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 2021-05-01 to 2025-05-01.)

Article	Citations
Identifying Playfulness: An Empirical Study on How Adults Recognize and Define Playfulness Across Culture	177
Social Realism in Red Orchestra 2 (2011)	48
Uses and Gratifications of Biophilic Simulation Games	27
Horror Video Games and the “Active-Passive” Debate	25
“Fear the Old Blood”: The Gothicism of Bloodborne	23
Machina ex Dea, Dea ex Machina: Gaia/GAIA/All-Mother and Lugones’ “World”—Traveling in Horizon Zero Dawn (2017)	18
The Practice of Oldhammer: Re-Membering a Past Through Craft and Play	17
Survey on Localization From the Development Perspective	16
Erratum	15
Livestreaming History: The Streamer-Historian and Historical Games Outreach	15
High Fantasy RPGs and the Materiality of the Medieval Book	14
“A Definition of Enchantment”: A New Approach to the Analysis of Magic Systems in Fantasy Games	13
Mask of the Translator: Walter Benjamin and Metal Gear Solid’s Difficult Relationship with Localization	13
Virtual Allies: Why Allyship is Critical to Diversification of Virtual Reality Gaming?	13
Esports Cannot Defeat Homophobia With Capitalism	12
Problematic Gaming at a Crossroad: Exploring the Interplay Between Internet Gaming Disorder, Toxic Attitudes, and Empathy in Digital Entertainment	12
Exploring Player Understandings of Historical Accuracy and Historical Authenticity in Video Games	12
Identification of Memorable Game Experiences: Analysis of Escape Rooms Visitors’ Experiences	11
Playing Video Games During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Effects on Players’ Well-Being	11
Hey, You! The Importance of Pragmatics in Localizations of Mass Effect in French and Spanish	11
Czech Appeal: Why and How National Game Productions Use Local Themes and Settings	11
The MTGO Virtual Economy: A Case Study on a “Play-to-Earn” Game That has Existed Since Before Cryptocurrency Was Even Invented	10
“We're All Mad Here!”: Becoming God in Bloodborne	10
‘What Was Your First Experience of a Videogame?’: The Fantasmatic Structure of Videogame Memory	10
“As if Possessed by a Demon”: Subjectivity, Possession, and Undeadness in Metal Gear Solid	10

The Rise of Gaming Nations	10
Esports as a Cultural Microcosm for Studying Psycholinguistics	9
Players Just Want to Have Fun? An Exploratory Survey on Hedonic and Eudaimonic Game Motives	9
To the Center of Nowhere: Deep Mapping Digital Games’ Paratextual Geographies	9
“What are you Bringing to the Table?”: The Something Awful Let’s Play Community as a Serious Leisure Subculture	9
Returning to Azeroth: Nostalgia, Sense of Place, and Social Presence in World of Warcraft Classic	8
“The Sense of Wonder”: Gaming Capital and Nostalgia for Inexperience in Magic: The Gathering	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 Crown is Warranted With Strength”: Bosses, Fantasy, and Democracy in Elden Ring	8
Perceived Foolishness: How Does the Saltybet Community Construct AI vs AI Spectatorship?	8
Finish—Spare the Shame: Realism of Hellish Quart and Alt-Sarmatian Ideology	7
Torres Strait Virtual Reality: A Reflection on the Intersection between Culture, Game Design and Research	7
Beyond the Game Itself: Understanding Authorial Intent, Player Agency, and Materiality as Degrees of Paratextuality	7
A Typology of Metagamers: Identifying Player Types Based on Beyond the Game Activities	7
Play and Misinformation: How America's Conspiracy Culture Became Gamified	6
Serious Games and Game Performance Before and During the Israel-Hamas War: The Case of Fact Finders and PeaceMaker	6
I Play, Therefore I Think: Procedural Philosophy in Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake 2 (2023)	6
Virtual Heterotopias and the Contested Histories of Kowloon Walled City	6
The Stupid, the Ridiculous, the Camp: How Goat Simulator's “Messy” Design Facilitates Queer Play	6
Fantasies of Adequacy: Mythologies of Capital in Dark Souls	6
Disability and Video Games Journalism: A Discourse Analysis of Accessibility and Gaming Culture	6
“I think I Get Why y’all do this Now”: Reckoning With Elden Ring 's Difficulty in an Online Affinity Space	6
Streamers as Arts Educators: Exploring Their Streaming Approaches as Pedagogical Practices	6
Metamodern Nature of Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding Synopsis and Gameplay	5
The Ones Who Walk Away from Hallownest: Hollow Knight's Radical Response to the Omelas Dilemma	5
Corrigendum to “It's Not a Game! Rules of Notice and Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Contemporary FMV Games”	5
Peace in the Valley: A Media and Discourse Analysis of Eric Barone's Stardew Valley Through Utopian Theory	5
FORGE: A Framework for Organizing Rewards in Gamified Environments	5
Taxonomy of Studies on the Use of Video Games in Entrepreneurship Education: A Systematic Literature Review with a Textometric Analysis	5
Exoplanetary Exploration and the End of the World in 22 Minutes: Philosofiction in Outer Wilds	5
A Conservative Metric of Power Creep	5
The Problem of Memory in the Assassin's Creed Series (2007–2020)	5
Analog Simulation and the Indian Wars: Encountering the Other Through Board Wargames	5
MeetDurian: Can Location-Based Games be Used to Improve COVID-19 Hygiene Habits?	5
The ‘First Person Shooter’ Perspective: A Different View on First Person Shooters, Gamification, and First Person Terrorist Propaganda	4
The Moral Service of Trans NPCs: Examining the Roles of Transgender Non-Player Characters in Role-Playing Video Games	4
Failing to See a Difference: Closing a Gender Gap in a Challenging Video Game	4
The Table and the Tomb: Positioning Trans Power and Play Amid Fantasy Realism in Dungeons & Dragons	4
Reshaping the Battlefield: The International Committee of the Red Cross, Video Games, and Public Relations	4
‘You Game Like a Girl’: Perceptions of Gender and Competence in Gaming	4
Broken Games and the Perpetual Update Culture: Revising Failure With Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Unity	4
Introduction: Reconsidering Paratext as a Received Concept	4
Response: In and Out of the Game, as Usual	4
“You’ve Been Living Here For as Long as You Can Remember”: Trauma in OMORI's Environmental Design	3
“A Legend From Before You Were Born”: Final Fantasy VII, Folklore, and Popular Culture	3
How Does Exposure to General and Sexual Harassment Relate to Female Gamers’ Coping Strategies and Mental Health?	3
Thought Experiments in Video Games: Exploring the (Un)Ethics of Motherhood in Frictional Games’ Amnesia: Rebirth	3
Translation Solutions in Professional Video Game Localization in Iran	3
The Beautiful Rule: Thinking the Aesthetics of Game Rules	3

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
Critical Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse in UFO 50	3
Gaming Capital on Overwatch's Official Forums	3
Assembling Auras: Towards a Methodology for the Preservation and Study of Video Games as Cultural Heritage Artefacts	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
How Accessible is This Video Game? An Analysis Tool in Two Steps	3
What is Videogame Formalism? Exploring the Pillars of Russian Formalism for the Study of Videogames	3
“Go. Just take him.”: PTSD and the Player-Character Relationship in The Last of Us Part II	3
Among the Casters: A Qualitative Study of Work and Play in Nottingham's Lead Belt	3
Blockchain Potentials for the Game Industry: A Review	3