For your theoretical consideration: Game Studies volume 20, issue 3.
“Elves are Jews with Pointy Ears and Gay Magic”: White Nationalist Readings of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
by Kristian A. Bjørkelo
This article explores how White Nationalists on Stormfront interpret (decode) Skyrim in accordance with their own worldview and the affordances of the game. In their eyes the Nords are a Germanic people and “Elves are Jews with pointy ears and gay magic”.[more]
A Typology of Imperative Game Goals
by Michael S. Debus, José P. Zagal, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera
This paper presents a typology of game goals to fill a gap in the literature regarding kinds of goals in games and how they are interrelated. We focus on ludic goals, instead of player created or narrative goals. The typology can be used for describing goal structures, how higher-level goals relate to lower levels and analyzing a games’ design.[more]
Sorry, Wrong Apocalypse: Horizon Zero Dawn, Heaven’s Vault, and the Ecocritical Videogame
by Megan Condis
This article is an examination of the ecocritical potential of Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerilla Games, 2017) and Heaven’s Vault (inkle, 2019). I argue that to properly depict climate change, we must develop new narrative formats and game mechanics that showcase “slow violence” (Nixon 2011).[more]
by Janine Engelbrecht
Lara Croft, the heroine of the popular Tomb Raider videogame series, has undergone a major transformation after the series reboot 2013. The new representation of Lara Croft is a clear departure from the postfeminist action heroine archetype and is replicated in other post-2013 videogames with female protagonists.[more]
This paper argues for applying corpus linguistics to videogames; a method that can reveal textual patterns in a corpus of games. This method is applied to gender representation in an example corpus, offering quantitative analysis of how discourses around social identities are (re)produced.[more]
by Jeremiah McCall
Historical games present the past in terms of historical problem spaces: player agents with roles and goals that are contextualized in a virtual world whose features enable and constrain player action. The HPS framework helps us better understand the gamic medium of history, with utility for historical game scholars, educators, and game designers.[more]
by Liam Mitchell
While Bernard Suits’s landmark book The Grasshopper is as playful as it is rigorous, scholars in game studies tend to reference it only for its apparently bloodless definition of gameplay. This paper responds to this reception by highlighting the productive ambiguities of the text, particularly the relationship between games and society.[more]
by M. D. Schmalzer
This article develops the concept of janky controls to disrupt the assumed cybernetic connection of player and game. Through this disruption, standard notions of player subjectivity is also disrupted allowing for more diverse players and videogame design practices.[more]