OOIR: Observatory of International Research

Papers

(The TQCC of Games and Culture is 3. 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 2021-07-01 to 2025-07-01.)

Article	Citations
Social Realism in Red Orchestra 2 (2011)	56
Uses and Gratifications of Biophilic Simulation Games	30
Machina ex Dea, Dea ex Machina: Gaia/GAIA/All-Mother and Lugones’ “World”—Traveling in Horizon Zero Dawn (2017)	25
Horror Video Games and the “Active-Passive” Debate	25
The Practice of Oldhammer: Re-Membering a Past Through Craft and Play	19
Erratum	17
Survey on Localization From the Development Perspective	17
Mask of the Translator: Walter Benjamin and Metal Gear Solid’s Difficult Relationship with Localization	15
“A Definition of Enchantment”: A New Approach to the Analysis of Magic Systems in Fantasy Games	15
Virtual Allies: Why Allyship is Critical to Diversification of Virtual Reality Gaming?	14
High Fantasy RPGs and the Materiality of the Medieval Book	14
Livestreaming History: The Streamer-Historian and Historical Games Outreach	14
“Fear the Old Blood”: The Gothicism of Bloodborne	14
Identifying Playfulness: An Empirical Study on How Adults Recognize and Define Playfulness Across Culture	13
Exploring Player Understandings of Historical Accuracy and Historical Authenticity in Video Games	13
Esports Cannot Defeat Homophobia With Capitalism	13
Identification of Memorable Game Experiences: Analysis of Escape Rooms Visitors’ Experiences	11
Hey, You! The Importance of Pragmatics in Localizations of Mass Effect in French and Spanish	11
Problematic Gaming at a Crossroad: Exploring the Interplay Between Internet Gaming Disorder, Toxic Attitudes, and Empathy in Digital Entertainment	11
“What are you Bringing to the Table?”: The Something Awful Let’s Play Community as a Serious Leisure Subculture	10
Esports as a Cultural Microcosm for Studying Psycholinguistics	10
“As if Possessed by a Demon”: Subjectivity, Possession, and Undeadness in Metal Gear Solid	10
The Rise of Gaming Nations	10
The MTGO Virtual Economy: A Case Study on a “Play-to-Earn” Game That has Existed Since Before Cryptocurrency Was Even Invented	10
To the Center of Nowhere: Deep Mapping Digital Games’ Paratextual Geographies	10

Players Just Want to Have Fun? An Exploratory Survey on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Game Motives	9
“We're All Mad Here!”: Becoming God in Bloodborne	9
Emotions in Game Data Work	9
Czech Appeal: Why and How National Game Productions Use Local Themes and Settings	9
“The Sense of Wonder”: Gaming Capital and Nostalgia for Inexperience in Magic: The Gathering	8
“A Crown is Warranted With Strength”: Bosses, Fantasy, and Democracy in Elden Ring	8
I Play, Therefore I Think: Procedural Philosophy in Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake 2 (2023)	8
Returning to Azeroth: Nostalgia, Sense of Place, and Social Presence in World of Warcraft Classic	8
Perceived Foolishness: How Does the Saltybet Community Construct AI vs AI Spectatorship?	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
A Typology of Metagamers: Identifying Player Types Based on Beyond the Game Activities	8
Streamers as Arts Educators: Exploring Their Streaming Approaches as Pedagogical Practices	7
Virtual Heterotopias and the Contested Histories of Kowloon Walled City	7
The Stupid, the Ridiculous, the Camp: How Goat Simulator's “Messy” Design Facilitates Queer Play	7
Beyond the Game Itself: Understanding Authorial Intent, Player Agency, and Materiality as Degrees of Paratextuality	7
Play and Misinformation: How America's Conspiracy Culture Became Gamified	7
Understanding How Marginal National Video Game Industries Differ	7
The Problem of Memory in the Assassin's Creed Series (2007–2020)	6
“I think I Get Why y’all do this Now”: Reckoning With Elden Ring 's Difficulty in an Online Affinity Space	6
FORGE: A Framework for Organizing Rewards in Gamified Environments	6
Finish—Spare the Shame: Realism of Hellish Quart and Alt-Sarmatian Ideology	6
Fantasies of Adequacy: Mythologies of Capital in Dark Souls	6
Serious Games and Game Performance Before and During the Israel-Hamas War: The Case of Fact Finders and PeaceMaker	6
The Ones Who Walk Away from Hallownest: Hollow Knight's Radical Response to the Omelas Dilemma	5
Exoplanetary Exploration and the End of the World in 22 Minutes: Philosofiction in Outer Wilds	5
Peace in the Valley: A Media and Discourse Analysis of Eric Barone's Stardew Valley Through Utopian Theory	5
Analog Simulation and the Indian Wars: Encountering the Other Through Board Wargames	5
Taxonomy of Studies on the Use of Video Games in Entrepreneurship Education: A Systematic Literature Review with a Textometric Analysis	5
The ‘First Person Shooter’ Perspective: A Different View on First Person Shooters, Gamification, and First Person Terrorist Propaganda	5
Metamodern Nature of Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding Synopsis and Gameplay	5
A Conservative Metric of Power Creep	5
MeetDurian: Can Location-Based Games be Used to Improve COVID-19 Hygiene Habits?	5
Corrigendum to “It's Not a Game! Rules of Notice and Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Contemporary FMV Games”	5
Critical Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse in UFO 50	4
The Table and the Tomb: Positioning Trans Power and Play Amid Fantasy Realism in Dungeons & Dragons	4
Failing to See a Difference: Closing a Gender Gap in a Challenging Video Game	4
“Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II	4
“A Legend From Before You Were Born”: Final Fantasy VII, Folklore, and Popular Culture	4
The Moral Service of Trans NPCs: Examining the Roles of Transgender Non-Player Characters in Role-Playing Video Games	4
Response: In and Out of the Game, as Usual	4
Beyond Game Blocks: Adolescent Girl Players' Perspectives During COVID-19	4
Introduction: Reconsidering Paratext as a Received Concept	4
The Business of Play: Financialization and Optimization in World of Warcraft	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	3
Thought Experiments in Video Games: Exploring the (Un)Ethics of Motherhood in Frictional Games’ Amnesia: Rebirth	3
The Game-Like Experience of Virtual Reality Art: Sensational Players and Critical Audiences	3
Gaming I, II, and III: Arcades, Video Game Systems, and Modern Game Streaming Services	3
Translation Solutions in Professional Video Game Localization in Iran	3
Playing with Character: A Framework of Characterization in Video Games	3

“You’ve Been Living Here For as Long as You Can Remember”: Trauma in OMORI's Environmental Design	3
How Accessible is This Video Game? An Analysis Tool in Two Steps	3
Among the Casters: A Qualitative Study of Work and Play in Nottingham's Lead Belt	3
Reshaping the Battlefield: The International Committee of the Red Cross, Video Games, and Public Relations	3
The Doors of Perception: Horror Video Games and the Ideological Implications of Ludic Virtual Reality	3
‘Born of the Blood, Made Men by the Blood, Undone by the Blood’: Bloodborne as a Critical Reflection of Ghosts of the Anthropocene	3
Exploring the Etymology of YouXi: A Chinese Perspective on the Concept of Game	3
‘You Game Like a Girl’: Perceptions of Gender and Competence in Gaming	3
The Beautiful Rule: Thinking the Aesthetics of Game Rules	3
How Does Exposure to General and Sexual Harassment Relate to Female Gamers’ Coping Strategies and Mental Health?	3
Gaming Capital on Overwatch's Official Forums	3
Blockchain Potentials for the Game Industry: A Review	3
Mutants and Zombies Everywhere! Or Villains, Violence, and Selfishness: Questions of Humanity in the Post-apocalyptic (Pandemic) Video Game	3
Experience in Videogame Display: An Extension of the Matrix Model	3
The Ground Floor Approach to Video Game Accessibility: Identifying Design Features Prioritized by Accessibility Reviews	3