The International Journal of Games and Social Impact

Cover and Front Matter

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

International Journal of Games and Social Impact, 2(2)

Cover and Front Matter

Editorial

Renata Ntelia — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

International Journal of Games and Social Impact, 2(2)

Editorial

Designing Romance and the ‘Playersexuality’ Debate

Christine Tomlinson — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 12:12:19 +0000

Players of role-playing games have become increasingly interested in romantic narratives as part of the play experience. These romantic possibilities with preprogrammed in-game characters can be an exciting part of play, giving games more depth and allowing players to feel more connected to game content. This qualitative project applies content analysis to the Dragon Age videogame series and Baldur’s Gate 3 as well as online conversations among players of these games to investigate how players interpret, experience, and evaluate in-game romance. I find that players’ relationship to romance in video games is complex. Romance is often also built around the idea of player agency, aiming to fulfill fantasies and emphasize player choice over representing sexualities as part of characters’ identities. This has resulted in tensions as players seek out in-game romance, selecting in-game partners, exploring facets of identity, and often pursuing realistic stories when it comes to love. While some players appreciate playersexual models of in-game romance that make characters love them at the press of a button, the desire for realism – including the inclusion of characters with their own sexualities – often undercuts desires for control.

Beyond the Screen: Exploring the Player’s Role and Its Impact on Emotional Experiences in Video Games

Filipe Pinto — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article explores the idea of the player as a co-creator of their own experience in video games, focusing on how we can define their role within the game’s architecture and how they shape their emotional experiences. By agreeing to an implicit ‘contract’ as they play a video game, players not only accept to adhere to the rules of the game world but allow themselves to become engaged in the game’s narratives, landscapes, characters, and other elements, opening themselves to deep emotional involvement and becoming integral parts of the narrative structure. Drawing on examples from games like Mass Effect, God of War, Doki Doki Literature Club!, and The Last of Us Part I, among others, the article examines how players form emotional connections through romantic relationships, familial bonds, and friendships. Using concepts inherent to video games, such as agency and immersion, alongside others like involvement and incorporation, as well as those applicable to all fictional works, like suspension of disbelief and rational distance, the article ties these concepts together to better understand the player’s role and its impact on their experience. It highlights how that role influences these emotional experiences, allowing them to extend beyond the game world and leave lasting personal impacts on players.

I'd Rather Have Cake: Asexual Representation and Queer Designing of Games

Todd Parker, Renata Ntelia — Sun, 01 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Queer game academics have identified an increase in the number of games that explore queer experiences by experimenting with the limitations of games, particularly from small independent creators, that has been described as a queer games avant garde. Despite this, this paper identifies a notable under representation of identities and experiences along the asexual spectrum. In this vein, it documents a study that looked to explore whether the dominant way in which game design is approached as practice, with frameworks that separate formal gameplay elements from aesthetic elements, hinders the authentic representation of the asexual lived experience. This falls in line with existing pushes in the queer design space to move beyond popular forms of queer representation in games that have often limited it to dramatic elements such as narrative and art. To do this, the study employed popular design frameworks for designing a playable proof of concept with the aim to convey asexual experiences. Using design as a research method, the study showed that while these formal elements can convey themes, even those relating to the asexual lived experience, they fall short as a lone avenue for queer representation. Instead, the paper calls for the exploration of a more comprehensive design framework and proposes affect theory as an appropriate conceptual tool not only for game analysis but also for game design.

Gameful Pedagogy: Towards a Students' Bill of Rights

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 12:59:00 +0000

Adopting the central premise of gameful pedagogy that the rules and mechanics of classrooms can be productively analyzed as if they were games, this paper summarizes the results of a study that adopts the concerns of player-centered user-experience to evaluate the effects of instructional design on students’ well-being. Taking inspiration from game designer Graham Nelson’s “Players’ Bill of Rights,” we conducted focus group sessions with undergraduates at the University of Illinois, asking them to connect specific elements of instructional design with their emotional experiences in the classroom. In crafting an analogous “Students’ Bill of Rights,” we reframed course development as a student-centered design process. Student well-being is often implicit within learning frameworks which promote inclusive course design, but there is a need to make the connection between instruction and wellness more explicit. This study provides empirical support for best practices in instructional design and recommends that instructional designers become more conscious of the effect of course design elements on the emotional well-being of students.