OOIR: Observatory of International Research

Papers

(The median citation count of Games and Culture is 2. 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 2022-05-01 to 2026-05-01.)

Article	Citations
Erratum	126
High Fantasy RPGs and the Materiality of the Medieval Book	40
Identifying Playfulness: An Empirical Study on How Adults Recognize and Define Playfulness Across Culture	39
Machina ex Dea, Dea ex Machina: Gaia/GAIA/All-Mother and Lugones’ “World”—Traveling in Horizon Zero Dawn (2017)	30
“A Definition of Enchantment”: A New Approach to the Analysis of Magic Systems in Fantasy Games	25
Virtual Allies: Why Allyship is Critical to Diversification of Virtual Reality Gaming?	24
Survey on Localization From the Development Perspective	23
Uses and Gratifications of Biophilic Simulation Games	21
Social Realism in Red Orchestra 2 (2011)	20
“Fear the Old Blood”: The Gothicism of Bloodborne	20
Livestreaming History: The Streamer-Historian and Historical Games Outreach	20
Identification of Memorable Game Experiences: Analysis of Escape Rooms Visitors’ Experiences	18
Esports Cannot Defeat Homophobia With Capitalism	18
Problematic Gaming at a Crossroad: Exploring the Interplay Between Internet Gaming Disorder, Toxic Attitudes, and Empathy in Digital Entertainment	16
The MTGO Virtual Economy: A Case Study on a “Play-to-Earn” Game That has Existed Since Before Cryptocurrency Was Even Invented	15
The Rise of Gaming Nations	15
Esports as a Cultural Microcosm for Studying Psycholinguistics	14
“What are you Bringing to the Table?”: The Something Awful Let’s Play Community as a Serious Leisure Subculture	14
“We're All Mad Here!”: Becoming God in Bloodborne	13
Emotions in Game Data Work	13
Czech Appeal: Why and How National Game Productions Use Local Themes and Settings	13
To the Center of Nowhere: Deep Mapping Digital Games’ Paratextual Geographies	13
Hey, You ! The Importance of Pragmatics in Localizations of Mass Effect in French and Spanish	13
Players Just Want to Have Fun? An Exploratory Survey on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Game Motives	12
Teaching Game Development at Universities: A Systematic Literature Review of Educational Practices for Multidisciplinary Industrial Demands	12

“As if Possessed by a Demon”: Subjectivity, Possession, and Undeadness in Metal Gear Solid	12
Press [A] to Read This: A Mixed Methods Study of Characterised Versus Direct Instructions in The Legend of Zelda Videogame Series	11
Designing the Future? The Metaverse, NFTs, & the Future as Defined by Unity Users	11
Perceived Foolishness: How Does the Saltybet Community Construct AI vs AI Spectatorship?	11
Return to the Pre-Modern: Mechanics Archeology of Fulu in Video Games	11
“The Sense of Wonder”: Gaming Capital and Nostalgia for Inexperience in Magic: The Gathering	11
Geopolitical Implications of E-Sports	10
A Typology of Metagamers: Identifying Player Types Based on Beyond the Game Activities	10
The Stupid, the Ridiculous, the Camp: How Goat Simulator's “Messy” Design Facilitates Queer Play	9
Gameplay Bricks Model, a Theoretical Framework to Match Game Mechanics and Cognitive Functions	9
“A Crown is Warranted With Strength”: Bosses, Fantasy, and Democracy in Elden Ring	9
Play and Misinformation: How America's Conspiracy Culture Became Gamified	8
I Play, Therefore I Think: Procedural Philosophy in Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake 2 (2023)	8
Understanding How Marginal National Video Game Industries Differ	8
Fantasies of Adequacy: Mythologies of Capital in Dark Souls	8
Beyond the Game Itself: Understanding Authorial Intent, Player Agency, and Materiality as Degrees of Paratextuality	8
“I think I Get Why y’all do this Now”: Reckoning With Elden Ring 's Difficulty in an Online Affinity Space	8
Streamers as Arts Educators: Exploring Their Streaming Approaches as Pedagogical Practices	8
Virtual Heterotopias and the Contested Histories of Kowloon Walled City	8
Finish—Spare the Shame: Realism of Hellish Quart and Alt-Sarmatian Ideology	7
Metamodern Nature of Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding Synopsis and Gameplay	7
The Ones Who Walk Away from Hallownest: Hollow Knight 's Radical Response to the Omelas Dilemma	7
Algorithmic Uncertainties in Video Game Forests	7
The Problem of Memory in the Assassin's Creed Series (2007–2020)	7
Serious Games and Game Performance Before and During the Israel-Hamas War: The Case of Fact Finders and PeaceMaker	7
Cozy Ecogames	7
FORGE: A Framework for Organizing Rewards in Gamified Environments	7
The ‘First Person Shooter’ Perspective: A Different View on First Person Shooters, Gamification, and First Person Terrorist Propaganda	6
A Seeming Change: Quasimorph and the Critique of Anarcho-Capitalism	6
Exoplanetary Exploration and the End of the World in 22 Minutes: Philosofiction in Outer Wilds	6
Corrigendum to “It's Not a Game! Rules of Notice and Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Contemporary FMV Games”	6
Peace in the Valley: A Media and Discourse Analysis of Eric Barone's Stardew Valley Through Utopian Theory	6
Taxonomy of Studies on the Use of Video Games in Entrepreneurship Education: A Systematic Literature Review with a Textometric Analysis	6
Analog Simulation and the Indian Wars: Encountering the Other Through Board Wargames	5
Failing to See a Difference: Closing a Gender Gap in a Challenging Video Game	5
Critical Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse in UFO 50	5
The Beautiful Rule: Thinking the Aesthetics of Game Rules	5
How Does Exposure to General and Sexual Harassment Relate to Female Gamers’ Coping Strategies and Mental Health?	5
Introduction: Reconsidering Paratext as a Received Concept	5
The Business of Play: Financialization and Optimization in World of Warcraft	5
“Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II	5
Thought Experiments in Video Games: Exploring the (Un)Ethics of Motherhood in Frictional Games’ Amnesia: Rebirth	5
Beyond Game Blocks: Adolescent Girl Players' Perspectives During COVID-19	5
The Table and the Tomb: Positioning Trans Power and Play Amid Fantasy Realism in Dungeons & Dragons	5
Reshaping the Battlefield: The International Committee of the Red Cross, Video Games, and Public Relations	5
“A Legend From Before You Were Born”: Final Fantasy VII , Folklore, and Popular Culture	5
How Accessible is This Video Game? An Analysis Tool in Two Steps	5
Character-Driven Storytelling Design for Digital Games: A Scoping Review	5
The Ecocritical Dimensions of Entertainment Video Games: A Systematic Review	4
Blockchain Potentials for the Game Industry: A Review	4

Gaming I, II, and III: Arcades, Video Game Systems, and Modern Game Streaming Services	4
Experience in Videogame Display: An Extension of the Matrix Model	4
“You’ve Been Living Here For as Long as You Can Remember”: Trauma in OMORI 's Environmental Design	4
Gaming Capital on Overwatch's Official Forums	4
The Game-Like Experience of Virtual Reality Art: Sensational Players and Critical Audiences	4
The Ground Floor Approach to Video Game Accessibility: Identifying Design Features Prioritized by Accessibility Reviews	4
Why do We Play? Towards a Comprehensive Player Typology	4
Playing with Character: A Framework of Characterization in Video Games	4
The Doors of Perception: Horror Video Games and the Ideological Implications of Ludic Virtual Reality	4
‘Born of the Blood, Made Men by the Blood, Undone by the Blood’: Bloodborne as a Critical Reflection of Ghosts of the Anthropocene	4
Mutants and Zombies Everywhere! Or Villains, Violence, and Selfishness: Questions of Humanity in the Post-apocalyptic (Pandemic) Video Game	4
Games and Culture Special Issue publication notice	4
Among the Casters: A Qualitative Study of Work and Play in Nottingham's Lead Belt	4
Gatekeeping the Gatekeepers: An Exploratory Study of Transformative Games Fandom & TikTok Algorithms	3
“Religious” and “Gamer”: Negotiating the Legitimacy of Video Games in a Muslim Context	3
The Technological Mediation of Collective Memory Through Historical Video Games	3
Videogames as an ‘Unheroic’ Medium: The Child Hero's Journey	3
It's Not a Game! Rules of Notice and Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Contemporary FMV Games	3
The Dullahan, From Fairy to Undead Tracing the Cultural Hybridization of Irish Folklore in Japanese Games and Their Paratexts	3
Cultural Imperialism and Video Game Localization: A Case Study of Revelations: Persona	3
Binary Barriers: Avatar Creation and Play for Nonbinary Video Game Players	3
Becoming Bayek: Blackness, Egypt, and Identity in Assassin's Creed: Origins	3
Histories of Fallout : Competing Pasts and Brand Identities	3
Disco Pinball: Declining Games and Depression in Disco Elysium	3
Undertale’s Loveable Monsters: Investigating Parasocial Relationships with Non-Player Characters	3
Eroticism and Design Workshops in Game Interfaces: Exploring a Mobile Otome Game for Chinese Women	3
Is Death Only the Beginning? How People Mourn Artificial Characters in Social Media	3
The Development of Video Game Representations of the Middle East	3
It's Not Always About You: The Subject and Ecological Entanglement in Video Games	3
Chippin’ In: An Analysis of the Criminological Concepts Within Cyberpunk 2077	3
Times They Are A-Changin’? Evolving Representations of Women in the Assassin's Creed Franchise	3
Setting the Game Agenda: Reviewing the Emerging Literature on Video Gaming and Psychological Well-Being of Sexual and Gender Diverse Youth	3
Playing Through the Pandemic: Gaming Usage as a Buffer During COVID-19	3
Cozy Violence: Animal Companions, Self-Care, and Nationalist Ideology in Rise of the Rōnin	3
Profiles, Perceptions, and Experiences of Video Game Translators	3
Exploring the Etymology of YouXi : A Chinese Perspective on the Concept of Game	3
Fear of Monsters: Toward an Understanding of the Threat of the Computational Monster Read Through the Theoretical Lens of Game-Play	2
“After All, They Don’t Know Me” Exploring the Psychological Mechanisms of Toxic Behavior in Online Games	2
Metaverse Engineering: Epic v. Apple , Ontopolitical Play, and Gaming the Law	2
Dark Patterns Meet the Gamer's Dilemma: Contrasting Morally Objectionable Content with Systems in Video Games	2
Reflecting on Celeste : Abstracting Trans Representation	2
Developing Meaning: Critical Violence and Eudaimonic Entertainment in the Seventh Console Generation	2
Dynamic Music Video: Categorizing the Convergence of Video Games and Music Videos	2
Datafication of Digital Intimacy: The Dual Logic of Empowerment and Commodification	2
Video Games Interventions to Reduce Radicalization and Violent Extremism in Young People: A Systematic Review	2
The Use of Games in Citizen Science Based on Findings from the EyeWire User Study	2
The Negative Geometry of Quake: Refusal, Subtraction, and Emergent Coherence	2
Broken Promises Marketing. Relations, Communication Strategies, and Ethics of Video Game Journalists and Developers: The Case of Cyberpunk 2077	2
Challenging Heroic Narratives of Polar Exploration in Indie Video Games	2
Share the Experience, Don’t Take it: Toward Attunement With Neurodiversity in Videogames	2
Replaying Wartime Résistance? Studying Ludic Memory-Making in the Open World Game The Saboteur	2
Nature Playing: On the Experience of Contemplating Technologically Mediated Nature within the Game World of Riders Republic	2
Remediating Video Games in Contemporary Fiction: Literary Form and Intermedial Transfer	2
Towards Representational Adequacy: A Critical Analysis of Transgender Representation in Tell Me Why	2
“Video Games Were My First Safe Space”: Queer Gaming in the Animal Crossing New Horizons LGBTIQA+ Community	2
The Future of Games Scholarship: An Interview With James Paul Gee	2
The Other Squid Game: How Splatoon 3 Promotes a Culture of Coziness, Inclusivity, and Becoming-Cephalopod	2
Gamification is not Working: Why?	2
Toward a Study of Pinball	2
From Player to Posthuman: Subjectivity and Meaning-Making in Cyberpunk 2077	2