Game Studies vol 20, issue 1

This study investigated players’ emotional attachment to two non-player characters from BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. Qualitative analysis of forum posts found players expressed intense emotional attachments but from different viewpoints. These emotional attachments also influenced how players engaged with the game mechanics of Mass Effect 2.

Can science fiction stories imagine more just futures for disabled bodies? Turning away from a future where technology has eradicated disability, this article explores crip encounters in Mass Effect 1-3 and interrogates the complex relationships between technology, culture, and disability.

This article applies the concept of prosthetic memory to Mafia III in order to discuss the significance of both contexts of production and reception in determining memory-making potentials of historical digital games with attention to racialized oppression in and beyond games.

Why do soda machines appear so frequently in video games? What purposes do they serve? What values do they represent? This article examines how virtual soda machines help anchor video games in a world we recognize as similar to our own, while simultaneously reinforcing the consumerist values of modern capitalism.

This article interrogates how war and play are smeared together in Battlefield 1, the first AAA game set in World War I. It advances liminality as a conceptual framework to investigate the ambiguities and contradictions that emerge in the tension between the history, memory and cultural meanings of World War I and the game’s ludic qualities.