Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture
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The Rise of the Roguelite: Inside a Gaming Phenomenon, edited by James Cartlidge (CRC Press, 2025).: Book review
No full textA review of James Cartlidge\u27s edited volume, The Rise of the Roguelite: Inside a Gaming Phenomenon. Published by CRC Press, 2025. ISBN: 978-1-00341-547-3, 200 pages
Cheating against the machine: Reclaiming (game) space in The Hunger Games
No full textThis paper explores the arena of The Hunger Games series (2008–2010) as game space, focusing on power dynamics between the Capitol and the tributes. The Hunger Games, as a televised deathmatch, exemplifies a battle royale setting orchestrated by a totalitarian regime to maintain control over subjugated districts through a brutal spectacle. This analysis examines the Capitol’s oppressive control, reflected in the meticulously designed arena—a setting where tributes are subjected to constant surveillance and manipulated by the Gamemakers to maximize entertainment value. Using Michael Nitsche’s framework of video game spaces, the analysis dissects the arena as rule-based, mediated, fictional, social, and play space, each aspect reinforcing the Capitol’s authority. In spite of this, tributes like Katniss Everdeen reclaim limited agency through acts of defiance and exploitation of the arena’s inherent flaws, allowing resistance from within the game system through cheating and deception
Metroidvania ecologies: Exploration and the environmental imagination in Hollow Knight and Rain World
No full textMetroidvania games are characterized by highly interconnected levels that open up as the player acquires new skills or knowledge of the game world. In this article, we argue that the spatial interconnectedness of the Metroidvania genre strongly resonates with ecological theories foregrounding human–nonhuman enmeshment as well as nonhuman autonomy. Discussing two recent Metroidvania titles, Hollow Knight (Team Cherry, 2017) and Rain World (Videocult, 2017), we show how these games consistently challenge the player’s environmental imagination, and particularly notions of human mastery over the nonhuman world. They do so on multiple levels: by evoking rich postapocalyptic settings that resist the player’s attempts to project anthropocentric assumptions onto the games; by confronting players with nonhuman characters and lore that remain unreadable and opaque; and by creating dynamically evolving game worlds in which nonhuman behavior feels unruly and unpredictable. Most importantly, though, the two games suggest ecosystemic interconnectedness by defamiliarizing the players’ understanding of exploration as the linear traversal of spaces that can be fully controlled and depleted. Through this discussion, we aim to situate Metroidvania games within the growing archive of ecogaming, explaining what is so unique about the genre’s approach to the environmental imagination
Monstrosity in Games and Play: A Multidisciplinary Examination of the Monstrous in Contemporary Cultures, edited by Sarah Stang, Mikko Meriläinen, Joleen Blom, and Lobna Hassan (Amsterdam University Press 2025): Book review
No full textA review of Sarah Stang, Mikko Meriläinen, Joleen Blom, and Lobna Hassan’s edited volume Monstrosity in Games and Play: A Multidisciplinary Examination of the Monstrous in Contemporary Cultures. Published by Amsterdam University Press, 2024. ISBN: 978-9-46372-568-2, 294 pages
Pandora\u27s labyrinth: The Hellraiser puzzle box
No full textThis essay will focus on a case study, a particular fictional game that has given rise to variants across both literature and film: the Hellraiser puzzle box. We focus on Clive Barker’s short story The Hellbound Heart and two films from the film franchise: the 1987 Hellraiser and its reboot, the 2022 Hellraiser, which fleshes out (pun intended) the mythos. In addition to discussing the overt horror genre framing and themes through the lenses of literary analysis and film studies, we also propose an analogy with the literary genre that most notably straddles the same nexus of body-puzzle-space, closely intertwining the three: that of detective fiction. Its similarities with and differences from the Hellraiser puzzle box will be used to elaborate the interpretation of its design, functioning, and (il?)logic
Of reviews and women: A study of women discourses on gender in videogame magazines
No full textVideo games and their history are mostly seen from a masculine standpoint. Most traces, commentary, workers, communities, significant events or people, etc., are linked to a masculine lens that tends to ignore or marginalize women in video games and their culture. Even if they were clearly minorized in a masculine and sometimes hostile environment, there is a need to observe a part of history that gives us more information on the thought, the production, the influence, and the discourses of women without limiting them to the status of passive victims or to the margins of history. This article uses methods inspired by cultural history and textual analysis to investigate women’s discourses about women protagonists present in the game reviews of the specialized press covering video game culture and the video game industry. By doing so, we will observe a complex situation where different, and sometimes contradicting, intentions can be linked to how women characters are described, criticized, or mentioned in the reviews. As such, this analysis will show a cultural context where women’s writings are sometime influenced by the masculine hegemonic discourses made by or for a mostly gender restricted definition of the ‘gamers’, while other women’s text openly resist this hegemony by criticizing the way the many protagonists and women are represented. Women, their writing, and traces of their intention, can be seen in multiple magazines from 1981 to 2021. As such these public discourses are a small but important part of a more general and diverse history of video games and their communities
The state of Native representation in videogames
No full textThis commentary examines the state of Native representation in videogames from a Native perspective. Also, this commentary offers examples of Native Representation in Videogames from 1971 to 2025. Furthermore, I provide decolonizing and indigenizing examples of Natives in videogames. The paper also contains recommendations for further research and suggests good practices for videogame developers to facilitate design of positive Native representation as a decolonizing practice of indigeneity. This commentary closes with a call for positive representation, as seen in Never Alone (Upper One Games, 2014), the first videogame made by an indigenous-owned videogame studio
"This is the best game!": Rejecting and redefining arcade norms in Bee and PuppyCat
No full textThis article analyses The Best Game, a fictional arcade game encountered in the YouTube animated series Bee and PuppyCat. Although arcade games in North America have long been conceptualised as sites of masculine skill-based competition and mastery, this reputation obfuscates the diverse history of arcade games and reinforces capitalist design conventions. The Best Game offers a critique of these assumptions. By examining this fictional game through arcade history, masculinity, capitalism, and dance, this article explores how The Best Game eschews design conventions to align with the show’s mahō shōjo-inspired themes and leverages its fictionality to suggest a game that neither trains nor evaluates its players, although the result expresses resentment more than it incites resistance
Antagonistic game design: The author as a player
No full textThis article examines a particular relationship between game authors and players: the possibility for game authors to co-opt the role of players in the very game they created. Among the various ways in which this can occur, the article concentrates on ‘antagonistic game design’: the creation of games meant to frustrate and provoke their players. Player engagement, I argue, does not solely arise from the pleasure of overcoming in-game obstacles, participating in the unfolding of the game’s narrative or defeating other players, but can also emerge from resisting and opposing an imagined persona: the off-putting and often sadistic (implied) author behind the work. By projecting an unsympathetic and adversarial attitude towards players, antagonistically designed games can establish an asynchronous adversarial relationship with them and foster distinctive avenues for meaning-making and the self-validation of players
Editorial: DOA
No full textPlaying on the double-meaning of the abbreviation DOA as referring to both diamond open access and dead-on-arrival, the editorial presents the rationale, politics, and not least severe challenges connected to Eludamos’s radical open access practices. Given the recent growth of the journal, we need to balance our publishing policies against the threats of (self-) exploitation and exhaustion of our reviewers and team of editors. We argue that institutional embedding and strategic logistical and financial support is crucial for the success of any DOA publishing project and point to a promising recent initiative taken by the university library at UiT The Arctic University of Norway