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 2021-04-01 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
Conceptualizing the Roles of Involvement and Immersion in Persuasive Games	25
Far Cry 5, American Right-Wing Terrorism, and Doomsday Prepper Culture	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
Growing Pains in Esports Associationalism: Four Modes of National Esports Associational Development	17
Disco Pinball: Declining Games and Depression in Disco Elysium	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
“Fear the Old Blood”: The Gothicism of Bloodborne	13
Gaming for Ecological Activism: A Multidimensional Model for Networks Articulated Through Video Games	13
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
“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
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
Morality Meters and Their Impacts on Moral Choices in Videogames: A Qualitative Study	11
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
Just Fun and Games? A Sociological Consideration of Fun in Video Games	10
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
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
The Practice of Oldhammer: Re-Membering a Past Through Craft and Play	8
Heroes and Hooligans: The Heterogeneity of Video Game Modders	8
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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