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Analog Game Studies

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Volume 11, Issue 1, 2024

Issue cover

Articles

  • 11.1 Table of Contents and Editors' Note (January 30, 2024)

  • The Board Game as a Narrative Medium

    Drawing on analyses of a range of German board games, this essay offers an overview of the development and definition of board games and an exploration of why board games are a legitimate medium for storytelling.

  • The Scientification of Games: Analyzing Ghost Blitz through the Lens of Cognitive Psychology

    This article provides a proof-of-concept for the complementary route of the scientification of games. We argue that the tasks and rules developed within commercially available games can exactly represent the same kinds of tasks studied in Cognitive Psychology. Consequently, analyzing games as though they were scientific paradigms a) allows for unique teachable moments in Cognitive Psychology using games as the vehicle of delivery, and b) feeds back principles of randomization and counterbalancing into the design and development of commercial games. Using the popular card game Ghost Blitz, we identify how players might resolve the game on a round-by-round basis in terms of both bottom-up (stimulus-driven) and top-down (expectation-driven) processes. We identify statistical biases within the card deck favoring one rule over the other, and a second bias where specific color/shape conjunctions are both under- and over-represented. These detailed analyses provided the insights necessary to present a re-designed and balanced version of the game and allow for teachable moments with respect to Cognitive Psychology including feature versus conjunction processing, visual search asymmetries, and task switching.

  • "Murders on the Stage, Tortures, Woundings, and the Like": Dungeons & Dragons Adventures as Tragedy

    This article examines Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) adventures as a genre to address game content, player agency, and reception. Specifically, Aristotle's Poetics serves as a starting point for the analysis of D&D adventures in order to think about the similarities between theatre and TTRPGs but also the nature and experience of tragedy and D&D adventures.

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