Review: The Privilege of Play: A History of Hobby Games, Race, and Geek Culture

Review: The Privilege of Play: A History of Hobby Games, Race, and Geek Culture, by Aaron Trammell. 2023. New York University Press. xiii + 221 pp

Can Ordinary Horror Games Reduce Avoidant and Safety Behaviours in Players with Anxiety Disorders?

Since 2010, several studies have highlighted the ability of therapeutic video games to reduce avoidant and safety behaviours in individuals with anxiety disorders (ADs). However, there has been little exploration into whether horror games can have similar effects on these behaviours without incorporating explicit therapeutic design strategies. This paper provides an exploratory heuristic analysis of Carbon Steel (Klubnika, 2022), an indie puzzle horror game, to investigate its potential impact on reducing avoidant and safety behaviours in players with ADs. Carbon Steel evokes fear and tension, elements that are typically seen as counterproductive in anxiety management, yet it may offer players controlled exposure to fear-inducing events, which are central to therapeutic techniques like cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), attention bias modification (ABM), and exposure training. The analysis explores how Carbon Steel, though not designed as a therapeutic tool, might indirectly provide benefits for players with anxiety disorders. This paper advocates for further research into how ordinary horror games could be adapted to serve as supplementary tools for more accessible and engaging mental health interventions, offering diverse approaches to anxiety management and prevention

Rose-Tinted Videogames: The Influential Nature of Nostalgia in Videogame Development

Nostalgia is a common experience, with videogames providing a strong potential trigger for nostalgic feelings towards the playing of games or memories about games. Nostalgia has positive effects on creativity, inspiration, exploration, social connectedness, and a sense of self-continuity. These elements find a natural home in the creative industries and have led to the creation of a multitude of nostalgic products. This study investigates nostalgia’s influential role in videogame development, analysing how nostalgia-driven decisions made by developers are interpreted by players who share a nostalgic object. This paper examines three case study games based on three lenses: Remind, Repeat, and Revive. These categories and cases demonstrate practical development insight into core design decisions and player reception. For developers, these findings could lead to the accurate representation and sensitive implementation of nostalgic objects in games. Players could enhance their enjoyment of games by learning to identify where idealised recollections diverge from the subjective and objective reality of their nostalgic object

Review: The Stuff Games Are Made Of

Review: The Stuff Games Are Made Of, by Pippin Barr. 2023. MIT Press. 184 pp

Riot Games’ Content Marketing Approach for VALORANT Champions 2022

VALORANT is a competitive first-person shooter (FPS) game developed and released by Riot Games in 2020. The game has celebrated high player involvement in the competitive gaming scene wherein, only two years after the game’s release, the grand finals of the culminating event of 2022, VALORANT Champions 2022, peaked at 1.5 million viewers (Esports Charts, 2022a). Building on firsthand observation of following VALORANT Champions 2022 as it took place, this paper explores Riot Games’ content marketing approach for VALORANT Champions 2022, its impact on player engagement, and compares it with other esports marketing strategies. I analyze the main mediums of content distribution for the VALORANT Champions 2022 event (social media, website, and in-game content) and compare them against the content marketing sector using the latest developments in esports, with reference to competing game developers and esports organizations. I argue that Riot Games focuses on inclusivity of the global market, involving diverse types of players and regions, and their design/marketing choices create immersive experiences that incentivize players to be a part of the event in one form or another. The results suggest that other games with an esports scene could implement and expand content marketing, creating more themed experiences, similar to how Riot Games does with anthems, in-game content, and more, to grow and maintain interest in their competitive events

How 2B[?]: The Narrative Mechanics of Posthumanism in NieR: Automata

This article examines how posthumanism operates through the player-avatar relationship in NieR: Automata (Platinum Games, 2017). NieR: Automata takes place on a 120th century Earth and sees the player control three android soldiers who fight to retake the planet from an enigmatic force of alien machines on behalf of humanity. However, no humans appear in the game itself. As the war drags on in their absence, androids and machines alike struggle to construct new subjectivities from the fragments of human existence, with each attempt to mimic humanity or deify it ending in violent catastrophes. Through narrative mechanics that build affinity between the player and their avatars, NieR: Automata encourages the player to enact a posthuman subjectivity that allows the androids to face the full—and ultimately hopeful—truth of a post-anthropocentric world

Review: Bioware’s Mass Effect

Review: Bioware’s Mass Effect, by Jerome Winter. 2022. Palgrave Macmillan Cham. v + 96 pp.

Editorial

Editorial for the July 2025 issue

Review: Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities

Review: Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities, by Poppy Wilde. 2023. Routledge. 232 pp.

Review: Przygody cyfrowego tułacza. Interpretacje groznawcze

Review: Przygody cyfrowego tułacza. Interpretacje groznawcze, by Michał Kłosiński. 2023. University of Silesia Press. 295 pp