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 2021-08-01 to 2025-08-01.)

Article	Citations
Social Realism in Red Orchestra 2 (2011)	67
Machina ex Dea, Dea ex Machina: Gaia/GAIA/All-Mother and Lugones’ “World”—Traveling in Horizon Zero Dawn (2017)	31
The Practice of Oldhammer: Re-Membering a Past Through Craft and Play	27
Survey on Localization From the Development Perspective	26
Erratum	18
“Fear the Old Blood”: The Gothicism of Bloodborne	17
Mask of the Translator: Walter Benjamin and Metal Gear Solid’s Difficult Relationship with Localization	17
Virtual Allies: Why Allyship is Critical to Diversification of Virtual Reality Gaming?	16
Horror Video Games and the “Active-Passive” Debate	15
High Fantasy RPGs and the Materiality of the Medieval Book	15
Livestreaming History: The Streamer-Historian and Historical Games Outreach	14
Uses and Gratifications of Biophilic Simulation Games	14
Identifying Playfulness: An Empirical Study on How Adults Recognize and Define Playfulness Across Culture	14
“A Definition of Enchantment”: A New Approach to the Analysis of Magic Systems in Fantasy Games	14
Esports Cannot Defeat Homophobia With Capitalism	13
Exploring Player Understandings of Historical Accuracy and Historical Authenticity in Video Games	12
Identification of Memorable Game Experiences: Analysis of Escape Rooms Visitors’ Experiences	12
Problematic Gaming at a Crossroad: Exploring the Interplay Between Internet Gaming Disorder, Toxic Attitudes, and Empathy in Digital Entertainment	12
Esports as a Cultural Microcosm for Studying Psycholinguistics	11
“What are you Bringing to the Table?”: The Something Awful Let’s Play Community as a Serious Leisure Subculture	11
To the Center of Nowhere: Deep Mapping Digital Games’ Paratextual Geographies	11
The MTGO Virtual Economy: A Case Study on a “Play-to-Earn” Game That has Existed Since Before Cryptocurrency Was Even Invented	10
Players Just Want to Have Fun? An Exploratory Survey on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Game Motives	10
Czech Appeal: Why and How National Game Productions Use Local Themes and Settings	10
“We're All Mad Here!”: Becoming God in Bloodborne	10

Hey, You ! The Importance of Pragmatics in Localizations of Mass Effect in French and Spanish	10
Emotions in Game Data Work	9
“As if Possessed by a Demon”: Subjectivity, Possession, and Undeadness in Metal Gear Solid	9
Returning to Azeroth: Nostalgia, Sense of Place, and Social Presence in World of Warcraft Classic	9
The Rise of Gaming Nations	9
“A Crown is Warranted With Strength”: Bosses, Fantasy, and Democracy in Elden Ring	8
Gameplay Bricks Model, a Theoretical Framework to Match Game Mechanics and Cognitive Functions	8
Designing the Future? The Metaverse, NFTs, & the Future as Defined by Unity Users	8
“The Sense of Wonder”: Gaming Capital and Nostalgia for Inexperience in Magic: The Gathering	8
Perceived Foolishness: How Does the Saltybet Community Construct AI vs AI Spectatorship?	8
A Typology of Metagamers: Identifying Player Types Based on Beyond the Game Activities	8
The Stupid, the Ridiculous, the Camp: How Goat Simulator's “Messy” Design Facilitates Queer Play	7
Finish—Spare the Shame: Realism of Hellish Quart and Alt-Sarmatian Ideology	7
Virtual Heterotopias and the Contested Histories of Kowloon Walled City	7
Serious Games and Game Performance Before and During the Israel-Hamas War: The Case of Fact Finders and PeaceMaker	7
Beyond the Game Itself: Understanding Authorial Intent, Player Agency, and Materiality as Degrees of Paratextuality	7
Streamers as Arts Educators: Exploring Their Streaming Approaches as Pedagogical Practices	7
Fantasies of Adequacy: Mythologies of Capital in Dark Souls	7
Play and Misinformation: How America's Conspiracy Culture Became Gamified	7
Understanding How Marginal National Video Game Industries Differ	6
The Ones Who Walk Away from Hallownest: Hollow Knight's Radical Response to the Omelas Dilemma	6
“I think I Get Why y’all do this Now”: Reckoning With Elden Ring 's Difficulty in an Online Affinity Space	6
The Problem of Memory in the Assassin's Creed Series (2007–2020)	6
Metamodern Nature of Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding Synopsis and Gameplay	6
I Play, Therefore I Think: Procedural Philosophy in Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake 2 (2023)	6
FORGE: A Framework for Organizing Rewards in Gamified Environments	6
A Conservative Metric of Power Creep	5
MeetDurian: Can Location-Based Games be Used to Improve COVID-19 Hygiene Habits?	5
Peace in the Valley: A Media and Discourse Analysis of Eric Barone's Stardew Valley Through Utopian Theory	5
Exoplanetary Exploration and the End of the World in 22 Minutes: Philosofiction in Outer Wilds	5
The ‘First Person Shooter’ Perspective: A Different View on First Person Shooters, Gamification, and First Person Terrorist Propaganda	5
Corrigendum to “It's Not a Game! Rules of Notice and Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Contemporary FMV Games”	5
The Table and the Tomb: Positioning Trans Power and Play Amid Fantasy Realism in Dungeons & Dragons	5
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
The Business of Play: Financialization and Optimization in World of Warcraft	4
Introduction: Reconsidering Paratext as a Received Concept	4
The Beautiful Rule: Thinking the Aesthetics of Game Rules	4
Beyond Game Blocks: Adolescent Girl Players' Perspectives During COVID-19	4
“You’ve Been Living Here For as Long as You Can Remember”: Trauma in OMORI's Environmental Design	4
“A Legend From Before You Were Born”: Final Fantasy VII, Folklore, and Popular Culture	4
Analog Simulation and the Indian Wars: Encountering the Other Through Board Wargames	4
Failing to See a Difference: Closing a Gender Gap in a Challenging Video Game	4
How Does Exposure to General and Sexual Harassment Relate to Female Gamers’ Coping Strategies and Mental Health?	4
Critical Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse in UFO 50	4
‘You Game Like a Girl’: Perceptions of Gender and Competence in Gaming	4
The Moral Service of Trans NPCs: Examining the Roles of Transgender Non-Player Characters in Role-Playing Video Games	4
Taxonomy of Studies on the Use of Video Games in Entrepreneurship Education: A Systematic Literature Review with a Textometric Analysis	4
“Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II	4
Reshaping the Battlefield: The International Committee of the Red Cross, Video Games, and Public Relations	4