials in a questionnaire containing closed and open-ended questions. We first quantitatively explore participants’ (N = 49) preferences for different types of instruction, then qualitatively investigate their perceptions via open-ended responses. Our findings suggest a mix of overall preferences, but that each type of instruction is preferred in particular contexts. We conclude with a discussion of the findings and implications for game design.

This paper introduces a theoretical framework for understanding “hopepunk games” by combining hauntological attitudes and utopian approaches, offering a grounded conceptualization of its core traits. By drawing together theories from hauntology and utopia as method, the framework synthesizes them into core concepts that engage and mirror each other. This produces prompts for analyzing hopepunk games both conceptually and practically. The approach clarifies that kindness and care aren't substitutes for political struggle but are embedded in a dual practice. It prevents hopepunk from complacency or mere critique, repositioning it as a lived stance that fosters action, solidarity, and transformative collective efforts. It offers a theoretically grounded, analytically attentive, and practically useful account of hopepunk.

Video games frequently revive pre-modern magical thinking despite their modern computational infrastructure. Focusing on the fulu (Daoist talisman), this article employs “mechanics archeology” to examine its digital translation. Through a close reading of Devotion, the study reveals how the fulu constructs ontological horror through strict adherence to site-specificity. In counterpoint, global titles such as Naraka: Bladepoint and Genshin Impact demonstrate an alternative destiny of decontextualization. The article argues that the digital fulu represents a recoding based on procedural rhetoric where algorithmic units displace theological contracts. The talisman thus evolves from a medium of invocation into a floating signifier. This analysis reveals how video games serve as a medium of TechGnosis that reconstructs the isomorphism between algorithmic logic and magical thinking, realizing a secular re-enchantment within the virtual heterotopia.

As the climate crisis escalates, video games are gaining recognition for shaping environmental perspectives that might inspire change. Although research has tended to focus on serious games, the ecocritical potential of entertainment games is increasingly advocated. However, this potential remains underexplored from a transdisciplinary perspective that encompasses fields such as ecogame studies, game literacies, and game-based learning. This systematic literature review analyzes 80 studies published between 2019 and November 2024, addressing how entertainment video games engage with environmental issues. Six themes were defined: Game Design, Climate Change, Future-Oriented Perspectives, Posthumanist Approaches, Games in Non-Guided Contexts, and Games in Guided Contexts. These were discussed through the four ecocritical dimensions of video games: Knowing, Feeling, Imagining, and Acting. This review provides an overview of current research. It also suggests directions for future work, shifting attention from games’ ecocritical design to how players engage with and around games and their impact beyond gameplay.

This article critically appraises Clint Hocking's seminal blog post, “Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock.” In doing so, it aims to provide clarity on ludonarrative dissonance: a concept that has been widely utilised yet under-theorised since its inception. First, the article reviews contesting notions of ludonarrative dissonance before establishing a game-centred, rather than a player-centred, understanding of the term. Then, by expanding on Hocking's brief reading of the acclaimed 2007 video game, BioShock, the article challenges the common assumption that certain aspects of this game's ludic and narrative properties are in flux. Finally, the article advocates moving away from Hocking's perception of ludonarrative dissonance as a design flaw in video games; embracing the concept from the point of view of the researcher and video game developer as a signifier of ideological tensions and a rhetorical device.

Teaching game development may come at odds with long-standing university structures due to industrial and cross- and multidisciplinary art-design-engineering aspects. This systematic literature review outlines standard practices for teaching game development in higher education. It shows two decades of increasing demand for established methods, with research that does not primarily focus on student motivation and engagement remaining sparse; out of 1076 records screened, 108 publications were included. Findings strongly indicate that project-based learning (PBL) structures with student groups creating game prototypes are effective. Many publications provide rich analysis of shorter courses or interventions. However, well-documented shortcomings in individual assessment and support in PBL structures are rarely addressed. Recommendations for higher education practice include curriculum restructuring with longer educational timeframes, clear progression paths, and robust measurement frameworks to address common challenges to student collaborative dynamics and enable missing fundamental skill development in computational thinking and theory-driven artistic approaches.

This article investigates how LGBTQ + youth cultivate enduring relationships through the cross-platform ecologies surrounding digital games, arguing that these environments function as affective infrastructures of dwelling. Drawing on qualitative interviews with LGBTQ + participants aged 17–25, the study demonstrates that relationships initiated in multiplayer games deepen as they circulate across Discord, Twitch, voice channels, and private messaging networks. Combining Heidegger's notion of dwelling with Sara Ahmed's theory of affective circulation, the article conceptualizes these relational formations as sticky intimacies: Affectively adhesive ties that emerge through repetitive encounters, shared rituals, and collective rhythms of online co-presence. Findings reveal four interlinked dynamics, existential significance, expressive plasticity, collective spatiality, and negotiated safety, through which participants fashion livable digital environments amid offline precarity, heteronormative surveillance, and identity-based risk. Digital platforms become spaces where visibility can be modulated, emotional breathing room is achievable, and continuity of self is sustained. Rather than treating gaming spaces as inherently protective, the study highlights the labor, moderation practices, and boundary-work that make such ecologies inhabitable. By theorizing cross-platform circulation as an affective-spatial process, this research expands digital games scholarship and offers a nuanced account of how LGBTQ + youth craft durable, meaningful intimacies within increasingly interconnected digital worlds.

This article proposes a structural reading of the Quake videogame that departs from conventional approaches to game analysis. Rather than treating the game as a coherent fictional world, characterized by narrative or stylistic continuity, this work interprets Quake as an ontological system generated through refusal, subtraction, and spatial discontinuity. By examining the technical substrate of the game's engine, the pervasive role of void, the instability of scale and continuity, and the collapse of global spatial reference, this paper shows that Quake produces coherence not through world-building but through structural constraints that negate representation. The player emerges not as a character but as an operator who temporarily stabilizes an otherwise unstable field. Therefore, coherence arises from systemic refusal rather than from additive construction. This framework positions Quake as a prototype of negative game design and suggests broader implications for spatial theory, game ontology, and the analysis of coherence in digital environments.

Through an examination of Epic v. Apple, this article defines and traces the project of metaverse engineering: a long-term, large-scale reorganization of the games industry at technical, organizational, and governmental scales. Metaverse engineering as a games industry project seeks to redefine regulatory and market landscapes to redefine what counts as a platform, as data ownership, and as games themselves. Epic Games′ goal of the platformization of gaming production software like Fortnite and the Unreal Engine will require more than just using game engines to develop financialized 3D worlds. It will require the production of enticing legal and monetization models to encourage content creation, and competing for influence in regulatory and governmental regimes. Gaming platformization is not only technical, it is ontopolitical: the material realities of platforms shape and are shaped by rhetorical, social, cultural, and institutional forces. Epic's court successes have already moved us into a post-metaverse world.

This essay provides an interpretation of Bloodborne, with the aim of shedding light on an issue that late modernity is facing. The paper argues that Bloodborne exemplifies a tragic allegory of Nietzsche's philosophy within a Lovecraftian universe: the will to overcome the limits of intelligibility either leads to madness or self-annihilation. Through a careful examination of Lovecraftian horror via the notion of intelligibility, and drawing on insights from Western philosophers, the game is shown to exemplify a central Lovecraftian idea: that with greater knowledge comes the confrontation with the incomprehensible, and with it, the descent into madness. The Lovecraftian background is then combined with Nietzsche's philosophy to illuminate the themes of overcoming, greatness, and self-annihilation in Bloodborne. The article concludes with a key insight: the path to greatness inevitably requires thinking beyond the “I,” an insight particularly relevant to the contemporary world marked by the absence of intergenerational thinking.

How do games articulate discourses of climate crisis? The article compares a particular discourse of climate change—the Anthropocene—in two digital games: the 4X strategy game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (1999) and the computer roleplaying game Disco Elysium (2019). Comparing two games separated by decades, production context, and genre reveals productive differences and similarities in the representation of the Anthropocene. The article presents an overview of the Anthropocene discourse from its origins to its relationship to complementary and competing concepts such as the noosphere and Capitalocene. The fictionalized Anthropocene(s) presented in Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri and Disco Elysium are then read for their resonance with these real-world visions of the Anthropocene. The article demonstrates complications to the tendency of various digital game genres to articulate specific discourses of the Anthropocene, ranging from games’ narrative genres and the broader political currents during game production.

The vision of seamlessly integrating virtual and physical environments—variously called spatial computing and the metaverse—has been around for decades. Recently, Big Tech companies, including Apple and Meta, have prioritized ushering in this computing paradigm. Despite hardware and interface inadequacies, how do these companies make such visions feel not only inevitable but also readily achievable? This paper analyzes performances of corporate vision-making as technological fictions, drawing attention to the genre and aesthetics that make a future seem like the future. By interweaving narratives illustrating the sociality of metaverse futures with presentations of technical capabilities, corporate visions purposely blur fiction and fact such that the former is mistaken for the latter. As scholars consider how to refuse Big Tech visions, excavating how inevitabilities are mere possibilities offers one critical strategy.

This article examines how Quasimorph, a turn-based roguelike extraction shooter, models and critiques anarcho-capitalism through its narrative, worldbuilding, mechanics and economic systems. Anarcho-capitalism is a political and economic philosophy which envisions a stateless society based upon private property and voluntary contractual exchange within unfettered free-market competition – capitalism, without the state. Traditionally state-performed services (policing, defence, administering justice, etc.) would instead be performed by private companies competing for profit. Quasimorph offers a speculative, futuristic vision of anarcho-capitalism in practise in a colonized solar system. The game offers a powerful critique of anarcho-capitalist thought which, on three distinct fronts, shows that anarcho-capitalism would represent only a ‘seeming change’ from capitalism that would preserve and exacerbate its worst aspects. This paper shows how Quasimorph put this critique in playable form, affirming the video game's status as a vehicle for the critique of social and political ideologies.

Pierre Bourdieu's sociological framework has become foundational in Game Studies, underpinning fundamental concepts like Mia Consalvo's gaming capital, Graeme Kirkpatrick's gamer habitus, and Brendan Keogh's video game production field. This article synthesizes research deploying Bourdieu's triad—field, capital, and habitus—to construct a cartography of the video game field. Our theoretical-methodological intervention offers: 1) the exploration of new zones beyond the video game industry; 2) the description of the various types of capital(s) valued in these spaces; and 3) the analysis of the most common habitus deployed within them. Following Deleuze and Guattari's cartographic approach, we frame this not as prescriptive theory but as a navigational tool for mapping fluid territories of practice. The model's boundaries are consciously delimited by both historical temporality and Bourdieusian theory's operational scope.

The sublime remains in game studies a concept most often linked to visual spectacle, spatial scale, and cinematic immersion associated with the medium's post-1990s technological development. This article challenges that orientation by arguing that sublimity in video games emerges less from representational excess than from moments of systemic failure. Drawing on aesthetic theory, philosophy, and game studies scholarship, it reconceptualizes the glitch as a central and transhistorical site of the digital sublime. Rather than treating glitches as frustrations, the article frames them as structurally revealing events. Through analyses of Pac-Man's level 256 killscreen and failure states such as death loops in Fallout: New Vegas, it shows how glitches produce similar affective conditions that closely parallel classical accounts of the sublime.

Games Workshop (GW) is a top 100 British company known for their Warhammer brand. Almost no attention has been paid to GW business strategy, however, in academic or management practitioner literature. This study addresses the analytical gap by examining how GW monetizes serial paratext over time. It connects GW's 1994–2002 magazine, The Citadel Journal, to the company's Warhammer+ digital platform TV content (2021–present) and references White Dwarf magazine (1977–present). We use reflexive thematic analysis to demonstrate seven GW paratext themes across decades. While the overall themes remain consistent, we identify changes in emphasis. For example, GW experiments with more advertisements and staff-produced reporting about the company but restrains customer participation. Our analysis informs wider debates about how paratext can operate within game studies and suggests that more scholars could assess its commercial implications.

This article aims to problematize two major paradigms of positive biopolitics in digital games. The study uses biopolitical analysis tools developed within and without game studies, to explore the positive pole of biopolitics, often neglected by critically oriented game studies. The article presents short case studies of simulation strategy games Terra Nil and The Wandering Village that thematically reference positive forms of governance: rebuilding the community, mending the world after catastrophes, and achieving a social, economic, or ecological utopia. Within these games, I searched for representations of positive biopolitics, understood as good community-oriented governance over life. The analyses broaden the understanding of the biopolitical aspects of environmental governmentality in digital games and provide explanations of two modes of realizing the philosophy of care in ecogames.

We revisit Life in the Garden more than a quarter of a century later, aiming to leverage advances in modular storytelling techniques and large language models (LLMs) to address limitations of the original: (1) narrative incoherence and (2) the lack of a strong sense of authorship. We built an interactive storytelling system and co-performed the story in a live session to test participant engagement. The experiment produced both a screenplay and a visual comic in near real time. Here, we share practical insights from the process and lessons from participant feedback. Those seeking to create coherent and author-driven interactive stories may find this particularly useful.

This article conducts a bibliometric analysis of 816 Games and Culture publications (2006–2025) indexed in Scopus to explore how specialized journals shape the institutionalization of interdisciplinary fields. Through citation networks, keyword co-occurrence, authorship, and geographic analyses, it treats the journal as a model of scholarly infrastructure in game studies. Results reveal steady publication growth (from 20 to over 100 articles annually), increasing collaboration (2.39 authors per paper), substantial citation accumulation (2006–2008 works exceeding 3,000 citations), and diversification beyond anglophone regions. Temporal keyword trends trace thematic shifts from virtual worlds and MMOs to esports, ethics, gamification, and representation. These findings inform broader debates on how niche journals foster disciplinary legitimacy, showing that Games and Culture has been central to consolidating game studies and offers a transferable framework for examining institutionalization in other interdisciplinary domains.