Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds - Current Issue

‘Actual Play’ is a growing form of play spectatorship which involves the recording and broadcast of tabletop gaming sessions. It has spawned bestselling comics, live shows and television adaptations. Unlike ‘Let’s Play’ videos on YouTube or game livestreaming on platforms like Twitch, there has been little in the way of critical analysis of this new media form. This article therefore aims to understand its audience(s) through qualitative and quantitative content analysis of survey responses from the fan communities of one of the most popular Actual Play shows, The Adventure Zone. We focus on the relationship between Actual Play’s attempts at creating more accessible and inclusive media that welcome all types of people and the more exclusionary, highly gendered aspects of the broader gaming community. These enquiries also serve as a case study for Actual Play as a less-examined area of both play spectatorship and gaming content creation, and points towards potential future study in these areas.

This article analyses Actual Play podcast The Adventure Zone to highlight the under-explored dynamics of fan audiences in this area of gaming content creation. Topics covered include audience reception of the creators, engagement with issues of diversity and Actual Play as a tabletop roleplaying game gateway.

Organizing games by categories based on playstyle (e.g. single-player vs. multiplayer) makes sense from a marketing perspective, but when it comes to organizing players into such categories, things get tricky. To illustrate that categorizing players based on preferences for single-player vs. multiplayer games may be problematic, we analysed millions of posts in Reddit for single-player and multiplayer games to see which players use more extroversion (pro-social) words, citing research suggesting that those who prefer multiplayer games should use more extroversion words. We found no noticeable differences between the two groups, although unexpectedly single-player gamers did use more extroversion words in a statistically significant manner. Ultimately, we offer caution that categorization of games and gamers – although useful at times – can oversimplify assumed preferences and, when not critically examined, may lead to the reification of misleading and exclusionary categories of both games and the people who play them.

Focusing on Liyla and the Shadows of War, Bury Me, My Love and This War of Mine through gender studies, platform studies, affect studies and theories of care, the article offers a comparative close reading analysis of the three games with an emphasis on time management, platform and affect, arguing that these games conceptualize a shift from heroism to care based on their temporality and by creating an affect of vulnerability. Liyla enacts the urgency made palpable by war, forcing the player character to abandon the time-consuming task of care. Bury Me, My Love systematically precludes heroic narratives, outlining instead a caring masculinity that relies on the affective time management of the mobile phone. Finally, the game mechanics of This War of Mine combine the time of heroism and caring – provided that the latter is an essential prerequisite for the former. The article concludes that these diegetic care templates may make players really care.

This article examines the depiction of libraries in post-apocalyptic games and the roles they play from a gameplay, storytelling and character development perspective. While the representation of libraries in film, fiction and other media has been the subject of considerable scholarly interest, there has been comparatively less attention on the representation of libraries in video games; this article fills a gap in the literature in its exclusive focus on the representation of libraries in post-apocalyptic settings. Libraries serve in two distinct roles in post-apocalyptic games: as storehouses of information and knowledge, and as sanctuaries from hostile and unforgiving worlds that emerge in the wake of an extinction-level event.

This review of Unknown Worlds Entertainment’s survival and exploration game, Subnautica (Unknown Worlds Entertainment 2018) aims to discuss the game and highlight just how it presents an enjoyable experience to new and veteran players alike and why the game is seeing a continual boom in its player base. To do this, I will be discussing some context around Subnautica and its place in PlayStation’s ‘Play at Home Initiative’ over the course of the global pandemic. Then I will discuss the game in-depth, focusing on its atmosphere and style, its narrative and finally its gameplay before offering some final thoughts on Subnautica as an excellent ‘comfort’ game whose different gameplay modes can attract players of all inclinations, providing the experience they are looking for.