The immersive and engaging characteristics of digital games are leading current pedagogical discussions about digital media. Game scientists, (pedagogical) researches, and practitioners continue to attempt to embed digital games in pedagogical settings. They consider these games to be so called serious games. The idea of serious games is that a digital game is not only played for fun and entert...

Ecocriticism of digital games has so far engaged with a rather small corpus of examples, often prescriptively and with a quite limited methodological toolkit. This essay systematizes and historicizes some of these commonly found limitations of past research and proposes methods for a more historically and generically diverse exploration of ecological thinking vis-à-vis digital games. The majori...

If digital games are to continue to grown as important cultural form they must move into new platforms and environments that appeal to a broader cultural demographic. Interactive Digital TV (iDTV) is developing rapidly in Europe and is providing platforms where games are popular among communities quite unlike the traditional PC or console gamer. In addition, communication is becoming possible t...

Computers have lead to a revolution in the games we play, and, following this, an interest for computer-based games has been sparked in research communities. However, this easily leads to the perception of a one-way direction of influence between that the field of game research and computer science. This historical investigation points towards a deep and intertwined relationship between researc...

Grounded in the motivational aspects of product consumption, this study examines the hedonic and utilitarian value of digital games and their influence on product recommendation. The findings of an internet survey conducted among active game players who assessed the hedonic and utilitarian value of eight digital games are presented. The findings suggest that games should be viewed not only as h...

This paper aims to map the German digital games industry. Using expert interviews and social network analysis, the current paper focuses on the industry development in Germany, identifying structures of organizational and personal networks in the digital games industry. Following a holistic approach, it is argued that while actors of the standard value chain are key units in the digital games i...

It is now 50 years since the development of the first computer game but despite the proliferation of digital games in our society with an industry which is flourishing and an average of 9 games sold every second of every day in 2007, it seems that these products are not as valued as the products of other cultural industries, such as film and television, and they are being excluded from the pres...

Player experience is an important area of research in digital games. The findings are crucial for the developers, designers and reviewers of games, allowing for the better understanding of player experience whilst playing digital games. Questionnaires are a way to directly measure the reported experiences of players. This approach in games research, however, is challenging for new researchers b...

This research project examines how video games can be programmed to generate the sense of the digital sublime. The digital sublime is a term proposed by this research to describe experiences where the combination of code and art produces games that appear boundless and autonomous. The definition of this term is arrived at by building on various texts and literature such as the work of Kant, Del...

Digital games have become a mainstream medium used by players of all ages and genders. Yet, aging adults are still relatively seldom featured in digital games as game-controlled or player-controlled characters. The representation of old women featured as player-characters in four casual digital games is here analyzed through a close playing. In their portrayal of the four player-characters, the...