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 2021-04-01 to 2025-04-01.)

Article	Citations
Resilient Values in Game Industry Formation: Institutional Perspective to the Finnish Context	176
“Religious” and “Gamer”: Negotiating the Legitimacy of Video Games in a Muslim Context	47
Far Cry 5, American Right-Wing Terrorism, and Doomsday Prepper Culture	25
Conceptualizing the Roles of Involvement and Immersion in Persuasive Games	25
Chippin’ In: An Analysis of the Criminological Concepts Within Cyberpunk 2077	21
Recentering Indigenous Epistemologies Through Digital Games: Sámi Perspectives on Nature in Rievssat (2018)	18
Disco Pinball: Declining Games and Depression in Disco Elysium	17
Growing Pains in Esports Associationalism: Four Modes of National Esports Associational Development	17
An “Alternative to the Pen”? Perspectives for the Design of Historiographical Videogames	16
Space Rednecks, Robot Butlers, and Feline Foreigners: Language Attitudes Toward Varieties of English in Videogames	16
Gaming for Ecological Activism: A Multidimensional Model for Networks Articulated Through Video Games	13
“Fear the Old Blood”: The Gothicism of Bloodborne	13
“A Little Bit Like Psychological Torture”: A Grounded Theory of the Sociocultural Challenges Surrounding Expertise Development in an Emerging Esports Ecosystem	12
Critical Protocols in Indigenous Gamespace	12
Developer Credit: Para-Industrial Hierarchies of In-Game Credit Attribution in the Video Game Industry	12
Livestreaming History: The Streamer-Historian and Historical Games Outreach	12
Morality Meters and Their Impacts on Moral Choices in Videogames: A Qualitative Study	11
Hello, Worlds: A Ludic Theory of Cognition	11
Creative, Technical, Entrepreneurial: Formative Tensions in Game Development Higher Education	11
Mask of the Translator: Walter Benjamin and Metal Gear Solid’s Difficult Relationship with Localization	11
Just Fun and Games? A Sociological Consideration of Fun in Video Games	10
Machina ex Dea, Dea ex Machina: Gaia/GAIA/All-Mother and Lugones’ “World”—Traveling in Horizon Zero Dawn (2017)	10
“Beyond Their Actual Limits”: Immersion, Interactivity, and the Virtual Sublime in Burke and Video Games	10
Institutionalized Aesthetics: Video Games and the Contemporary Art Gallery	9
“A Definition of Enchantment”: A New Approach to the Analysis of Magic Systems in Fantasy Games	9

Horror Video Games and the “Active-Passive” Debate	9
Engagement With the Gurus of Gaming Culture: Parasocial Relationships to Let’s Players	9
Uses and Gratifications of Biophilic Simulation Games	9
Social Realism in Red Orchestra 2 (2011)	9
Virtual Allies: Why Allyship is Critical to Diversification of Virtual Reality Gaming?	8
“More Than Just Playing a Character”: Gender Exploration and Expression in Avatar Customization	8
The Practice of Oldhammer: Re-Membering a Past Through Craft and Play	8
Heroes and Hooligans: The Heterogeneity of Video Game Modders	8
Last Man Standing: Battle Royale Games Through the Lens of Self-Determination Theory	7
Rescripting of the Genre Through Greek Mythology in Hades	7
“You Took That From Me”: Conspiracism and Online Harassment in the Alt-Fandom of The Last of Us Part II	7
Becoming Bayek: Blackness, Egypt, and Identity in Assassin's Creed: Origins	7
Dynamic Music Video: Categorizing the Convergence of Video Games and Music Videos	7
Level Design Processes and Challenges: A Cross Section of Game Development	7
Profiles, Perceptions, and Experiences of Video Game Translators	7
Dungeons, Dragons, and Rogues: How Picaresque Literature Shaped the Thief Class in Dungeons & Dragons	7
FORGE: A Framework for Organizing Rewards in Gamified Environments	7
The Ones Who Walk Away from Hallownest: Hollow Knight's Radical Response to the Omelas Dilemma	6
Metamodern Nature of Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding Synopsis and Gameplay	6
Towards Sovereign Games	6
High Fantasy RPGs and the Materiality of the Medieval Book	6
Erratum	6
Survey on Localization From the Development Perspective	6
Symbolic Violence in the Language of Game Descriptions of Blackness: The Case of Pathfinder	6
Ludic Mechanics, Psychic Mechanisms and Explorations of “Inner Space” in Mindwheel and Psychonauts	5
The ‘First Person Shooter’ Perspective: A Different View on First Person Shooters, Gamification, and First Person Terrorist Propaganda	5
Reconstructing History and Culture in Game Discourse: A Linguistic Analysis of Heroic Stories in Honor of Kings	5
In Defense of Imagination: Canadian Youth Culture and the Dungeons & Dragons Panic in Canada, 1980–1995	5
Broken Games and the Perpetual Update Culture: Revising Failure With Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity	5
The Problem of Memory in the Assassin's Creed Series (2007–2020)	5
Playing With Needles: Technology, Gender and Playful Participation in Online Knitting Communities	5
The Moral Service of Trans NPCs: Examining the Roles of Transgender Non-Player Characters in Role-Playing Video Games	5
The Revival of the White Whale: Kojima’s The Phantom Pain and Death Stranding against Melville’s Moby-Dick	5
Background Checks: Disentangling Class, Race, and Gender in CRPG Character Creators	5
Identifying Playfulness: An Empirical Study on How Adults Recognize and Define Playfulness Across Culture	5
The Technological Mediation of Collective Memory Through Historical Video Games	4
Videogames as an ‘Unheroic’ Medium: The Child Hero's Journey	4
It's Not a Game! Rules of Notice and Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Contemporary FMV Games	4
Meditations on a Rubber Chicken: An Affective-Cultural Analysis of Monkey Island and Lucasfilm Games’ Humorous Puzzles	4
Why and How to Define Educational Video Games?	4
Eroticism and Design Workshops in Game Interfaces: Exploring a Mobile Otome Game for Chinese Women	4
Machphrasis: Towards a Poetics of Video Games in Contemporary Literary Culture	4
Identification of Memorable Game Experiences: Analysis of Escape Rooms Visitors’ Experiences	4
Stochastic Process Approaches for Modeling of Games	3
The Show, the Game, and the Old Gods: On the Ontological Reframing and the Fiction/Real Boundary	3
Peace in the Valley: A Media and Discourse Analysis of Eric Barone's Stardew Valley Through Utopian Theory	3
A Conservative Metric of Power Creep	3
Undertale’s Loveable Monsters: Investigating Parasocial Relationships with Non-Player Characters	3
Games for the Pluriverse: Exploring the Use, Opportunities, and Problems of Drawing from Local Cultural Heritage in Video Games	3
Exoplanetary Exploration and the End of the World in 22 Minutes: Philosofiction in Outer Wilds	3

What are the Drivers, Barriers, Mechanisms, and Anchors of cross-industry cooperation? The Perspective of the Video Game Industry Ecosystem	3
Exploring Player Understandings of Historical Accuracy and Historical Authenticity in Video Games	3
Virtual Empire: Performing Colonialism in the MMORPG Runescape	3
Playing Through the Pandemic: Gaming Usage as a Buffer During COVID-19	3
Problematic Gaming at a Crossroad: Exploring the Interplay Between Internet Gaming Disorder, Toxic Attitudes, and Empathy in Digital Entertainment	3
‘It's Just Not Safe’: Gender-Based Harassment and Toxicity Experiences of Women in Esports	3
Is Death Only the Beginning? How People Mourn Artificial Characters in Social Media	3
Aesthetics, Engagement, and Narration: Temporal Constraint as an Articulator of Ludo-Narrative Time	3
The Significance and Complexities of Anti-Corporate Gamer Activism: Struggles Against the Exploitation and Control of Game-Worlds in 2000s China	3
“Protecting our female gaze rights”: Chinese Female Gamers’ and Game Producers’ Negotiations with Government Restrictions on Erotic Material	3
Slow Motion in Videogames—Gameplay Over Style?	2
Gamification in Education: Why, Where, When, and How?—A Systematic Review	2
Online Gaming and Racism: Impact on Psychological Distress Among Black, Asian, and Latinx Emerging Adults	2
“She's Built Like a Tank”: Player Reaction to Abby Anderson in The Last of Us: Part II	2
Better Game Worlds by Design: The GAS Framework for Designing and Analyzing Games Based on Socio-Ecological Systems Thinking, Demonstrated on Nusfjord (2017)	2
Players Just Want to Have Fun? An Exploratory Survey on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Game Motives	2
“What are you Bringing to the Table?”: The Something Awful Let’s Play Community as a Serious Leisure Subculture	2
Becoming a Xia: Constructing Cultural Identity in the History of Wuxia Games in China	2
Game-Assisted Social Activism: Game Literacy in Hong Kong’s Anti-Extradition Movement	2
Analog Simulation and the Indian Wars: Encountering the Other Through Board Wargames	2
MeetDurian: Can Location-Based Games be Used to Improve COVID-19 Hygiene Habits?	2
Pivotal Play: Rethinking Meaningful Play in Games Through Death in Dungeons & Dragons	2
Corrigendum to “It's Not a Game! Rules of Notice and Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Contemporary FMV Games”	2
Hey, You! The Importance of Pragmatics in Localizations of Mass Effect in French and Spanish	2
“Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II	2
Becoming Afflicted, Becoming Virtuous: Darkest Dungeon and the Human Response to Stress	2
“A Legend From Before You Were Born”: Final Fantasy VII, Folklore, and Popular Culture	2
Top Shelf Drinks, Bottom Line Play: Examining Representations of Class in Bartending and Mixology Games	2
Addressing Toxicity and Extremism in Games: Conversations with the Video Game Industry	2
Taxonomy of Studies on the Use of Video Games in Entrepreneurship Education: A Systematic Literature Review with a Textometric Analysis	2
Experience, Rationality, Situation and Fallibilism: Establishing a Feminist Pragmatist Epistemology in Game Studies	2
Esports Cannot Defeat Homophobia With Capitalism	2
Professional Gaming and Pro-Gamers: What Do We Know So Far? A Systematic Review	2
The Table and the Tomb: Positioning Trans Power and Play Amid Fantasy Realism in Dungeons & Dragons	2
Response: In and Out of the Game, as Usual	2
Failing to See a Difference: Closing a Gender Gap in a Challenging Video Game	2
How Does Exposure to General and Sexual Harassment Relate to Female Gamers’ Coping Strategies and Mental Health?	2
Auteur Theory and Minor Literature: Meg Jayanth as a Game Auteur	2
Playing Video Games During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Effects on Players’ Well-Being	2
Bridge Babies and Rebuilding America: Reproductive Commodification in Death Stranding	2
Video Game Development in India: A Cultural and Creative Industry Embracing Regional Cultural Heritage(s)	2
“Video Games Were My First Safe Space”: Queer Gaming in the Animal Crossing New Horizons LGBTIQA+ Community	1
The Use of Games in Citizen Science Based on Findings from the EyeWire User Study	1
‘You Game Like a Girl’: Perceptions of Gender and Competence in Gaming	1
The Economy of Time, the Rationalisation of Resources: Discipline, Desire and Deferred Value in the Playing of Gacha Games	1
Towards Representational Adequacy: A Critical Analysis of Transgender Representation in Tell Me Why	1
Chinese Gold-Farming in the 2000s: Worker Empowerment and Local Development Through Video Games-Based Digital Labor	1
Playing (Against) the Heritage: Absolutism and the French Revolution in French Digital Games Before 2000	1
Desire and Delusion: Fetish of Brazilian Favela in Videogame (Mis)representation	1
To the Center of Nowhere: Deep Mapping Digital Games’ Paratextual Geographies	1
Space Games: Ecologies of Scale and Technologies of Hope in Taiwan's OPUS Game Trilogy	1
“We're All Mad Here!”: Becoming God in Bloodborne	1
The Rise of Gaming Nations	1
Esports as a Cultural Microcosm for Studying Psycholinguistics	1
Representation and Its Historical Antecedents in New Media: The Queer-ious Case of Assassin's Creed	1
Reshaping the Battlefield: The International Committee of the Red Cross, Video Games, and Public Relations	1
Right-Wing Extremism in Mainstream Games: A Review of the Literature	1
Newsgames: The Use of Digital Games by Mass-Media Outlets to Convey Journalistic Messages	1
Setting the Game Agenda: Reviewing the Emerging Literature on Video Gaming and Psychological Well-Being of Sexual and Gender Diverse Youth	1
The MTGO Virtual Economy: A Case Study on a “Play-to-Earn” Game That has Existed Since Before Cryptocurrency Was Even Invented	1
Geek Cuisine: Extending the Narrative of a Junk Food Gamer	1
Between Subjectivity and Flourishing: Creativity and Game Design as Existential Meaning	1
Introduction: Reconsidering Paratext as a Received Concept	1
Geographical Aspects of Open-World Video Games	1
Foreign Yet Familiar: J. L. Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings and Other Cultural Ferrymen in Japanese Fantasy Games	1
Gameplay 2.0: Toward a New Theory	1
Platform-produced Heteronormativity: A Content Analysis of Adult Videogames on Patreon	1
Behind the Scenes at ApertureScience.com: Portal and Its Paratexts	1
“The Devil in the Mirror: Projections of Desire from Folk Tales to Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt”	1
Avant-Garde is Dead? On Arrière-Garde and Digital Games	1
Czech Appeal: Why and How National Game Productions Use Local Themes and Settings	1
Video Games as Social Institutions	1
Making Complexity Measurable in Practice: A Formal Analysis of Gamble-Play media	1
“As if Possessed by a Demon”: Subjectivity, Possession, and Undeadness in Metal Gear Solid	1
‘What Was Your First Experience of a Videogame?’: The Fantasmatic Structure of Videogame Memory	1