Since early in the history of digital computing, analog games have been adapted into digital forms. More recently, adaptations are emerging in the spaces between analog and digital games, notably in board games and the genre of escape games. Prior frameworks for understanding analog game adaptation cannot handle these examples. This thesis introduces an object-focused approach: by framing these games as collections of objects, this approach includes games across the analog-digital spectrum based on which objects and rules are made digital, and how. A descriptive analysis of board game adaptations demonstrates that analog game adaptation has three subprocesses: mediation of game objects, digitization of game information, and codification of rules. Applying the approach to escape games expands the concept of mediation and allows for comparison between escape games across media. Escape games also exemplify a new term, ”genre adaptation”, describing adaptation occurring at the level of genre, not individual works.

In the second half of the 2010s there is a new trend emerging amongst the gaming community. The video game randomizer is a project taken on by hobbyist developers who are fans of a particular game and wish to extend its lifespan; to make the old new again. Some of these randomizers have become so popular that entire communities are beginning to form around them. In this paper I put forth a taxonomy for video game randomizers that categorizes them by degree of change to the base gameplay brought about by randomization. I identify a tipping point where the transformation to gameplay becomes fundamentally different from the base game and wherein the community forms. Through interviews and research I construct an ethnography of these communities to identify what other communities randomizer developers and players belong to and compare and contrast those communities.

Glitch in video games has been studied as an intentional aesthetic element and as an unintentional breakage that produced new narrative possibilities. Glitch art theory has examined interaction with glitch as phenomenological, but the examination of glitch as a systemic aesthetic in video games has gone under-explored. This thesis proposes that the defining power of glitch, in both cases, arises from the ways it makes the otherwise invisible protocols of computing visible in both domains and finds that both glitch art production and transformative modes of videogame play—such as speedrunning and narrative reparative play—have the capacity to make this glitch materiality productive.