Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture

Editorial

Holger Pötzsch — 2023-12-14

The editorial offers some red threads connecting the articles of this issue, introduces each contribution, and takes up some organisational matters.

Game worker solidarity

Austin Kelmore — 2023-12-14

This commentary discusses the Game Worker Solidarity (GWS) Project. It documents instances of collective action in the games industry, presenting the data in a map and accompanying database. The aim of the project is to facilitate sharing information on the emergent movement for unionisation in the games industry after 2018, as well as archiving the longer history of worker resistance. We argue that understanding worker organisation—both the existing forms of collective action as well as the potential in the future—is vital for understanding the future of games and game production.

Reimagining a future for game studies, from the ground up

Nicholas T. Taylor — 2023-12-14

This article posits a future for game studies based on considering the ground—metaphorically and quite literally—upon which we play, produce, distribute, and work with games. Offering a critical consideration of the mobile game Temple Run inspired by both postcolonial and anticolonial scholarship, I explore some of the ways in which games transform our relations to land. This offers a multiscalar understanding of games and (in) place. From this perspective it becomes possible to understand how games are materially imbricated in some of our most urgent challenges—a central task for game studies, both present and future.

Time to stop playing

Emil L. Hammar — 2023-12-14

This article highlights the interrelated crises that the games industry, its digital game consumers, and the academic field of game studies are embedded in and responsible for reproducing. By couching our analysis in Marxist, feminist, anti-fascist, and anti-imperialist understandings of how our social relations arise from the historical-material basis of society, we identify several different conditions of modern digital games that everyone working in and around games should confront and take seriously, especially regarding contemporary and future impacts and restrictions on the type of research and education we are able to conduct. These crises emerge from social and economic structures including imperialism, racism, militarism, fascism, and patriarchy. To better confront them, we broadly define the causes from which the morbid symptoms we witness arise in primarily Western societies and how they manifest in the games industry, its consumers, and its academic institutions. Based off these aspects, we extrapolate their trajectory in how they will change and adapt to the future of games and of their study, as the ecological and social crises intensify and reverberate. This allows us to propose potential strategies for radically confronting and potentially overcoming the looming crises related to war, patriarchy, white supremacy, famine, destitution, fascism, and climate apocalypse.

Fancies explained

Alesha Serada — 2023-12-14

The concept of symbolic capital, introduced by Pierre Bourdieu (1986), has been applied to explain the circulation of value between game communities and the industry. The bottom-up approach can be found in the studies of so-called “gaming capital” accumulated by gamers (Consalvo, 2009), while the top-down approach focuses on the agents who hold the most power in the gaming industry (Nichols, 2013). These perspectives may require reconfiguration today: since the end of the 2010s, traditional power relations have been contested by ‘decentralized’ gaming that uses blockchain technologies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Their early adopters suggest that NFTs may disrupt traditional circulation of value to the benefit of players as opposed to major corporations. Many gamers, however, vehemently oppose NFTs in games. By combining these top-down and the bottom-up approaches, this article explains that the specific symbolic gaming capital remains systematically underappreciated in blockchain gaming, which operates along different vectors of power. To support my argument, I turn to the longest-running blockchain-based game CryptoKitties (Axiom Zen, 2017), and analyze the elements of the role-playing genre that appeared in the game during the collective process of continuous development. In the first case, these elements (‘fancies’) were added by the developers of the game, and in the second case, an RPG-like extension emerged as one of its fan spin-offs (KotoWars). I conclude that symbolic capital is community-specific in the case of blockchain gaming. It is only available to those who already possess considerable symbolic, and, much more importantly, financial capital within the crypto community.

A future already past?

Hans-Joachim Backe — 2023-12-14

The article argues that blockchain-based games should be conceptualized as an emerging social practice that attracts financial speculators under the guise of online games. The article first outlines the blockchain-gaming discourse, which promises ownership and benefits to players, while it encourages financiers and publishers to exploit players. The article presents the performative discourse of blockchain advocates as well as the counterarguments presented by journalist, players, and developers, in order to demonstrate that arguments against cryptogaming are not anticapitalist and politicized, but mostly based on common sense. Then, the article investigates game studies concepts for their capacity to further explicate cryptogames, and finds that neither gamification nor playbor are completely fitting. Instead, the article turns to the game research fundamentals of Huizinga and Caillois to cast blockchain gaming in a new light. From this perspective, games like CryptoKitties and Axie Infinity emerge as nested activities that can be approached as play of financial speculation, with the latter approach being significantly privileged in existing games.

Narrative selfies and player–character intimacy in interface games

Agata Waszkiewicz — 2023-12-14

This paper discusses the use of selfies in narrative-driven interface games, that is games that place the narrative within fictionalized interfaces resembling those of computers or smartphones, as methods of creating intimacy between the characters and the player, while simultaneously maintaining the player’s separateness as a witness of personal stories, rather than their active actor. The article analyses how inter-character and player–character intimacy and emotional distance can be negotiated through the implementation of selfies into the narrative within interface games. The inherent intimacy of such games, which often tell personal stories of people of marginalized identities, is juxtaposed with the constrictions on the player’s agency—both in the overall gameplay and in their inability to take the selfies themselves. Three games are discussed according to three frameworks used to discuss selfies as noted by Gabriel Faimau (2020): a dramaturgic lens (the selfie as self-presentation), a sociosemiotic approach (the selfie as an art of communication), and a dialectical framework (selfie as a social critique).

Playing on life's terms

Elisa Wiik — 2023-12-14

This article sheds light on the changes to play habits when there is not as much time or possibilities to play as before. The research is based on a survey and interviews of Finnish former active players, who now played less or had quit some game types they used to enjoy. Most of the respondents still played something, but the playing had changed on the level of games, playstyles, time management, and content. These changes were then used as behavioral strategies to keep gaming as a part of the changing lives: shifting to lighter options, integrating playing into everyday life, redefining co-play, and focusing on opportunities. The results highlight the complexity and continuity of the changes and negotiations, and further hint at how the borders of casual and hardcore playing are fluid and mixed. This complexity and fluidity of play should be the starting point of a game design that must be heard in the public and academic discourses around gaming.

Young video game players’ self-identified toxic gaming behaviour

Maria Ruotsalainen — 2023-12-14

In this study we analyze negative behaviour in the context of digital gaming through interviews of players (N=12) aged 16–27 who self-reported as having behaved in a manner they acknowledged as toxic. Through thematic analysis of the interviews, we highlight three central themes: Games as affective spaces; affordances and norms facilitating negative behaviours; and players’ navigation of negative behaviours. Our study demonstrates the situational and affective nature of negative behaviour and offers solutions for reducing it in gaming.

Book review

Rob Gallagher — 2023-12-14

A review of Andrew Burn’s book Literature, Videogames and Learning. Published in 2022 by Routledge. ISBN: 9781032024523, pp. 232.