by C. Barkman
The boundary of what exists inside and outside a videogame world is one that is frequently transgressed. This article discusses acts that cross this boundary through two games appealing for how they do so and what this suggests about metalepsis in interactive media.
Local Practices in Digital Gaming Heritage: An Interview with Maurizio Banavage and Andrea Dresseno
by K. Bonello Rutter Giappone & S. Caselli
This article engages with the experiences of two small-scale computer/game heritage curators, in Malta and Italy. The interviews delve into their aspirations and concerns, as well as practices and values. We situate their voices in relation to other examples and to recent and current debates in the area of digital heritage, memory studies, and nostalgia, with particular regard to the specific issues facing such smaller initiatives.
by R. Loban
This article discusses interlinked findings that show the complex and dynamic ways the strategy games, especially Europa Universalis IV, represents history. The article highlights a learning cycle of play, discovery and research of history both inside and outside such games.
Labour and Love: Play-Centrism and Procedurality in Spiritfarer
by E. Meakin, B. Vaughan, & C. Cullen
This paper explores game play incentives and the tension between game playing as labour and the way it can be transformed into something subjective and liberating while still rooted in the same activity.
The Kid in the Fridge: Sacrificial Children and Vengeful Masculinity in Contemporary Videogames
by E. Reay
Dead children are everywhere and nowhere in videogames. A recent content analysis of child characters in contemporary videogames found that while many games protected their digital kids by making them invincible or invisible, a significant number featured a child non-player character who is brutally murdered by in-game antagonists. This article builds on the critical analysis of the figure of the sacrificial child in other media to explore the rhetorical and ludic function of this trope in videogames.
The Evolution of Pokémon GO: A Survey of Finnish Player Experiences
by K. Alha, E. Koskinen, D. Leorke, & E. Wiik
In this article we unpack responses (n = 1,741) by Finnish Pokémon GO players to an open-ended survey question “how has your experience of the game changed throughout the time you’ve played it”.
Journal of Games Criticism 