2025: Abstract Proceedings of DiGRA 2025: Games at the Crossroads

Papers

• Communicative Artificial Intelligence for Nonplayer Characters in Digital Games: Mapping the Field

  Dom Ford

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• Trajectories of Professionalization as Game Developer in 2000s Brazil: stories from Tectoy Digital/Zeebo Interactive Studios/Tectoy Studios

  Bruno de Paula

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• "Love's a Game, Wanna Play?" Games in and around Taylor Swift's Music

  Elina Koskinen, Lobna Hassan

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• Tentacle to the Metal: Ecosophy, Metamodernism, and Splatoon 3

  Nikolas Matovinovic

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• Towards a Southern Epistemology in Game Studies: Gaming Practices, Ideological Struggle, and Common Sense in Latin America

  Marco Jaramillo

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• Party Games as a Crossroad Between Strangers: A Mixed-Methods Study

  Leland Masek, Daphne Bachmann, Yutong Wang, Mohammad Asif Ibtehaz

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• The Evolution of Liberalism in the XCOM Franchise Reboot

  J. M. L. Whittington

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• Uncanny Homecoming: The Temporality of Dwelling and Return in Digital Games

  Justyna Janik, Daniel Vella

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• Still failing to disclose loot box presence: Identifying illegal UK video game ads using Meta's advertising repository

  Leon Y Xiao, Elena Petrovskaya, Callum Deery, Solip Park, Philip W. S. Newall

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• Writing the World: Personal Journals in Video Games

  Kübra Aksay

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• Out of Bounds: Exploring Beyond the Map

  Hollie Wistow

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• Creating video games in Barcelona: field, capital(s), habitus and belonging

  Juan Francisco Torres Díaz, Joel Feliu, Adriana Gil Juárez

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• This Gift of a Fragile Vessel: Encountering Perspectives on the Real in Slay the Princess

  Péter Kristóf Makai

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• Roleplay with chatbots on character.ai: A new direction for online gaming?

  Kristine Ask, Tanja Sihvonen

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• Impact of Full-Body Haptic Feedback on the Sense of Presence, Affective Experience, and Game Engagement in a VR Game

  Naman Merchant, Ecem Ince, Jung In Jung, Haocheng Yang, Andrea Szymkowiak

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• Playing World War II. Designing a simulation game on the Resistance in Turin in collaboration with the historical archive.

  Mauro Mola

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• Following the Bunny: Gendered Labor and Digital Play in Livestreaming Cultures

  Thomas Apperley

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• Diode Games: Rediscovering the Bridge between Analog and Video Gaming through the Elektor Magazine

  Pierre-Yves Hurel, Johan Cuda, Sophie Bémelmans, Yannick Rochat

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• Reshaping Esports Fandom: Insights into Platformization from B.stage and LCK Communities

  Yeochan Park, Jinhee Yang, Yaewon Jin

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• Oedipus at the Crossroads: Tragic Agency in Contemporary Videogame

  Xinyue Zhang

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• Save-Scumming: A Novel Exploration of Video Game Play

  George Farmer, Danielle Kelly, Amanda Jones-Rincon

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• Assemblages of Awareness: Exploring the Role of La Valise de Lise in Addressing Older Adult Mistreatment through Collaborative Play and Cultural Adaptation

  Constance Lafontaine, Kim Sawchuk, Sarita Israel

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• An "easy life" or "no freedom of expression"? Men's experiences of game culture

  Kristine Jørgensen, Hilde G. Corneliussen, Arne Graham Christiaan Campbell

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• Returning to The Last of Us: The Aesthetics and Contexts of Remaking & Remastering The Last of Us Franchise

  Scott Knight, Jakub Majewski

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• Bridging Virtual and Real-World Charity: The Role of Interactive Narratives in Ant Forest

  Ming Ying

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• Playing With Videogames on YouTube in East Asia

  Martin Roth

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• Watching different play styles: The pleasure of transgressive play in Tears of the Kingdom

  Xin Pan

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• Fair Play Perspectives: Bridging Research, Design, and Industry

  Ida Kathrine Hammeleff Jorgensen, Jessica Enevold Duncan

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• Memorializing the Dead with Games

  Martin Gibbs, Marcus Carter, Fraser Allison

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• Between Action and Inaction: A Distant-Play Reading of The Longing

  Kübra Aksay, Astrid Ensslin, Sebastian R. Richter

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• Chludens.ch: Developing an interactive archive for Swiss vintage games and its community

  Noemi Chow

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• "One-and-a-Quarter Way Relationships": Understanding Authenticity and Asymmetry In Gaming Podcast Audiences

  Ryan Stanton

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• From Military Simulation to Ludic War: A Generational Typology of the Mobilization of Play

  Dennis Jansen

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• "We were the porters of overseas media." -- An investigation into the gaming information media under the influence of the state

  Lifeng Huang

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• Fifty Shades of Red. Depictions of the Eastern Bloc in American and European Cold War-themed real time strategies

  Szymon Kukulak

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• Indie vs. AAA: A Model for the Educational Potential of Artificial Intelligence in Video Games

  Piotr Siuda, Piotr Siuda, Piotr Siuda

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• Fake VS Fictional Games: On Dark and Deceptive Representations of Non-Actual Games

  Nele Van de Mosselaer

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• From Wuxia to Cultivation Games: Reimagining Chinese Cosmology in Digital Space

  Morgan Yu Hao

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• At the Crossroads of Game Studies and Business Ethics: What are the Sustainability Obligations of Stakeholders in the Game Industry?

  Thorsten Busch, Tanja Sihvonen, Florence Chee

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• Virtual Burden: Representations of Animal Disabilities in Video Games and Their Posthuman Contexts

  Jan Stasienko, Agnieszka Dytman-Stasienko

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• Undead ecologies: Reconceptualising zombiism in videogames

  Lawrence May

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• Private Servers Are More than Video Game Piracy

  Geoffrey Hill, Martin Gibbs, Melissa Rogerson

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• The gaming habitus: An exploration of gender and class differences among student gamers

  Rune Klevjer, Jan Fredrik Hovden

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• Excitatio Corcyrae: Embracing history through mindful game design

  Sofia Despoina Kyrgiafini, Ioannis Ntionias

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• Navigating The 'Gamer Space'

  Caitlin Veal

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• Preliminary Results from a Systematic Review of Narrative Game-based Interventions for Mental Health

  Nisha Devasia, Jamie Espinosa-Briones, Julie Kientz

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• Understanding the paradox of MetroidBrainias: The case of Animal Well

  Xin Pan, Wenting Cheng

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• Exploring Gender, Identity and Belongingness: The Role of AI-driven Social Features of the Gaming Platforms in Shaping Chinese Female Gamers' Experiences

  Weijie Huang

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• Production and reception of Yugoslav past through Roblox games

  Elisabetta Zurovac, Gaia Amadori

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• Design Decisions and Obstacles in Serious Game Design: Insights from Design Cases

  Rafael Leonardo da Silva, Esther Daniells, Marium Baig

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• Soulslike Posthumanism: Open Subjectivity and East Asian Philosophy

  Marco Caracciolo

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• Making Friends with Death: Posthuman Post-Life Play

  Poppy Wilde

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• By the Law of the Wolf. Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Heart of the Forest between global, national, and fictional

  Tomasz Majkowski, Aleksandra Prokopek, Magdalena Kozyra

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• WildStar's rogue archives: exploring an anarchaeological approach to defunct games

  Lawrence May, James Manning

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• Unexpected Feelings: Counterfactual History in The Seven Cities of Gold (1984)

  Diego Calderara

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• Assessing the landscape of illegal loot box advertising in Belgium

  Elena Petrovskaya, Leon Y Xiao, Nicole Khoo, Amanda Roberts

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• "We'll always go with what's more sustainable": Understanding the Financialised Logics of Game Development

  Taylor Hardwick, Ben Egliston, Marcus Carter

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• On Simema: The Radical Passivity of Self-Playing Games

  Doug Stark

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• A Dating Sim Without the Dating: New Adventures at the Crossroads of Literature and Games

  Jon Stone

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• From Extended Self to Posthuman Other: Empathy and Morality in Encounters with AI Characters

  Theresa Krampe, Melanie Kreitler

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• Cruising in Apulia. Mediterranea Inferno at the Crossroads of Queer Desire and Political Crisis

  Giorgio Chiappa

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• A Call for an Appalachian Game Studies

  J. M. L. Whittington

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• The Military-Entertainment Hero Complex: Playing the War Hero

  Caighlan Smith

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• Ludotariat: problematizing the gaming class

  Michał Kłosiński

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• Swiss Pinball Culture: Between Nostalgia and Revival

  Mela Kocher

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• Crafting Comfort: Postdigital Practices in Current Cozy Games

  Bettina Bódi, Jan-Noël Thon

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• "Planting World Seeds": Procedural Content Generation, Labour and Conceptual Art in Digital Games

  Finn Dawson

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• Understanding Transmedia Character-Centric Discourse in Gacha Games: A Social Semiotic Analysis of Genshin Impact

  Haoning Li

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• Discourse Analysis of Game Mechanics: A Methodological Proposition

  Camila Freitas

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• A Plague Tale: Autoethnography and Authenticity in Historical Games Research

  Nick Webber, Poppy Wilde

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• How Video Game Journalists Cover Sexual Misconduct in the Industry

  John Fennimore

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• Game Localisation in Live Game Streaming: A Practice-Led Case Study

  Dody M.H. Chen

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• Decisions in the Loop: An Empirical Study of Narrative Time and Player Agency in Hades and Twelve Minutes

  Brent Van Mol

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• Dies Irae in a fantasy world: Gregorian sequence and Requiem motifs in Heroes of Might and Magic series

  Radosław Walczak

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• Transforming Shibuya through the power of graffiti, fashion, music, and friendship.

  William Helmke

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• Conspiracy Thinking and Videogame Interpretation

  Nele Van de Mosselaer, Kathleen Murphy-Hollies

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• P(l)aying for Love: Capitalizing on patterns of contemporary romance fiction in PlayMe Studio's MeChat

  Magdalena Bednorz

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• Racketeering, Cartels, Collusion and Extortion: Exploring the Language of Player-Organized 'Criminality' in MMORPGs

  Nick Webber

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• Feasible Antiquity: Ancient History in the Unity, Unreal, Godot and itch.io Asset Stores

  Brent Van Mol, Alexander Vandewalle

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• Divided by Politics, United by Play: Computing in East and West Germany during the 1980s

  Regina Seiwald

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• Zoos as utopian enclaves in Ark Nova

  Michal Jutkiewicz

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• The Fractured Imbunche: a Study of Chilean Horror Games

  Val Caroca Escauriaza

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• Queer enclosure in the cinematic adaptation of The Last of Us

  Bjarke Liboriussen

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• Inducing and non-inducing interpretations of the sinograph in Word Game

  Yue-Jin Ho

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• Bird Games - an exploration into game experience design for children within the Central Energy Trust Wildbase Recovery Centre.

  Tanya Marriott

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• Game Jams as Pedagogic Playgrounds for Problem Deconstruction and Reflective Learning

  Lindsay Grace

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• "You have to prove yourself all the time": Misogyny and countermeasures in game journalism

  Antonia Maria Wurm

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• The Spike Video Game Awards Are Dead, Long Live the Game Awards: Reconsidering Awards Shows as the Struggle for a Field of Cultural Production

  Andrei Zanescu

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• Gameplay-Elicited interviews: Exploring Worldness and the Processes of Play

  Mike Hyslop Graham

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• Gothic Forests and Magic Flights: Examining the Gothic False Hero in Campbell's Hero's Journey

  Jacqueline Moran

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• Fighting Against Return: a taxonomy of time loops in digital games

  Matteo Genovesi

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• Love as a service in otome games

  Joleen Blom

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• Shifting The Meta: Bridging The Gap Between Scholar and Developer Perspectives of the Post-Pandemic Game Industry

  John Redinbo, Gwendolyn Patwardhan, Maxwell Foxman, David Jeong

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• Shaping Time in Games: Developer Approaches to Temporality

  Thomas Byers, Martin Gibbs, Bjorn Nansen

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• Half Stress, Half Party: Play and Labor at Mattel in the Early Videogame Industry

  Tom Boellstorff, Braxton Soderman

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• Games for Fun and Games for Blood: A Framework for Understanding In-Game Violence

  Charalampos Apartoglou

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• Virtual Roads, Real Ecologies: Driving Games, Coziness, and Petroculture

  Bettina Bodi

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• Encounters with the Self as Other: Empathy in the Games of Nomada Studio

  Melanie Kreitler

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• "It's a real con": Parent Attitudes Toward Children's Game Spending

  Marcus Carter, Taylor Hardwick, Stephanie Harkin

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• (Semi-)Peripheral Gameplay in Video Games

  Stanisław Krawczyk

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• Iterating the Past: Using Game Analytic Methods in Historical Game Studies

  Keerthi Sridharan

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• Playfully Conservative: Reinventing Nintendo's Platform Games through Materiality in Yoshi's Crafted World

  Josef Tichý

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• Masculinity in gaming discourses: A general overview of an ongoing project, and some early findings

  Ida Martine Rysjedal

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• History of Artist-Gamemaking: The Art of Tomorrow - Selectparks.net "artists exploring computer games as an emerging, artistic medium"

  Helen Stuckey

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• Studying the Invisible: Femininity and Gaming in Girls' Lifestyle Magazines

  Stephanie Harkin

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• Rewriting the Script: Navigating Cybernetic Dynamics and Ethical Expression in Modular Narrative Games—The Case of Storyteller

  Jingyan Lin

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• Expanded Abstract_Gaming in the Gray: The Making of "Mindie" Games in China's In/Formal Network

  Ningxi Guo

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• Towards Ethical Guidelines for Videogame Character Creation with GenAI

  Jana Hecktor, Theresa Krampe

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• Alternative localities: Queering Time and Space through Videogame Play

  Hollie Wistow

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• Cosmoludics: Sylvia Wynter, C. L. R. James, and the Crossroad of Cricket

  Doug Stark

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• LUDIFYING DIGITAL PROTESTS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH: THE BANGLADESH SCENARIO

  Souvik Mukherjee, Piuli Basu

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• Making Bodies Possible: Exploring Transformative Justice in Esports

  Tom Legierse, Maria Ruotsalainen

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• Hardcore Gamers in Ballgowns: At the Crossroads of Gender and Play

  Ashley Guajardo

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• Exploring Waste and Garbage through a Digital Game: The Case of Stardew Valley

  Agata Zarzycka

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• Speculative Games: Games Envisioning Possible Futures

  Tonguc Sezen, Digdem Sezen

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• Golden Goal: Altruism versus Toxicity and the Soul of Football (Soccer) Simulators

  Iain Donald, Andrew Reid

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• LAN is Dead, Long Live LAN

  Aidan Strong, Elliot B. Yu

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• At the Crossroads of Art and Games: NPCs in Contemporary Video Art

  Rob Gallagher

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• Pokimane, Myna Snacks and the Cookie Controversy: Combating Platform Dependency by Performing as the Streamer-Entrepreneur

  Pauline Munnich

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• The Human Encounter as a Designable Surface: Leveraging Insights from Larp Design to Enable Democratic Participation

  Johanna Koljonen, Jaakko Stenros

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• Playing the Othered Self as Wukong: a Resilience in Speculative-Mythological Games

  Yifan Wang

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• Gaming the Political Arena: An Analysis of Political Messaging on Twitch in Germany

  Maria Grub, Antonia Wurm, Julian Kauk

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• Affording Playfulness in Daniel Benmergui's Storyteller

  Kieron Brown

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• The digital imaginary of esports: A League of Legends Worlds case study

  Josh Jarrett, David Murphy

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• The expectation game: Exposing hidden assumptions in a game studies classroom.

  René Glas, Jasper van Vught

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• Playing with Identity: Racebending in the God of War Series

  Kimberly Dennin

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• Cross-Border Conflicts in Gaming: Indo-Pak Tensions in Competitive Multiplayer Spaces

  Tushya Sachan, Dinesh Chhabra

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• Suicide Livestreams in NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD

  Julián Gutiérrez Carrera, Joleen Blom

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• Otium and Walking Simulators

  Jan-Noël Thon

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• At the crossroads of innovation and regulation: legal implications of using AI in game development.

  Maciej Niezgoda

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• Mutual Incorporation: On Eating and Being Eaten in Bugsnax (2020)

  Merlyn Seller

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• Assassin's Creed Syndicate and the Depiction of Female "Britishness" in Victorian London

  Andrew Reid, Iain Donald, Hailey Austin, Fruzsina Pittner

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• Just Can't Get Enough: Exploring the concept of tolerance in gaming and gambling

  Joseph Macey, Maris Catania

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• Copyright and games preservation: lessons and opportunities in de-colonization

  Abby Rekas, Matt Voigts

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• Folklore-driven representations of femininity in Slavic-coded video games: the figure of Baba Yaga

  Aleksandra Mochocka

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• Silent In-game Concerts: Text-Based Musical Performances in MUDs

  Karina Moritzen Barbosa

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• Music beyond gameplay: embodied experience of acoustic music in the covers of original game soundtracks

  Aleksandra Mochocka, Radosław Piotr Walczak

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• Between preservation and nostalgic fantasy. Approaches to fanmade remasters

  Krzysztof Olszamowski

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• Beyond Metagames: Analyzing Metareference in Videogames

  Theresa Krampe, Jan-Noël Thon

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• Gaming streamers as influencers and intermediaries: Differentializing the micro, meso and macro contexts of streaming

  Jeffrey Wimmer, Antonia Wurm

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• Failure: Dealing with Non-Existence in Videogames

  Sebastian R. Richter

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• Posthuman Gaming in a Time of Planetary Crisis: Human Agency at the Crossroads of Technology and Ecology in Signalis

  Wing Tung Jamie Tse, Eric Peterson

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• Two Routes to Research and their Implications for Avatar-based Interviewing

  Matthew Pulis, Luke Joseph Buhagiar

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• Exploring Collaborative Practices in Video Game Development: An Ethnographic Study

  Laureline Chiapello

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• Mindful and Mindless Gaming: Two Approaches to Emotional Regulation Through Play

  Tiernan Cahill

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• "The Protagonist Training Project": How Simulator-Style Produsage on Social Media Shapes Our Gamified Daily

  Sunny Jie Yang

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• Playfulness in Comics

  Kieron Brown, Jan-Noël Thon

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• Moral Ambiguity in Playdead games

  Fabrizio Fulio Bragoni, Marvic Catania, Dean Muscat

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• Games that Play You: Outmersion, Game Bleed, and Transformative Vulnerability in Hellblade

  Juliana Ruseva

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• Playing with Perspectives: German Planspiele as Tools for Political Education

  Regina Seiwald

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• Preserving Japanese Indie Games at BitSummit Drift 2024

  Michael Pennington, James Newman

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• Theatre of (Virtual) Dreams: Exploring the Cultural Heritage Value of Stadiums in the EA FC/FIFA Franchise

  Iain Donald, Andrew Reid

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• On the Aesthetic Relevance of Difficulty in Games

  Johan Kalmanlehto

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• We. The Revolution: Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, Authenticity.

  Andrew Reid, Iain Donald

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• AI Nightmares: Videogames and The Uncanny Valley in Images Generated by Artificial Intelligence

  Ana Laura Torquato, Caio Tulio Olimpio Pereira da Costa

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• Virtual Memories of Displacement: A Narrative Game in VR Exploring Refugee Stories through Symbolic Interaction

  Anastasios Theodoropoulos, Marios Ilias Ntetzonai, Yannis Aggelakos

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• Speak with blocks: Minecraft, environmental education and activism

  Gaia Amadori

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• History and operational mechanisms in the video game industry: the case of the Turin cluster

  Nicola Costalunga, Riccardo Fassone

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• (Dis)Embodiment: Trans Hauntings in Kitty Horrorshow's Corpus

  Merlyn Seller

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• The Lost 87%: Towards Improved Access to Games for Game Design Education

  Lane D. Koughan, Jin Ha Lee

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• Crossover Kingdom: Narration, Gamification, and the Platform Unconscious of Kingdom Hearts and Disney Parks

  Luna Loganayagam, Samuel Pizelo

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• Shades of Grey in the Gaming Industry: A Case Study of Commercial Boosting in China

  Samson Tang, Ningxi Guo

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• Measuring the impact of an educational project mediated by indie games on students' personal, social and learning to learn competence: work in progress

  Raquel Palomera, Jorge Oceja

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• An EEG hyperscanning setup to investigate collaboration in games

  Stefan Glasauer, Margarete Jahrmann, Georg Luif, Theresa Demmer, Matthew Pelowski

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• Avatar and Real Me: Identity Anxiety of Chinese Mobile Otome Game Players—A Case Study of Papergames

  Yutong Wang

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• A Game Developer's Perspective on Social Impact Video Games: Conclusions from a Qualitative Study

  Damian Gałuszka

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• Cozy History? Frameworks, Contrasts, and Affect in Cozy Historical Video Games

  Alexander Vandewalle

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• Rhetorics of Puppy Love and Death in The Pale Beyond (2023)

  Eleonora Imbierowicz

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• Becoming, Not Being: Rethinking Mental Illness at the Crossroads of Videogame Representation

  Sina Torabi, Jasvinder Mann

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• Card pack and loot box spending are both positively correlated with problem gambling but not linked to negative mental health

  Leon Y Xiao, David Zendle, Elena Petrovskaya, Rune K. L. Nielsen, Philip W. S. Newall

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• More than Let's Plays? Towards a content analysis of game-related YouTube videos

  Vincenzo Idone Cassone, Martin Roth

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• "Spatial Rape": Interleaving House of Leaves with MyHouse.pk3

  Péter Kristóf Makai

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• "Test Trophy Please Ignore": Achievements as Paratexts in Palimpsestic Readings of Remasters and Remakes

  Loris Rimaz, Michael Wagnières, Yannick Rochat

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• Making cozy games: How game developers build (and talk about) cozy games

  Mia Consalvo, Kelly Boudreau, Andrew Phelps

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