The paper revisits a central question in the study of characters in digital games: Do players of, for example, a racing game steer the virtual car directly themselves, or are they controlling the body of a virtual driver? This seemingly technical question is shown to be primarily cognitive and conceptual: players draw ontheir real-life and fictional frames of reference in an ongoing epistemological processof situating themselves vis-à-vis gameworld and playable figure. The traditional metaphor for this relationship, that of a cyborg, neither captures the variety of relationships suggested by games, nor the range of interpretations open to players. To overcome this limitation, I propose six conceptual types, based on the significance that tools and vehicles have for the playable figure. I ask: is there a co-dependence between equipment and user, is it permanent, and do they have a metonymic relationship to eachother? These abstract categories are shown to be connected to archetypical proto-narratives epitomized by characters from mythology and popular culture, which players implicitly refer to in conceptualizing their relationship to the gameworld. The essay, then, offers a framework for the conceptual variety of player-playable figure-relations,which, in drawing on cultural history, should be equally transparent to scholars of game studies and narratology.

We report research on player modeling using psychophysiology and machine learning, conducted through interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers of computer science, psychology, and game design at Aalto University, Helsinki. First, we propose the Play Patterns And eXperience (PPAX) framework to connect three levels of game experience that previously had remained largely unconnected: game design patterns, the interplay of game context with player personality or tendencies, and state-of-the-art measures of experience (both subjective and non-subjective). Second, we describe our methodology for using machine learning to categorize game events to reveal corresponding patterns, culminating in an example experiment. We discuss the relation between automatically detected event clusters and game design patterns, and provide indications on how to incorporate personality profiles of players in the analysis. This novel interdisciplinary collaboration combines basic psychophysiology research with game design patterns and machine learning, and generates new knowledge about the interplay between game experience and design.

Building on case study data, this paper identifies processes and actors that form an enabling ecosystem for indie porn game development consisting of: game platform technologies, asset stores,commission-based artists, F95zone, Steam, Discord, and crowd-funding platforms (e.g., Patreon). Co-creational and organisational perspectives provide a rewarding exploration of this phenomenon.

This paper is a summary of the concept work on interactive stories done within the Future Interaction Television at the Hypermedia Laboratory, University of Tampere. One of the largest questions we dealt with in relation to the design of program content for interactive television was how to provide interesting interactive content for future television viewers. Television as a medium has established traditions for how it is used. These are not likely to change drastically overnight. Because of this, the context of viewing has to be considered when developing new concepts.

Interactive television systems are still under development and standards are still pending. Although the aim of our research has been to consider interactivity from the viewers’ and the content production community's perspective, work on this topic also provides insights into what kinds of iTV broadcasting techniques will be needed in the future. Most importantly, our work here shows an interactive television show concept that can be used already, with television broadcasting as it is done today, only using the Internet as the return channel. As households move into the digital era and the television sets become technically interactive (e.g. come with a built-in return channel), the interactive part can be shifted over from the Internet to be used via the television sets.

In this paper we propose a solution that combines a game with a traditional story, which in our example prototype is a simulated television series. Our concept relies on the game having effects on the series and vice versa, but solves many of the familiar problems of interactive stories, as the parts still stay separate.

Consequently, the concept gives viewers greater freedom of choice; in our concept one can choose to only watch the series or only play the game. However, the strength of the concept is that doing both adds something special to the experience of both watching and playing. We implemented this kind of concept as a prototype called Footprints of Power. The concept was tested and the test results indicate that interactive stories following this approach could enhance the experience of both playing and watching.

Research into the design aspect of games has proliferated since the early 1970s. Currently, early historical overviews appear and categorical divisions within the field become more pronounced. It is therefore timely to reflect on the development untiltoday, take stock of the current landscape, and consider future topics. This position paperdoes so by bringing together seasoned and emerging scholars, as well as practitioners and industry insiders. Together, they consider which topics are already engaged, and what new ones might be necessary. In addition, the paperwill discuss the relationship between game design research and independent/industry practices as well as implications for game design education.

How players experience games emotionally is the central question in this essay. The answer varies and depends on the game. Yet, most of the actions in games are goal-driven. Cognitive emotion theories propose that goal status appraisals and emotions are connected, and this connection is used to formulate how goal-driven engagement works in the games. For example, fear is implied when the player’s goal of keeping the player character alive is under threat. This goal-driven engagement is not enough to explain all the emotions involved in gameplay. Empathy, reacting emotionally to an emotional expression is a potential source of emotions in character-based games. As such, the visual beauty of the environment and character can be pleasurable. Lastly, sounds and music can modulate the emotions of the player. For example, loud and fast music tend to correlate with emotions with high arousal. The emotional experience of playing is an amalgam of these different sources. Importantly, the emotional experience is not straightforwardly caused by the game but it depends on the players’ appraisal of the situation in the game.

Embodiment is used to denote the sense that something is a part of one's body. The sense of own body is argued to relate to the sense of agency of one's own actions and of the ownership of the body. In this sense of own body can incorporate something external to the body, such as simple tools or virtual hands. The premise of the study is that the player-characters and game controllers get embodied in a similar to a tool or a virtual hand. In order to study embodiment, a psychometric scale is developed using explorative factor analysis (n=104). The scale is evaluated with two sets of data (n=103 and n=89) using confirmatory factor analysis. The embodiment scale ended to having two dimensions: controller ownership and player-character embodiment. Finally, the embodiment scale is tested and put into action in two studies with hypotheses 1) embodiment and players' skills correlate and 2) the sense of presence and embodiment correlate. The data (n=37 and n=31) analysed using mixed effects models support both hypotheses.

This pilot study looks at how the formal features of character-driven games can be used to explain player-character engagement. Questionnaire data (N=206), formal game features (in 11 games), and ordinal regression were used in the analysis. The results show that interactive dialogue and cut-scenes showing the romances between the player-character and another character relates to higher character engagement scores, while romance modeling and friendship modeling relate to lower character engagement scores.

What are the elements that affect story interestingness or consistency in single-player videogames? The question is approached by comparing player evaluations (N=206) of 11 videogames against a set of features derived by formal (qualitative) analysis. Ordinal regression was used to analyze the collected data. The study posits that dialogue system, romance, moral choice, appearance customization, and support for different play styles relate to story evaluation. Females tend to judge game stories more favorably and those with doctoral degree less favorably than players with other education.

This article argues how players can control a player character influence interpretation and facilitate engagement within a game. Engagement with player characters can be goal-related or empathic, where goal-related engagement depends on affects elicited by goal-status evaluations whereas characters facilitate empathic engagement. The concepts of recognition, alignment, and allegiance are used to describe how engagement is structured in games. Recognition describes aspects of character interpretation. Alignment describes what kind of access players have to a character's actions, knowledge, and affects. Allegiance describes how characters elicit sympathy or antipathy through positive or negative evaluation of the character.

This article examines the prominent role of Patreon in the rapidly growing sector of crowdfunded pornographic games. Recent research has indicated that, on average, more people (patrons) are funding pornographic digital games on Patreon than other (non-adult) digital games (Lankoski & Dymek, 2020). Graphtreon’s ‘Top Patreon Creators’ list from 9 June 2021 includes six NSFW game projects among the top 50 projects (ranked by number of Patrons).1 For example, Summertime Saga (Dark Cookie), the highest-ranked pornographic game, is third in terms of the number of funders, with 27,791 patrons funding $74,657 per month. While Wild Life – An Adult RPG (Adeptus Steve), which reportedly only had 9417 patrons as of 9 June 2021, receives a monthly income of $94,129 from those pledges.2 The current funding levels for both Patreon projects are considerably higher than when we began our sampling: since January 2020, the funding level for Summertime Saga has risen by 27.86%, while for Wild Life – An Adult RPG it has risen by 21.45%.

Games are increasingly becoming the focus for research due to their cultural and economic impact on modern society. However, there are many different types of approaches and methods than can be applied to understanding games or those that play games. This book provides an introduction to various game research methods that are useful to students in all levels of higher education covering both quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. In addition, approaches using game development for research is described. Each method is described in its own chapter by a researcher with practical experience of applying the method to topic of games. Through this, the book provides an overview of research methods that enable us to better our understanding on games.

Gameplay design patterns are semiformal interconnected descriptions features of gameplay. While most previous patterns have been identified through analyzing existing games, this paper proposed how patterns can be identified using theories as starting points. More specifically, we propose three different approaches to harvesting gameplay design patterns: 1) using theories as analysis foci, 2) distilling patterns from theories, and 3) using theories to understand the consequences of having or not having patterns present in a game design. The three approaches are presented together with examples of their use, and based upon this the concept of Theory Lenses as an analytical tool is introduced as a way of allowing theories independent of their research field to be applied to research on gameplay design.

Patreon is a crowdfunding platform where pornographic games are funded; even the most successful game developer in terms of the number of members is developing a pornographic game. We looked at 42 developers and their Patreon pages in order to examine the effects of the Patreon crowdfunding model on videogame development. Especially we studied membership rewards. As a result, developers were not only selling the game, but rewards we much about Community, Influence, and Recognition. Regulating Content Access is used regularly but often the latest version of the game is made available to everybody, just later to the members funding the development. We propose that certain rewards are similar to backstage passes in the music business and suggest that Patron pornographic games funding deviates from the crowdfunding model is not following mainly product-oriented commodity logic but a more community-oriented concept.

This paper looks at the history of game industry platforms in Finland and Sweden between 1979 and 2020 via 745 games. Both are relatively small countries where developers perform exceptionally well in a global market context. Developers and games developed in both countries are rather similar with some notable differences: Finnish developers focused on mobile games on Symbian in the 2000s, whereas Swedish developers focused on PC and console games, continuing a PC focus during the 2010s. The number of game companies has increased rapidly in Finland and Sweden since 2010 but peaked in Finland in 2014. From a platform studies perspective our data highlights rewarding historical insights about the dynamics of game industry platforms in Finland and Sweden with dimensions such as influence by demo scene, price of hardware/software (computers), mathematics education, third-party game engines, and finally higher education programmes in game development, consequently framing the data in socio-material perspectives on game industry platforms as application ecologies. 

This paper presents a case study of a Bachelor level game research methods course (15 ECTS). The course covers observations, interviews, and introduction to statistical analysis. The course set-up follows \textit{constructive alignment} design where the aim is that the learning goals, learning tasks, and evaluation are aligned. During the course, students first learn research design and later design their research based on a set of examples and conduct data gathering and analysis. The evaluation of the pedagogical approach used is based on students' learning diaries where the focus is the methods and applying methods. Qualitative evaluation indicates that students can better describe their research designs and analyses.

The design has been a study topic in various fields where design methods have been the focus of inquiry.

Design research, or design studies as it is also called, has been gaining momentum as a field of academic inquiry since the beginning of 20th century. Originally, design research focused on design methods and processes but it has moved to cover more varied research questions related to design. Current research topics include, for example, how to study design and what methods can be used to study design along with the more fundamental questions such as what is design in the first place and what kinds of knowledge design research produces. The topics of design research have also become more wide and varied with active research on architecture, information systems, product, service, graphic, and interaction design to name a few. Game design research, however, has received surprisingly little attention regardless of the large body of work in the more general design research.

The main aim of this book is to situate game design research within and alongside general design research.

The article proposes that the theories of grounded cognition and embodiment can be utilized in explaining the role-playing experience. Embodied cognition theories assume that cognition is not only a feature of the brain, but the body as a whole and it’s interaction with the environment  it operates in. Grounded cognition proposes that an action, perceiving an action, and thinking about an action rely on the same processes. Moreover, knowledge is inseparably grounded to bodily states and modalities. Based on the grounded cognition theory and especially embodiment, we argue the character immersion and bleed are natural consequences on how the brain works. Also we illustrate how the operation of  simulators explain some of the central features in the creation of fiction and it’s similarities to our everyday experiences. In general, grounded cognition provides a rather simple explanation how fiction is experienced as in this theoretical framework action and thinking about an action largely utilize the same brain mechanics and so are phenomenally similar.

Pornographic games have historically been distributed outside of mainstream channels. Steam, in 2018, change its policy allowing uncensored pornographic games to be sold. We found 452 games or DLCs that were tagged as mature content and sexual content. We analyzed 40 of those games in detail. 17.5% of these games only contain nudity while the rest graphically depicted sex. Visual novels and adventure games were the most numerous genres. Drama and fantasy were the most used milieus. Two of the games contained only male-male sex whereas the rest depicted heterosexual sex or heterosexualized same-sex sex. The pornographic scenes or nude images were tied to the game's progression structure.