This paper traces a history of platforms targeting no-code and low-code audiences. It connects historical moments addressing accessibility challenges related to computer programming up through the more recent adoption of generative AI in game engines. Across these moments, this paper identifies communities that claimed authoring platforms, establishing their identity by rejecting other, potentially more efficient or expressive options. We argue these community dynamics have shaped the evolution of current game development platforms. By contextualizing current efforts in pedagogy as part of larger shifts in computer programming and game engine practice, we present a better understanding of the origins of platforms targeting no and low code audiences as rooted in earlier pivots in computer programming and community engagement. These “twisty” and often queer adaptations aimed at smaller communities have led to major changes in how game development has evolved for larger audiences. We close on considerations of the uncertain futures and pedagogical implications of AI-generated code and visual scripting, as game engines increasingly serve as the primary interface between creators and their work.

In 2023, three major games introduced they/them pronouns into their character creation options: Baldur's Gate 3 (Larian Studios), Starfield (Bethesda); and Story of Seasons: A Wonderful Life (Marvelous). Each of these games comes from companies or series with a history of enforcing binary gender. Making such shifts to include both gender equity and same-sex romance sparked backlash, particularly at a moment when “woke” cultural production is under intense cultural scrutiny. By examining the responses to these three very different, but culturally significant, games, we contextualize the importance of meaningful gender and sexuality inclusivity in gaming given a history of reactionary movements in gaming culture (most notoriously Gamergate). Critically, all of these games became bestsellers, suggesting that while “go woke, go broke” might remain a rallying cry in small portions of gaming subculture, the move towards inclusivity is ultimately not harming the commercial success of these games.

Following a successful Kickstarter campaign, hybrid dating simulator and dungeon crawler Boyfriend Dungeon was released in August 2021 and was quickly met with significant fan critique. The game's advertised promise of cozy or “wholesome” play was contradicted by the presence of a content warning and an antagonist character exhibiting threatening, stalker-like behavior. The strength of the fan reactions caused the developers, Kitfox Games, to revise the content warning while simultaneously resisting requests to fundamentally remove or sideline the game's central conflict. Contextualizing this response through news coverage and Twitter discussion demonstrates the challenges of the fan-developer relationship, augmented by the disproportionate responsibilities and expectations placed on queer creators and the power dynamics of fan-supported indie development. This incident stands as a warning of the consequences of centering a constraining mode of “consent” and aesthetic demands of “coziness” on genres associated with relationships and queer romantic play.

Initially released in 2018 to minimal attention, Among Us (InnerSloth) is a retro-style multiplayer game that employs both cooperative play and betrayal. In 2020, the game was catapulted into the popular culture spotlight thanks to a combination of pandemic play conditions, Twitch streamer attention, and political resonance. In this critical examination of the game and its reception, we consider how Among Us demonstrates both the importance of situated play and the potential for impact of minimalist indie games. The language of the game and its players (including the particularly notorious use of “sus”) has spread to play a significant role in culture more broadly. Transformed by its contextual moment into a force for memes and broader cultural conversation, the game transcends gaming and gamer identity to intertwine with how we understand the 2020 US election and American political polarization.

Visual novels occupy a space on the fringes of gaming. While many are sold on Steam, and several have been released on gaming platforms, most visual novels are promoted to enthusiasts or fans of connected properties (primarily anime). In this paper, we focus on the Western iterations of the queer dating simulator, a visual novel subgenre. The introduction of queer romances into a framework built for heteronormativity does not itself subvert that heteronormativity. Instead, it might simply enforce the same transactional mechanics and assumptions of queer relationships. The idea of monstrous romance is somewhat undermined by the skinny avatars and anime aesthetic that dominates Monster Prom’s visual experience. However, underneath that superficial resemblance to other dating simulators a more meaningful queering of play exists outside the limitations of the subgenre. The representational limitations of dating simulators are both mechanical and aesthetic: the visual expectations of anime, and the warping of bodies in favor of the hyperfeminine and super-skinny, create a space ill-suited to monsters or Other-marked bodies, broadly construed.

In this paper we examine the representation of crafts in video games, particularly in “crafting systems” – collections of mechanics that are described as crafting within a game's narrative. Real world crafting practitioners value creativity, expression, and mastery of material, but the act of crafting itself is often viewed by society as reproductive, feminized labor and therefore devalued. Because of this, crafting systems in games have been designed to more closely resemble masculinized, productive labor in the form of repetitive, manufacturing-like mechanics. These representational choices persist even across games lauded for their crafting systems, as our analysis demonstrates. Through an examination of both user-generated tutorials and game mechanics for three games that frequently appear on “best crafting games” lists, we show that games persist in devaluing the reproductive labor of crafting, reducing creative expression and material mastery to marginal and repetitive tasks while catering to the palates of masculine gamers by emphasizing stats-driven progression rather than creative making.

Since the first Pokémon game launched in Japan in 1996, the series has been a balancing act between casual and hardcore gaming. While the first iteration and "core" series has emphasized a modified, accessible version of traditional JRPG mechanics, other titles have frequently emphasized so-called casual play; most recently, Pokémon Go lured in a new set of players with mobile, locative Pokémon hunting. The 2018 release of a hybrid game, Let's Go, Pikachu! and its sister release Let's Go, Eevee!, has drawn renewed attention to the casual-hardcore dichotomy, meeting considerable resistance and criticism for its perceived casualization of the franchise. Through analyzing the discourse of the new game's reception as demonstrated by a dataset of user reviews on Metacritic alongside published game reviews, the gendered nature of the casual-hardcore dichotomy in the Pokémon franchise becomes clear. Key themes coded from the reviewed data include grinding, difficulty, nostalgia, and "cuteness." Placing this discourse alongside the game's own internal representations of reproductive labor through Pokémon caretaking and the contested definition of "grinding" demonstrates a fundamental resistance from the so-called hardcore game community to what are viewed as feminized play mechanics. The revealed tension is particularly remarkable given the emotional, reproductive labor of training and loving Pokémon that is front-ended in the franchise's overarching narrative and core values-a set of values that inherently conflicts with the "hardcore" gamer mentality of play.

While queer narratives have recently gained greater prominence and attention [35][51][48] both in games and game studies, they still represent a tiny portion of the playable romances available. Even fewer among these represent the potential of what Edmond Chang [12] has referred to as "queergaming," or games which refuse to conform in their narrative, mechanics, and modes of play to a cisgender, white, heteronormative gaze. We argue that meaningful queergaming is impossible within the current norms and genres of so-called AAA, or mainstream. It thus requires space and platforms dedicated to transgressive game design, building on Aarseth's [1] framework of transgressive play. To substantiate our argument, we use an examination of recent queer visual novels built using Ren'Py and released on Itch.io, with a case study of most popular current exemplar Butterfly Soup [32] alongside previous exemplars of queer romance in games.

In this paper, we seek to extend the definition and scope of discourse surrounding creative games and play by looking outside the communities traditionally represented in the conception of "gamer" and game studies. Through an examination of games popular in craft communities, particularly that of the textile craft spaces dominated by women, we propose a new model for merging craft play with existing representations and understanding of "craft" and craft systems as a part of gaming. Drawing upon the community-oriented, challenge-centered models we discuss in this paper, we offer potential avenues for game designers to pursue inclusive, feminist design and rethinking creative modalities of play.

The 2016 US election brought with it a torrent of related media and responses, thanks to the combination of the intense political divide and the turmoil and upheaval of the nation following the surprising results. We will examine selected games from the months preceding and immediately following the historic outcome of November 8, 2016, focusing on the games created during the March event #ResistJam which called for contributors to create "games that resist oppressive authoritarianism in all its forms." Joshua and Karen Tanenbaum proposed a theory of transformative play, which "supports a process of empathic identification with a new point-of-view or lived experience" [59]. Pre- and Post-Trump games, situated in the months leading up to and immediately following the election results, demonstrate not only transformative play but cathartic play, or the use of games as part of a process of emotional release and expression as part of sharing current struggles and challenges. We propose that combining these two types of play (transformative and cathartic) suggests new possibilities for how we understand personal games as providing new mechanisms for shared emotional experiences.

Narrative-centric analog games 1 have emerged from a hybridization of genres: they borrow conventions from pen and paper-based role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons, as well as the foundations of eurogames and war games. Historically, board game narratives and themes have primarily been imposed through design elements rather than mechanics: in his study of Eurogames, Woods noted that while players often value a "sense of narrative" that unifies theme and mechanics, this is rarely an emphasis of the genre [34]. However, modern narrative-centric board games demonstrate new levels of unity between play and story, integrating players into the narrative as meaningful actors and borrowing conventions from video games to build nonlinear play. In this paper, we examine and compare some exemplars of the narrative-centric board game genre, and use these games as a lens to propose a taxonomy of narrative-based physical games that builds from and extends Espen Aarseth's narrative theory of digital games [1] and suggest new possibilities for digital game narratives.