Games and Culture

This article examines the cultural background informing the overarching narrative of the Legend of Zelda series, focusing on the references to Japanese religious traditions associated with the characters Ganondorf, Demise, and Calamity Ganon. The destruction enacted by these antagonists is not entirely negative; rather, it is a part of the cycle of rebirth that is necessary for the renewal of Hyrule both within the series mythology and in the context of the player’s delight in the postapocalyptic and preindustrial green spaces that characterize the games in the Zelda franchise. A close reading of the original Japanese-language script of Breath of the Wild (2017), Skyward Sword (2011), and The Wind Waker (2002) reveals that the various permutations of Ganon add cultural depth to the games, thus endowing the conflicts underlying their stories with a greater sense of literary complexity.

This article examines a terrain in which gender inclusion remains a challenge: competitive esports. In the male-dominated sphere of esports, the underrepresentation of women and nonbinary people often leaves these marginalized groups invisible, with a significant lack of women and nonbinary people competing in top-tier tournaments. We highlight the experience of Wang ‘BaiZe’ Xinyu, a Chinese Hearthstone player who became the first woman to compete in a Hearthstone Championship Tour event in the game’s 3-year history. The narrative surrounding BaiZe’s participation largely focused on her gender and ignored the achievements that led her to qualify for the event. We argue that BaiZe’s entrance to the championship scene was received negatively by both competitors and spectators, reinforcing barriers that exclude women and nonbinary people from entering this male-dominated space. The discrimination faced by these esports competitors reinforces sexism inherent not only in Hearthstone but also in esports in general.

Women in video game development face issues such as the pay disparity reported at Rockstar North and the “bro culture” issues reported within Riot Games. Some development roles are rewarded more, whether by pay or creative voice, than others. Although there has been research into gender disparity by roles within other entertainment industries, such as the movie industry, there has yet to be a data-based examination of gender disparity broken down by role within the video game industry. To provide a more nuanced examination of the gender gap that exists in game development, we analyze the gender and roles for 14,265 staff listed in the credits of 27 games produced by seven of the video game publishers most represented in top seller lists to discover how the distribution of women and men varies by role.

Esports is one of the fastest growing avenues of entertainment in the world today, projected to have revenues approaching US$1.5 billion by year 2020. The large growth of this market has led to similarly large growth in the gambling industry around esports, with some estimates predicting over US$7.4 billion in wagers made in 2018. In this article, we explain the nuances of the esports gambling market that differentiate it from the traditional sports betting market, such as “skins” betting, and empirically examine the biases present in wagering for two different esport titles (Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2) at two esports gambling websites. We find that real money and skins gambling markets have different types of market biases. In particular, we find that bettors in real money markets tend to overbet large underdogs, particularly when those underdogs are European teams playing against non-European teams.

This article introduces a novel methodology to analyze the historical evolution of the adventure game genre. This method involved the development of an analytical system, online database, and data visualization tool designed to help us understand the evolution of gameplay. Following an overview of these methodological considerations, we present the most common gameplay configurations adopted by adventure games over the years with the help of the data visualization interface. This forms the foundation of a comparative study that seeks to highlight the specificity of French production at the turn of the 1990s. The results shed light on gameplay configurations in a way that effectively articulates a synoptic, macrohistorical perspective with deep inspections of specific games.

Beyond the blockbuster studios and multinational publishers of North America, Western Europe, and Japan, videogame production happens in a range of contexts, at a variety of scales, and for a number of reasons. While “the videogame industry” as a sector of the economy accounts for the flow of capital between corporate actors and global markets, as a concept it is insufficient to account for the spectrum of cultural activities and identities that constitute videogame production. In this article, I instead follow Bourdieu to consider videogame production as a cultural field. The videogame field is locally situated and constituted by a contested range of activities and identities implicated in interrelated economic, cultural, and social forces. Drawing from empirical research with videogame makers in Australia, this article’s conceptualization of the videogame field provides ways to better account for the plurality of ways videogames makers navigate economic stability and creative autonomy.