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 2020-11-01 to 2024-11-01.)

Article	Citations
Playing Video Games During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Effects on Players’ Well-Being	145
Behind the Streams: The Off-Camera Labour of Game Live Streaming	28
Heritage Sites and Video Games: Questions of Authenticity and Immersion	27
“I Can be Who I Am When I Play Tekken 7”: E-sports Women Participants from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan	20
Families Playing Animal Crossing Together: Coping With Video Games During the COVID-19 Pandemic	20
Gamification in Education: Why, Where, When, and How?—A Systematic Review	18
“After All, They Don’t Know Me” Exploring the Psychological Mechanisms of Toxic Behavior in Online Games	17
Designing the Future? The Metaverse, NFTs, & the Future as Defined by Unity Users	17
Engagement With the Gurus of Gaming Culture: Parasocial Relationships to Let’s Players	17
The Industry of Landlords: Exploring the Assetization of the Triple-A Game	12
Masculine Pleasures as Normalized Practices: Character Design in the Video Game Industry	12
Archeology of Abandoned Human Settlements in No Man’s Sky: A New Approach to Recording and Preserving User-Generated Content in Digital Games	11
Online Gaming and Racism: Impact on Psychological Distress Among Black, Asian, and Latinx Emerging Adults	11
Playthings	10
Gamifying Contentious Politics: Gaming Capital and Playful Resistance	10
Disability and Video Games Journalism: A Discourse Analysis of Accessibility and Gaming Culture	10
Becoming a Gamer: Performative Construction of Gendered Gamer Identities	10
Returning to Azeroth: Nostalgia, Sense of Place, and Social Presence in World of Warcraft Classic	9
The Economy of Time, the Rationalisation of Resources: Discipline, Desire and Deferred Value in the Playing of Gacha Games	9
Using Case Studies to Explore Need Satisfaction and Frustration in Puzzle Video Games	9
Pivotal Play: Rethinking Meaningful Play in Games Through Death in Dungeons & Dragons	9
Balancing Ethics, Art and Economics: A Qualitative Analysis of Game Designer Perspectives on Monetisation	8
‘You Game Like a Girl’: Perceptions of Gender and Competence in Gaming	8
‘Thank you for your compliance’: Overwatch as a Disciplinary System	8
Professional Gaming and Pro-Gamers: What Do We Know So Far? A Systematic Review	8

Right-Wing Extremism in Mainstream Games: A Review of the Literature	8
A Virtual Reality Educational Game for the Ethics of Cultural Heritage Repatriation	7
Studying Game Development Cultures	7
History, Heritage, and Memory in Video Games: Approaching the Past in Svoboda 1945: Liberation and Train to Sachsenhausen	7
Translation Solutions in Professional Video Game Localization in Iran	7
Newsgames: The Use of Digital Games by Mass-Media Outlets to Convey Journalistic Messages	7
Are Video Games Still a Boys’ Club? How German Public Television Covers Video Games	7
Animating a Plausible Past: Perceived Realism and Sense of Place Influence Entertainment of and Tourism Intentions From Historical Video Games	7
Growing Pains in Esports Associationalism: Four Modes of National Esports Associational Development	7
Share the Experience, Don’t Take it: Toward Attunement With Neurodiversity in Videogames	6
Chinese Gold-Farming in the 2000s: Worker Empowerment and Local Development Through Video Games-Based Digital Labor	6
Last Man Standing: Battle Royale Games Through the Lens of Self-Determination Theory	6
The Proteus Effect: Overview, Reflection, and Recommendations	6
Undertale’s Loveable Monsters: Investigating Parasocial Relationships with Non-Player Characters	6
Mashing Up History and Heritage in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey	6
Exploring Player Understandings of Historical Accuracy and Historical Authenticity in Video Games	6
Assembling Auras: Towards a Methodology for the Preservation and Study of Video Games as Cultural Heritage Artefacts	5
“She's Built Like a Tank”: Player Reaction to Abby Anderson in The Last of Us: Part II	5
Reconstructing History and Culture in Game Discourse: A Linguistic Analysis of Heroic Stories in Honor of Kings	5
Horror Video Games and the “Active-Passive” Debate	5
The COVID Season: U.S. Collegiate Esports Programs’ Material Challenges and Opportunities During the 2020–21 Pandemic	5
Uncovering the Meaning: Exploring Semantic Differences in US Perceptions of “Gamer” and Game Players	5
Heroes and Hooligans: The Heterogeneity of Video Game Modders	5
Morality Meters and Their Impacts on Moral Choices in Videogames: A Qualitative Study	5
How Accessible is This Video Game? An Analysis Tool in Two Steps	5
Video Game Development in India: A Cultural and Creative Industry Embracing Regional Cultural Heritage(s)	5
Developer Credit: Para-Industrial Hierarchies of In-Game Credit Attribution in the Video Game Industry	5
Blockchain Potentials for the Game Industry: A Review	4
Setting the Game Agenda: Reviewing the Emerging Literature on Video Gaming and Psychological Well-Being of Sexual and Gender Diverse Youth	4
Exploring the Feminization of Backseat Gaming Through Girlfriend Reviews YouTube Channel	4
Enjoying My Time in the Animus: A Quantitative Survey on Perceived Realism and Enjoyment of Historical Video Games	4
The ‘First Person Shooter’ Perspective: A Different View on First Person Shooters, Gamification, and First Person Terrorist Propaganda	4
White-Collar Criminality Within the Video Game Industry	4
Geek Cuisine: Extending the Narrative of a Junk Food Gamer	4
Towards Sovereign Games	4
A Typology of Metagamers: Identifying Player Types Based on Beyond the Game Activities	3
Gameplay Bricks Model, a Theoretical Framework to Match Game Mechanics and Cognitive Functions	3
Game-Assisted Social Activism: Game Literacy in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Movement	3
Videogames as an ‘Unheroic’ Medium: The Child Hero's Journey	3
An “Alternative to the Pen”? Perspectives for the Design of Historiographical Videogames	3
Toward a Study of Pinball	3
What Does it Mean to be a Female Character in “Indie” Game Storytelling? Narrative Framing and Humanization in Independently Developed Video Games	3
“What are you Bringing to the Table?”: The Something Awful Let’s Play Community as a Serious Leisure Subculture	3
“Protecting our female gaze rights”: Chinese Female Gamers’ and Game Producers’ Negotiations with Government Restrictions on Erotic Material	3
Background Checks: Disentangling Class, Race, and Gender in CRPG Character Creators	3
Torres Strait Virtual Reality: A Reflection on the Intersection between Culture, Game Design and Research	3
Why do We Play? Towards a Comprehensive Player Typology	3
Seeking a Sense of Control or Escapism? The Role of Video Games in Coping with Unemployment	3
Players Just Want to Have Fun? An Exploratory Survey on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Game Motives	3
The Significance and Complexities of Anti-Corporate Gamer Activism: Struggles Against the Exploitation and Control of Game-Worlds in 2000s China	3

Far Cry 5, American Right-Wing Terrorism, and Doomsday Prepper Culture	3
Virtual Heterotopias and the Contested Histories of Kowloon Walled City	3
Crab-Rangoons in Kyrat: (Re)Writing South-Asian History in Far Cry 4	2
Gamification is not Working: Why?	2
Mutants and Zombies Everywhere! Or Villains, Violence, and Selfishness: Questions of Humanity in the Post-apocalyptic (Pandemic) Video Game	2
Rethinking Remakes: Value and Culture in Video Game Temporalization	2
The Moral Service of Trans NPCs: Examining the Roles of Transgender Non-Player Characters in Role-Playing Video Games	2
Virtual Empire: Performing Colonialism in the MMORPG Runescape	2
The Data-Driven Myth and the Deceptive Futurity of “the World’s Fastest Growing Games Region”: Selling the Southeast Asian Games Market via Game Analytics	2
Creative, Technical, Entrepreneurial: Formative Tensions in Game Development Higher Education	2
The Beautiful Rule: Thinking the Aesthetics of Game Rules	2
Critical Protocols in Indigenous Gamespace	2
“Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II	2
Identification of Memorable Game Experiences: Analysis of Escape Rooms Visitors’ Experiences	2
The Orc—Playing the “Wholly Other”: Investigations of Kant's Sublime and The Technological Sublime in Blizzard Entertainment's Massive Multiplayer Online Game World of Warcraft	2
Developing Meaning: Critical Violence and Eudaimonic Entertainment in the Seventh Console Generation	2
“Community” in Video Game Communities	2
“Never Good Enough”: Player Identities, Experiences, and Coping Strategies of Women in Czech Video Game Journalism	2
Reading Ren’Py: Game Engine Affordances and Design Possibilities	2
Level Design Processes and Challenges: A Cross Section of Game Development	2
The Collector, the Glitcher, and the Denkbilder: Toward a Critical Aesthetic Theory of Video Games	2
Becoming Bayek: Blackness, Egypt, and Identity in Assassin's Creed: Origins	2
Video Games Interventions to Reduce Radicalization and Violent Extremism in Young People: A Systematic Review	2
The Seriousness of Play: Johan Huizinga and Carl Schmitt on Play and the Political	2
‘You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?’: A Hauntological Analysis of Carceral Violence in Majora’s Mask	2
Meaningful Place: A Phenomenological Approach to the Design of Spatial Experience in Open-world Games	2
The Ground Floor Approach to Video Game Accessibility: Identifying Design Features Prioritized by Accessibility Reviews	2
A Conservative Metric of Power Creep	2
Postphenomenology, Kill Cams and Shooters: Exploring the Code of Replay Sequences	2
Postmodern Medusa: The Monstrous-Feminine in StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm	2
“Beyond Their Actual Limits”: Immersion, Interactivity, and the Virtual Sublime in Burke and Video Games	2
Play and Spiel are not the Same: Anti-Wittgensteinian Arguments and Consideration of Game as a Kind of Human Play	2
The Practice of Oldhammer: Re-Membering a Past Through Craft and Play	2
Becoming Afflicted, Becoming Virtuous: Darkest Dungeon and the Human Response to Stress	2
How Does Exposure to General and Sexual Harassment Relate to Female Gamers’ Coping Strategies and Mental Health?	2
Problematic Gaming at a Crossroad: Exploring the Interplay Between Internet Gaming Disorder, Toxic Attitudes, and Empathy in Digital Entertainment	1
Looking for the Gamic Gaze: Desire, Fantasy, and Enjoyment in Gorogoa	1
“Religious” and “Gamer”: Negotiating the Legitimacy of Video Games in a Muslim Context	1
Adaptation, Violence, and Storytelling in The Last of Us	1
Gaming for Ecological Activism: A Multidimensional Model for Networks Articulated Through Video Games	1
The Limits of Memory in Disavowed: Interference, Military Execution, and the Dishonored Dead	1
Social Networking or Social Isolation? A Systematic Review on Socio-Relational Outcomes for Members of Online Gaming Communities	1
Remediating Video Games in Contemporary Fiction: Literary Form and Intermedial Transfer	1
“You’ve Been Living Here For as Long as You Can Remember”: Trauma in OMORI's Environmental Design	1
What is Videogame Formalism? Exploring the Pillars of Russian Formalism for the Study of Videogames	1
To the Center of Nowhere: Deep Mapping Digital Games’ Paratextual Geographies	1
Playing (Against) the Heritage: Absolutism and the French Revolution in French Digital Games Before 2000	1
The Technological Mediation of Collective Memory Through Historical Video Games	1
Is Death Only the Beginning? How People Mourn Artificial Characters in Social Media	1
The Voices of Game Worlds: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Disco Elysium	1
Recentering Indigenous Epistemologies Through Digital Games: Sámi Perspectives on Nature in Rievssat (2018)	1
“I think I Get Why y’all do this Now”: Reckoning With Elden Ring's Difficulty in an Online Affinity Space	1
Resilient Values in Game Industry Formation: Institutional Perspective to the Finnish Context	1
Gaming I, II, and III: Arcades, Video Game Systems, and Modern Game Streaming Services	1
Dates, Carpets, and Pearl Necklaces: The Case of Anno 1404s Exotic Orientalism	1
Editorial: Games with History, Heritage, and Provocation	1
Twitch's Second Phase of Development: Analyzing Streamer Profiles and Content Trends That Boost Its Evolution into a Mass Media	1
Video Game Accessibility Defined Through Advocacy: How the Websites AbleGamers.org and CanIPlayThat.com Use the Word Accessibility	1
“Video Games Were My First Safe Space”: Queer Gaming in the Animal Crossing New Horizons LGBTIQA+ Community	1
Making Complexity Measurable in Practice: A Formal Analysis of Gamble-Play media	1
Slow Motion in Videogames—Gameplay Over Style?	1
Space Rednecks, Robot Butlers, and Feline Foreigners: Language Attitudes Toward Varieties of English in Videogames	1
Whose Expression Is It Anyway? Videogames and the Freedom of Expression	1
The Problem of Memory in the Assassin's Creed Series (2007–2020)	1
Conceptualizing the Roles of Involvement and Immersion in Persuasive Games	1
Beyond the Game Itself: Understanding Authorial Intent, Player Agency, and Materiality as Degrees of Paratextuality	1
Aesthetics of Agency and the Rhythm of Gameplay	1
Let's Meetup? Board Game Communities in Hong Kong	1
Broken Promises Marketing. Relations, Communication Strategies, and Ethics of Video Game Journalists and Developers: The Case of Cyberpunk 2077	1
Importance of Social Videogaming for Connection with Others During the COVID-19 Pandemic	1
Response: In and Out of the Game, as Usual	1
Platform-produced Heteronormativity: A Content Analysis of Adult Videogames on Patreon	1
Geographical Aspects of Open-World Video Games	1