OOIR: Observatory of International Research

Papers

(The median citation count of Games and Culture is 1. The table below lists those papers that are above that threshold based on CrossRef citation counts [max. 250 papers]. The publications cover those that have been published in the past four years, i.e., from 2021-02-01 to 2025-02-01.)

Article	Citations
“More Than Just Playing a Character”: Gender Exploration and Expression in Avatar Customization	169
Dynamic Music Video: Categorizing the Convergence of Video Games and Music Videos	35
Developer Credit: Para-Industrial Hierarchies of In-Game Credit Attribution in the Video Game Industry	30
“Fear the Old Blood”: The Gothicism of Bloodborne	27
“A Definition of Enchantment”: A New Approach to the Analysis of Magic Systems in Fantasy Games	24
An “Alternative to the Pen”? Perspectives for the Design of Historiographical Videogames	21
Chippin’ In: An Analysis of the Criminological Concepts Within Cyberpunk 2077	20
Heroes and Hooligans: The Heterogeneity of Video Game Modders	20
Dungeons, Dragons, and Rogues: How Picaresque Literature Shaped the Thief Class in Dungeons & Dragons	17
“Beyond Their Actual Limits”: Immersion, Interactivity, and the Virtual Sublime in Burke and Video Games	16
Metamodern Nature of Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding Synopsis and Gameplay	12
“You Took That From Me”: Conspiracism and Online Harassment in the Alt-Fandom of The Last of Us Part II	12
High Fantasy RPGs and the Materiality of the Medieval Book	12
Morality Meters and Their Impacts on Moral Choices in Videogames: A Qualitative Study	12
Just Fun and Games? A Sociological Consideration of Fun in Video Games	12
Symbolic Violence in the Language of Game Descriptions of Blackness: The Case of Pathfinder	11
Gaming for Ecological Activism: A Multidimensional Model for Networks Articulated Through Video Games	11
Livestreaming History: The Streamer-Historian and Historical Games Outreach	11
Becoming Bayek: Blackness, Egypt, and Identity in Assassin's Creed: Origins	11
Last Man Standing: Battle Royale Games Through the Lens of Self-Determination Theory	11
Rescripting of the Genre Through Greek Mythology in Hades	10
Profiles, Perceptions, and Experiences of Video Game Translators	10
Institutionalized Aesthetics: Video Games and the Contemporary Art Gallery	9
Critical Protocols in Indigenous Gamespace	9
Engagement With the Gurus of Gaming Culture: Parasocial Relationships to Let’s Players	9

Recentering Indigenous Epistemologies Through Digital Games: Sámi Perspectives on Nature in Rievssat (2018)	9
Reconstructing History and Culture in Game Discourse: A Linguistic Analysis of Heroic Stories in Honor of Kings	9
Far Cry 5, American Right-Wing Terrorism, and Doomsday Prepper Culture	9
Corrigendum to “Balancing Gender Identity and Gamer Identity: Gender Issues Faced by Wang ‘BaiZe’ Xinyu at the 2017 Hearthstone Summer Championship”	9
Mask of the Translator: Walter Benjamin and Metal Gear Solid’s Difficult Relationship with Localization	8
FORGE: A Framework for Organizing Rewards in Gamified Environments	8
Uses and Gratifications of Biophilic Simulation Games	8
Resilient Values in Game Industry Formation: Institutional Perspective to the Finnish Context	8
Disco Pinball: Declining Games and Depression in Disco Elysium	8
The Practice of Oldhammer: Re-Membering a Past Through Craft and Play	8
Erratum	7
Survey on Localization From the Development Perspective	7
Level Design Processes and Challenges: A Cross Section of Game Development	7
Towards Sovereign Games	7
Identifying Playfulness: An Empirical Study on How Adults Recognize and Define Playfulness Across Culture	7
Hello, Worlds: A Ludic Theory of Cognition	7
The Ones Who Walk Away from Hallownest: Hollow Knight's Radical Response to the Omelas Dilemma	6
Social Realism in Red Orchestra 2 (2011)	6
Conceptualizing the Roles of Involvement and Immersion in Persuasive Games	6
Background Checks: Disentangling Class, Race, and Gender in CRPG Character Creators	6
“Religious” and “Gamer”: Negotiating the Legitimacy of Video Games in a Muslim Context	6
Space Rednecks, Robot Butlers, and Feline Foreigners: Language Attitudes Toward Varieties of English in Videogames	6
In Defense of Imagination: Canadian Youth Culture and the Dungeons & Dragons Panic in Canada, 1980–1995	6
The Problem of Memory in the Assassin's Creed Series (2007–2020)	6
Creative, Technical, Entrepreneurial: Formative Tensions in Game Development Higher Education	6
Pivotal Play: Rethinking Meaningful Play in Games Through Death in Dungeons & Dragons	5
Machina ex Dea, Dea ex Machina: Gaia/GAIA/All-Mother and Lugones’ “World”—Traveling in Horizon Zero Dawn (2017)	5
Growing Pains in Esports Associationalism: Four Modes of National Esports Associational Development	5
Exploring Player Understandings of Historical Accuracy and Historical Authenticity in Video Games	5
Machphrasis: Towards a Poetics of Video Games in Contemporary Literary Culture	5
Virtual Allies: Why Allyship is Critical to Diversification of Virtual Reality Gaming?	5
The Moral Service of Trans NPCs: Examining the Roles of Transgender Non-Player Characters in Role-Playing Video Games	5
The Technological Mediation of Collective Memory Through Historical Video Games	5
Horror Video Games and the “Active-Passive” Debate	5
A Conservative Metric of Power Creep	5
Games for the Pluriverse: Exploring the Use, Opportunities, and Problems of Drawing from Local Cultural Heritage in Video Games	4
Behind the Streams: The Off-Camera Labour of Game Live Streaming	4
The Significance and Complexities of Anti-Corporate Gamer Activism: Struggles Against the Exploitation and Control of Game-Worlds in 2000s China	4
Playing Through the Pandemic: Gaming Usage as a Buffer During COVID-19	4
Why and How to Define Educational Video Games?	3
Identification of Memorable Game Experiences: Analysis of Escape Rooms Visitors’ Experiences	3
MeetDurian: Can Location-Based Games be Used to Improve COVID-19 Hygiene Habits?	3
The Show, the Game, and the Old Gods: On the Ontological Reframing and the Fiction/Real Boundary	3
Virtual Empire: Performing Colonialism in the MMORPG Runescape	3
Broken Games and the Perpetual Update Culture: Revising Failure With Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity	3
Undertale’s Loveable Monsters: Investigating Parasocial Relationships with Non-Player Characters	3
“Protecting our female gaze rights”: Chinese Female Gamers’ and Game Producers’ Negotiations with Government Restrictions on Erotic Material	3
Taxonomy of Studies on the Use of Video Games in Entrepreneurship Education: A Systematic Literature Review with a Textometric Analysis	3
Peace in the Valley: A Media and Discourse Analysis of Eric Barone's Stardew Valley Through Utopian Theory	3
Professional Gaming and Pro-Gamers: What Do We Know So Far? A Systematic Review	3

Aesthetics, Engagement, and Narration: Temporal Constraint as an Articulator of Ludo-Narrative Time	3
‘It's Just Not Safe’: Gender-Based Harassment and Toxicity Experiences of Women in Esports	3
The Table and the Tomb: Positioning Trans Power and Play Amid Fantasy Realism in Dungeons & Dragons	3
Videogames as an ‘Unheroic’ Medium: The Child Hero's Journey	3
Game-Assisted Social Activism: Game Literacy in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Movement	3
Slow Motion in Videogames—Gameplay Over Style?	2
The Rise of Gaming Nations	2
The ‘First Person Shooter’ Perspective: A Different View on First Person Shooters, Gamification, and First Person Terrorist Propaganda	2
Gamification in Education: Why, Where, When, and How?—A Systematic Review	2
Stochastic Process Approaches for Modeling of Games	2
Postmodern Medusa: The Monstrous-Feminine in StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm	2
Meditations on a Rubber Chicken: An Affective-Cultural Analysis of Monkey Island and Lucasfilm Games’ Humorous Puzzles	2
Experience, Rationality, Situation and Fallibilism: Establishing a Feminist Pragmatist Epistemology in Game Studies	2
“As if Possessed by a Demon”: Subjectivity, Possession, and Undeadness in Metal Gear Solid	2
Representation and Its Historical Antecedents in New Media: The Queer-ious Case of Assassin's Creed	2
Is Death Only the Beginning? How People Mourn Artificial Characters in Social Media	2
“We're All Mad Here!”: Becoming God in Bloodborne	2
Video Game Development in India: A Cultural and Creative Industry Embracing Regional Cultural Heritage(s)	2
Playing Video Games During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Effects on Players’ Well-Being	2
Esports Cannot Defeat Homophobia With Capitalism	2
Problematic Gaming at a Crossroad: Exploring the Interplay Between Internet Gaming Disorder, Toxic Attitudes, and Empathy in Digital Entertainment	2
It's Not a Game! Rules of Notice and Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Contemporary FMV Games	2
Eroticism and Design Workshops in Game Interfaces: Exploring a Mobile Otome Game for Chinese Women	2
Platform-produced Heteronormativity: A Content Analysis of Adult Videogames on Patreon	2
Exoplanetary Exploration and the End of the World in 22 Minutes: Philosofiction in Outer Wilds	2
Avant-Garde is Dead? On Arrière-Garde and Digital Games	2
Analog Simulation and the Indian Wars: Encountering the Other Through Board Wargames	2
Ludic Mechanics, Psychic Mechanisms and Explorations of “Inner Space” in Mindwheel and Psychonauts	2
Online Gaming and Racism: Impact on Psychological Distress Among Black, Asian, and Latinx Emerging Adults	2
Uncovering the Meaning: Exploring Semantic Differences in US Perceptions of “Gamer” and Game Players	2
Addressing Toxicity and Extremism in Games: Conversations with the Video Game Industry	2
Bridge Babies and Rebuilding America: Reproductive Commodification in Death Stranding	2
Corrigendum to “It's Not a Game! Rules of Notice and Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Contemporary FMV Games”	2
To the Center of Nowhere: Deep Mapping Digital Games’ Paratextual Geographies	2
Setting the Game Agenda: Reviewing the Emerging Literature on Video Gaming and Psychological Well-Being of Sexual and Gender Diverse Youth	2
Making Complexity Measurable in Practice: A Formal Analysis of Gamble-Play media	1
Video Games as Social Institutions	1
Becoming Afflicted, Becoming Virtuous: Darkest Dungeon and the Human Response to Stress	1
Reshaping the Battlefield: The International Committee of the Red Cross, Video Games, and Public Relations	1
‘What Was Your First Experience of a Videogame?’: The Fantasmatic Structure of Videogame Memory	1
The Collector, the Glitcher, and the Denkbilder: Toward a Critical Aesthetic Theory of Video Games	1
Geographical Aspects of Open-World Video Games	1
‘You Game Like a Girl’: Perceptions of Gender and Competence in Gaming	1
“She's Built Like a Tank”: Player Reaction to Abby Anderson in The Last of Us: Part II	1
Failing to See a Difference: Closing a Gender Gap in a Challenging Video Game	1
Response: In and Out of the Game, as Usual	1
Hey, You! The Importance of Pragmatics in Localizations of Mass Effect in French and Spanish	1
Becoming a Xia: Constructing Cultural Identity in the History of Wuxia Games in China	1
Esports as a Cultural Microcosm for Studying Psycholinguistics	1
Better Game Worlds by Design: The GAS Framework for Designing and Analyzing Games Based on Socio-Ecological Systems Thinking, Demonstrated on Nusfjord (2017)	1
Playing (Against) the Heritage: Absolutism and the French Revolution in French Digital Games Before 2000	1
Between Subjectivity and Flourishing: Creativity and Game Design as Existential Meaning	1
Geek Cuisine: Extending the Narrative of a Junk Food Gamer	1
Players Just Want to Have Fun? An Exploratory Survey on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Game Motives	1
How Does Exposure to General and Sexual Harassment Relate to Female Gamers’ Coping Strategies and Mental Health?	1
Top Shelf Drinks, Bottom Line Play: Examining Representations of Class in Bartending and Mixology Games	1
“Video Games Were My First Safe Space”: Queer Gaming in the Animal Crossing New Horizons LGBTIQA+ Community	1
“Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II	1
“What are you Bringing to the Table?”: The Something Awful Let’s Play Community as a Serious Leisure Subculture	1
The Use of Games in Citizen Science Based on Findings from the EyeWire User Study	1
Space Games: Ecologies of Scale and Technologies of Hope in Taiwan's OPUS Game Trilogy	1
Desire and Delusion: Fetish of Brazilian Favela in Videogame (Mis)representation	1
Auteur Theory and Minor Literature: Meg Jayanth as a Game Auteur	1
Introduction: Reconsidering Paratext as a Received Concept	1
Heritage Sites and Video Games: Questions of Authenticity and Immersion	1
How Accessible is This Video Game? An Analysis Tool in Two Steps	1
“A Legend From Before You Were Born”: Final Fantasy VII, Folklore, and Popular Culture	1
Don't Flip the Table Yet: A Framework for the Analysis of Visual and Cognitive Ergonomics in Board Games	1
Foreign Yet Familiar: J. L. Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings and Other Cultural Ferrymen in Japanese Fantasy Games	1
Gameplay 2.0: Toward a New Theory	1
The MTGO Virtual Economy: A Case Study on a “Play-to-Earn” Game That has Existed Since Before Cryptocurrency Was Even Invented	1