Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds - Current Issue

This article examines how the video game Death Stranding demonstrates the enmeshment of video games with the material conditions of our planet during an era of compounding ecological crises. This article focuses on Death Stranding’s engagement with apocalypse, both as a fictional backdrop and as a form of practice for the player. Exercises of labour undertaken by the player and their avatar, and their involvement in the proliferation of communication technologies within the gameworld, are shown to be ruinous in ways that are resonant with our contemporary conditions of crisis. Through this analysis an understanding is developed of how Death Stranding enlists players in the process of repeating apocalypse(s) and invites reflection upon the place of video games and play in these fractious times.

Cosy games are an established sub-genre of video games offering relaxed gameplay in a soft, calm environment. While any video game can offer emotional benefits, cosy games create an environment of abundance and safety, where players can deepen their emotional experiences within the game. In this article, I explore one aspect of cosy games that can provide emotional well-being to players: digital third places. Third places are public gathering places separate from home and work that allow people to unwind and interact with others in affirming environments. These environments are cultivated through placemaking, a principle exploring how abstract spaces on our planet are transformed into meaningful places. I highlight Stardew Valley, Coffee Talk Episode 2 and Kinder World to explore how each cosy game embodies placemaking principles to create digital third-place experiences for players, supporting their emotional well-being in ways similar to in-person third places.

In January 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak imposed restrictions on public forms of in-person mourning throughout the United States. Mortuaries live-streamed funerals, and players of games such Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) even adapted their virtual spaces for in-game funerals. Through close-reading analysis, this paper examines examples of memorials, shrines, and other bereavement rituals created by players of ACNH to argue that such sites provide players and community members with a critical outlet for grief and a space for ritualizing mourning practices. Contrary to expectations that ACNH and related cosy games offer an escapist reprieve from loss, the findings of this paper demonstrate that players often invite signifiers of death and mourning into otherwise ideal virtual realms. In sharing images of their in-game creations in online forums, players also encourage a broader participatory and trans-spatial form of mourning within the gamer community. This paper concludes that the gaming industry should continue to be attentive to such player needs by preserving elements of creative control while employing recommendations for thanatasensitive design advanced by scholars such as Massimi and Charise.

In this article, I discuss the potential that a dialogic approach to teaching game (design) in an intercultural postgraduate classroom in UK higher education can have to unsettle limited and universalist models to engage with video games. Through reflections on my own teaching practice, supported by interviews with former students who undertook my course in the period between 2019 and 2022, I argue that game educators can be understood as cultural workers, as suggested by Paulo Freire. This argument is supported by the concept of game literacies and Freirean critical pedagogies, more specifically his ideas on dialogic teaching – one that understands ‘dialogue’ as the mutual understanding of interlocutors’ realities – which I argue offer paths towards a more critical and less dissociated games education, bridging the rift between vocational and critical approaches and fostering more nuanced models to engage with games as a global – intercultural, interconnected – phenomena.

Review of: Not All Fun and Games: Videogame Labour, Project-based Workplaces, and the New Citizenship at Work, Marie-Josée Legault and Johanna Weststar (2024)

Montreal: Concordia University Press, 377 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-98811-149-0, p/bk, CAD $59.95