OOIR: Observatory of International Research

Papers

(The TQCC of Games and Culture is 4. 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 2021-11-01 to 2025-11-01.)

Article	Citations
Mask of the Translator: Walter Benjamin and Metal Gear Solid’s Difficult Relationship with Localization	88
Erratum	35
Machina ex Dea, Dea ex Machina: Gaia/GAIA/All-Mother and Lugones’ “World”—Traveling in Horizon Zero Dawn (2017)	33
Social Realism in Red Orchestra 2 (2011)	29
“A Definition of Enchantment”: A New Approach to the Analysis of Magic Systems in Fantasy Games	20
Horror Video Games and the “Active-Passive” Debate	20
Identifying Playfulness: An Empirical Study on How Adults Recognize and Define Playfulness Across Culture	18
Livestreaming History: The Streamer-Historian and Historical Games Outreach	18
Uses and Gratifications of Biophilic Simulation Games	17
Virtual Allies: Why Allyship is Critical to Diversification of Virtual Reality Gaming?	16
High Fantasy RPGs and the Materiality of the Medieval Book	15
“Fear the Old Blood”: The Gothicism of Bloodborne	15
Esports Cannot Defeat Homophobia With Capitalism	14
Exploring Player Understandings of Historical Accuracy and Historical Authenticity in Video Games	14
Survey on Localization From the Development Perspective	14
Problematic Gaming at a Crossroad: Exploring the Interplay Between Internet Gaming Disorder, Toxic Attitudes, and Empathy in Digital Entertainment	14
Identification of Memorable Game Experiences: Analysis of Escape Rooms Visitors’ Experiences	13
Czech Appeal: Why and How National Game Productions Use Local Themes and Settings	13
The Rise of Gaming Nations	12
Emotions in Game Data Work	12
The MTGO Virtual Economy: A Case Study on a “Play-to-Earn” Game That has Existed Since Before Cryptocurrency Was Even Invented	12
Esports as a Cultural Microcosm for Studying Psycholinguistics	11
“As if Possessed by a Demon”: Subjectivity, Possession, and Undeadness in Metal Gear Solid	11
“What are you Bringing to the Table?”: The Something Awful Let’s Play Community as a Serious Leisure Subculture	11
Hey, You ! The Importance of Pragmatics in Localizations of Mass Effect in French and Spanish	11

To the Center of Nowhere: Deep Mapping Digital Games’ Paratextual Geographies	11
Players Just Want to Have Fun? An Exploratory Survey on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Game Motives	10
“The Sense of Wonder”: Gaming Capital and Nostalgia for Inexperience in Magic: The Gathering	10
“We're All Mad Here!”: Becoming God in Bloodborne	10
Geopolitical Implications of E-Sports	10
Gameplay Bricks Model, a Theoretical Framework to Match Game Mechanics and Cognitive Functions	9
Designing the Future? The Metaverse, NFTs, & the Future as Defined by Unity Users	9
Fantasies of Adequacy: Mythologies of Capital in Dark Souls	9
A Typology of Metagamers: Identifying Player Types Based on Beyond the Game Activities	9
Perceived Foolishness: How Does the Saltybet Community Construct AI vs AI Spectatorship?	9
“I think I Get Why y’all do this Now”: Reckoning With Elden Ring 's Difficulty in an Online Affinity Space	9
“A Crown is Warranted With Strength”: Bosses, Fantasy, and Democracy in Elden Ring	9
Finish—Spare the Shame: Realism of Hellish Quart and Alt-Sarmatian Ideology	9
Beyond the Game Itself: Understanding Authorial Intent, Player Agency, and Materiality as Degrees of Paratextuality	8
Virtual Heterotopias and the Contested Histories of Kowloon Walled City	8
Streamers as Arts Educators: Exploring Their Streaming Approaches as Pedagogical Practices	8
Play and Misinformation: How America's Conspiracy Culture Became Gamified	8
The Stupid, the Ridiculous, the Camp: How Goat Simulator's “Messy” Design Facilitates Queer Play	7
Understanding How Marginal National Video Game Industries Differ	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
The Ones Who Walk Away from Hallownest: Hollow Knight's Radical Response to the Omelas Dilemma	7
I Play, Therefore I Think: Procedural Philosophy in Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake 2 (2023)	7
MeetDurian: Can Location-Based Games be Used to Improve COVID-19 Hygiene Habits?	6
The Business of Play: Financialization and Optimization in World of Warcraft	6
Corrigendum to “It's Not a Game! Rules of Notice and Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Contemporary FMV Games”	6
FORGE: A Framework for Organizing Rewards in Gamified Environments	6
The ‘First Person Shooter’ Perspective: A Different View on First Person Shooters, Gamification, and First Person Terrorist Propaganda	6
Analog Simulation and the Indian Wars: Encountering the Other Through Board Wargames	6
Metamodern Nature of Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding Synopsis and Gameplay	6
Exoplanetary Exploration and the End of the World in 22 Minutes: Philosofiction in Outer Wilds	6
Taxonomy of Studies on the Use of Video Games in Entrepreneurship Education: A Systematic Literature Review with a Textometric Analysis	6
The Moral Service of Trans NPCs: Examining the Roles of Transgender Non-Player Characters in Role-Playing Video Games	5
“A Legend From Before You Were Born”: Final Fantasy VII, Folklore, and Popular Culture	5
Critical Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse in UFO 50	5
“Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II	5
The Table and the Tomb: Positioning Trans Power and Play Amid Fantasy Realism in Dungeons & Dragons	5
A Conservative Metric of Power Creep	5
Beyond Game Blocks: Adolescent Girl Players' Perspectives During COVID-19	5
Peace in the Valley: A Media and Discourse Analysis of Eric Barone's Stardew Valley Through Utopian Theory	5
Introduction: Reconsidering Paratext as a Received Concept	5
Character-Driven Storytelling Design for Digital Games: A Scoping Review	5
Reshaping the Battlefield: The International Committee of the Red Cross, Video Games, and Public Relations	5
‘You Game Like a Girl’: Perceptions of Gender and Competence in Gaming	4
Among the Casters: A Qualitative Study of Work and Play in Nottingham's Lead Belt	4
“You’ve Been Living Here For as Long as You Can Remember”: Trauma in OMORI's Environmental Design	4
Mutants and Zombies Everywhere! Or Villains, Violence, and Selfishness: Questions of Humanity in the Post-apocalyptic (Pandemic) Video Game	4
Blockchain Potentials for the Game Industry: A Review	4
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	4
How Does Exposure to General and Sexual Harassment Relate to Female Gamers’ Coping Strategies and Mental Health?	4

Gaming Capital on Overwatch's Official Forums	4
How Accessible is This Video Game? An Analysis Tool in Two Steps	4
Gaming I, II, and III: Arcades, Video Game Systems, and Modern Game Streaming Services	4
Playing with Character: A Framework of Characterization in Video Games	4
Failing to See a Difference: Closing a Gender Gap in a Challenging Video Game	4
Thought Experiments in Video Games: Exploring the (Un)Ethics of Motherhood in Frictional Games’ Amnesia: Rebirth	4
The Beautiful Rule: Thinking the Aesthetics of Game Rules	4
The Game-Like Experience of Virtual Reality Art: Sensational Players and Critical Audiences	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