The International Journal of Games and Social Impact

Editorial

Hugo Barata, Rui Filipe Antunes — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tactile Texts

Simone Downie — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper describes Shadow Castle, a two-player interactive storybook game that blends digital projection with tactile materials to engage players in narrative exploration. Developed as an arts-based intervention, the game supports aliterate learners – those who can read but don’t want to – by reimagining reading as a self-driven yet collaborative process rooted in play and imagination.

In the game, two players progress through a fairytale-inspired world using a collaged fabric book constructed with conductive materials, as well as a companion tablet. Touch-based interactions reminiscent of touch-and-feel storybooks activate hidden story elements, trigger animations from an overhead projector, and reveal additional pieces of narrative. This multisensory structure reframes reading as an active, process-based social experience, concepts that align with the core principles of intrinsic motivation.

The development of Shadow Castle was shaped by co-design sessions with university students, who explored their emotional and symbolic associations to fabric through playful activities. These sessions investigated how physical materials shape understanding, offering valuable insight into how learners might connect more deeply with story when multiple senses are involved. Insights from these sessions directly informed the book’s material design.

This paper outlines the game’s design process, technical implementation, and early playtest feedback, while also reflecting on how its creation shaped the author’s evolving artistic practice. By merging craft, technology, and storytelling, Shadow Castle explores how multimodal, participatory design can open new pathways into reading, particularly for those who have felt excluded or disinterested in traditional text-based approaches.

COLLECTIVE AESTHETICS THROUGH I-POSITION AND SELF-ENGAGEMENT

Maryam Farahani, Ian Schermbrucker — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The social impact of board game usability is historically explored in group and multiplayer contexts, ranging from pedagogical spaces of collaborative student learning to team and businesses development. Alongside educational usability, aesthetic features of board games are long established in children and adults therapy for enhancing symbolic and emotional expression with interpersonal motivation in a safe space. Given consistent emphasis on multiplayer board games and group impact, this paper addresses an overlooked area concerning human interaction with oneself rather than with others, achieved through artistic features in solo board games. We, therefore, employ psychological and aesthetic frameworks to discuss the significance of I-position designs for identity multiplicity, demonstrating the need for solo game designs to improve inclusion specifically for neurodivergent and disabled individuals as well as introverts who may prefer solo board games.

Art devices - play devices: immersion vs. estrangement in art-games

Maria Mandea — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the concept of "device" in art, beginning with Viktor Shklovsky's Russian formalist concept of ostranenie, or "making strange," as the essence of artistic expression. It then applies this idea to games, especially hybrid and large-scale analog art games, by exploring the central, academic tension between immersion and the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) as an ethical-political device linked to the German playwright Bertolt Brecht.

While the dominant paradigm in game design is immersion—where the player is so emotionally absorbed that they forget the artificiality of the medium—Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt is the deliberate act of breaking the audience's focus on narrative to allow for critical thinking about the situation. This paper argues that games that exist solely as one or the other are limited: a game focused solely on immersion risks being pure entertainment. At the same time, one concentrated solely on alienation could be perceived as abstract or unplayable.

The most powerful design, therefore, lies in the dialectic between these two forces, in complicity. Estrangement creates an intentional "crisis within immersion" that forces the player to step back from their emotional experience and critically analyze the game's constructed situations and underlying systems. Through this process, the player becomes complicit, and the game is transformed into a participatory and critical medium, serving a political and didactic function that encourages reflection on the issues and power dynamics it models - an essential direction if it is to be considered a form of art.

This paper draws upon the author’s design experience, using art games to demonstrate these concepts in practice. The analysis includes The Rousseau Game, an exhibition playground created for and displayed at the National Museum for Contemporary Art in Bucharest and Divided, a game developed for the Deep Space 8K at the Ars Electronica Center Linz.

DIGITAL ARTS, DIGITAL GAMES AND VOLUMETRY

Pablo Gobira, Emanuelle Silva, Eduardo Séllos — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The paper here presented stems from the experiences had at Laboratório de Poéticas Fronteiriças, LabFront, a research, development and innovation group that aims to problematize at the borders of the fields of science, art, and technology. One of the most relevant aspects of social construction currently is the way in which new, state-of-the-art technology is being applied to visual, artistic creations, and how they help us shape and understand the reality we live in. Specifically in the third decade of the 21st century, the applied potential of digital games, or gamified applications are, virtually, present in most aspects of our day-to-day lives. In this paper we propose to better analyse how such creations, which we understand as a facet of digital arts, are relevant to the ever developing world. Having a special interest towards the use and application of new technology and how it affects the strength of such visual, poetic constructions this paper aims to analyse how and in which ways new volumetry technologies are (or can be) used in digital game as a way to strengthen and expand the possibilities that such creations can achieve and, consequently, its social impact and reverberation.

PRESS PLAY TO START

Raquel Pereira — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Curating video games in art museums presents a range of complex theoretical and practical challenges, necessitating a critical reassessment of established museological norms and practices. As both cultural artifacts and interactive experiences, video games are inherently participatory, technologically dependent, and susceptible to rapid obsolescence, which complicates the processes associated with their collection, preservation, and exhibition in ways that exceed the demands associated with traditional art objects.

Drawing a parallel between New Media Art and video games, this article focuses on the challenges of exhibiting digital and electronic works within the context of art museums. By examining the process of translating video games into artistic objects and the implications of their inclusion in museum settings, it invites a reflection on more specific issues, including the mediation of interactivity within institutional space; the construction of narratives that confer cultural value and stimulate critical engagement; the tension between material and immaterial components; the intersection of gaming culture and the white-cube gallery; and technological obsolescence, which threatens to render games unplayable within a few years, thereby jeopardizing their preservation as authentic cultural forms. This analysis is informed by perspectives from museum studies and curatorial theory.

By theorizing these issues, this exploratory article contends that video games should not be merely integrated into pre-existing curatorial frameworks. Rather, their exhibition demands the development of new curatorial models that address hybridity, interactivity, and technological ephemerality. Ultimately, this study contributes to broader debates surrounding digital culture, arguing that video games compel museums to reconsider both their curatorial practices and their foundational conceptual frameworks.

STILL NOT GAME

Linda Loh — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Still Not Game reflects on the use of Unreal Engine as a visual artist’s studio space. The artist presents her personal journey of learning and making with the software, never having played a computer game. Determined to create abstract work unrelated to games or simulation, she built a virtual realm more concerned with non-worldly experience. The world formed into a sublime landscape, a timeless space that might transport visitors to altered states. Years later, after many software updates, the artist still feels like a beginner, using only fragments of its vast potential. Through experimentation and accretion, that world became an overwhelming space, full of strange objects, overgrown like a crazy garden. A revelation, a shift to an artist’s mindset, suddenly turned it into an artist studio: a site where iteration, what-if scenarios and serendipitous insights give rise to an endless flow of new works, exploring luminosity and transcendent spaces afforded by the software.

History-Themed Games from the Players' Perspective

Ayşegül Nihan Erol Şahin, Muhammed Erdoğan — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This study seeks to answer the question: What are the opinions and experiences of young people interested in history regarding learning history through digital games? To address this question, posts by enthusiasts of history-themed games on Reddit, a popular social media platform among gamers, were analysed through qualitative content analysis. Based on these posts, additional questions were formulated and posted on the platform to further explore the topic. The responses, along with the initial posts, were collected and analysed. The study is limited to texts written in Turkish or English by users on the mentioned social media platform. The findings reveal that some students attribute their success in history courses to digital games, while certain teachers incorporate these games as educational tools in their lessons. Additionally, some users stated that digital games can provide fundamental knowledge of historical events and offer complementary benefits for history education. On the other hand, some users expressed concerns about the potential of digital games to distort historical accuracy, highlighting the risk of misrepresentation in game narratives.

Gaming in the Crossfire

Akinade Adewojo — Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Negative online behaviors, such as toxicity, continue being issues in several popular multiplayer online games (PUBG) affecting player’s experience. Related research suggests that there are individual differences in how players understand the concept, and that various interconnected variables are relevant in understanding the emergence of toxicity. Although previous studies have illustrated common types and features of in-game toxic behavior, it remains unclear what psychological mechanisms can explain why toxic behavior emerges and evolves in gaming environments. To fill this research gap, this study explores the forms, causes, and effects of toxicity in PUBG, drawing insights from player interviews and community forum analyses. The findings reveal that toxicity manifests as trolling, harassment, skill-based insults, and gender-based discrimination, disrupting communication and creating hostile environments. The results were used to create a series of recommendations for online video game developers in their attempts to address toxicity. Recommendations included emphasizing transparency with a game's player base, overhauling the in-game report function, and introducing a system for reinforcing positive behaviors.