This blog post provides an English summary of an article that explores gaming on marginal home computers in 1980s Finland, highlighting user experiences, community support, and the factors behind their decline, originally published in Finnish.
Author: Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies
In this blog text, Adjunct Professor Rami Mähkä writes about ice hockey video game research. The context is explicitly Finnish, even if the perspective, player identification, applies internationally. Mähkä’s main point is that the games remain popular one decade after another because they are based on virtual versions of real-life hockey teams and players, which are updated annually.
In this blog post, Postdoctoral Researcher Maria Ruotsalainen, PhD Research Fellow Tom Legierse, Doctoral Researcher Azul Romo Flores, Media Scholar Finja Walsdorff, Doctoral Researcher Ida Martine Gard Rysjedal and Associate Professor Egil Trasti Rogstad reflect on “Feminist Approaches to Esports Research” workshop organized in November 2024. By reading selected texts, the authors contemplate how feminist studies and understanding the margins should be extended to examining esports as whole.
In this blog post, Doctoral Researcher Mayara Araujo Caetano explores tags as a valuable point of entrance to study user animated pornography production using sex game and its points of connections with free porn platforms and its creation and consumption logics.
In this blog post, Postdoctoral Research Fellows Usva Friman and Matilda Ståhl describe their experiences and initial insights gained from studying Nordic esports.
In this blog post, Postdoctoral Researcher Evgenia Amey discusses the interplay between narrative, worldbuilding, and in-game environments, looking at how players can experience, affectively engage with and form emotional attachments to in-game settings and localities.
In this blogpost, Doctoral Researcher Hanne Grasmo reports from her new university course, Larp Design in Theory and Practice, where the students used their own bodies to role-play serious, impactful, and even erotic scenes in Nordic-style larps. She discusses how physical bodies and other materiality impact play-experience and emotions in a study context.
This blog post is the English summary of an article about the demonic imagery of games, originally published in Finnish.
In this blog post, Dr. Joleen Blom shares insights and background on the “Japanilaiset romanssipelit” (Japanese Romance Games) exhibition she curated for The Finnish Museum of Games at Vapriikki.
The concept of empowerment lacks a clearly defined description. While seemingly self-explanatory, the careless use of the term can lead to confusion. The many meanings of empowerment are relevant to the dissertation of Doctoral Researcher Valtteri Kauraoja, who is studying game design structures and the types of engagement they build. In this blog post, he maps out the concept in the context of mechanical game design, as it pertains to his design analysis.