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Video games have evolved into a profound cultural language, shaping experiences, memories, and societal imagination.
Official canonical publication: krizek.tech
Video games, once relegated to the realm of niche entertainment, have definitively matured into a foundational cultural language. They now intricately organize human experience, memory, and the collective social imagination, moving far beyond simplistic narratives. This paradigm shift underscores their role not merely as storytelling vehicles, but as sophisticated platforms that rework inherited symbolic traditions into interactive worlds. In these digital tapestries, interfaces, spatial design, and the crucial element of player agency converge to create deeply immersive and meaningful experiences.
At the heart of this transformation is a dual-pronged inquiry: how do video games and their transmedia adaptations encode and translate cultural values across diverse national and linguistic contexts? This extends to understanding how vibrant gaming communities interact across geographical and cultural borders, actively co-creating their own forms of fandom storytelling. Simultaneously, the focus shifts to analyzing video games as epistemological artifacts — cultural systems through which players encounter, test, and interpret fundamental ideas about society, history, identity, technology, and the very fabric of the future.
The guiding premise is profound: video games do not simply depict reality; they meticulously model temporalities, values, conflicts, and forms of social knowledge through interaction. This capability allows a game to translate abstract concepts into tangible experiences. A philosophical claim might become a rule within the game's mechanics, a historical memory could manifest as a navigable ruin, and cinematic grammar might be reinterpreted as a player-driven rhythm. Literary myths are reimagined as compelling quest structures, and societal anxieties are cleverly distilled into challenges involving resource management, the specter of failure, the rhythm of repetition, or complex moral choices.
This scholarly endeavor builds upon a rich academic tradition, drawing from the ludological insights pioneered by Aarseth (1997) and the narrative and spatial accounts of digital media articulated by Murray (1997), Ryan (2006), and Jenkins (2006). It incorporates Bogost's (2007) procedural argument and Sicart's (2009) ethics of play. Crucially, it integrates work on intermediality, transmedia adaptation, and fictional worlds by prominent scholars such as Bolter and Grusin (1999) and Scolari (2009). A significant immediate starting point is the recent work by Freire-Sánchez, Vidal-Mestre, and Fitó-Carreras (2024) on the *Fallout* series' adaptation, demonstrating how playable worlds retain their unique essence even when translated across television and fan interpretations.
The research topic actively invites diverse perspectives on video games and their vast transmedia expansions, including streaming series, cinema, animation, comics, social media, mods, wikis, and fan communities. These are all viewed as potent forms of cultural knowledge. Key areas of exploration include intertextuality, intermediality, transmedia adaptation, remediation, paratextuality, and procedural rhetoric. The critical role of player agency, mechanics, spatial storytelling, environmental narrative, and world-building are central to understanding these cultural expressions.
Beyond structural analysis, the scope extends to examining how games engage with complex themes such as cultural memory, myth, ideology, identity, trauma, mental health, and posthumanism. Contemporary anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence, dystopia, and ecological crisis are also pertinent areas of study, alongside the exploration of historical imagination and philosophical critique embedded within these digital worlds. This holistic approach connects game studies with a broad spectrum of humanities and social sciences.
The collection aims to foster a vital dialogue between game studies, communication studies, media studies, visual culture, film and television studies, adaptation studies, philosophy, literary theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities. Contributions may range from case studies and comparative media research to theoretical models, methodological proposals, systematic reviews, and empirical work on player reception and interpretation. This interdisciplinary approach is essential for a comprehensive understanding of the medium.
There is particular interest in submissions that scrutinize game-to-series and game-to-film adaptations, the intricate translation of mechanics, lore, interfaces, and player experience across different media, and the pivotal role of paratexts and interpretive communities. A core focus lies in the epistemological value of agency and the unique ability of video games to effectively communicate profound social, ethical, and existential questions to contemporary audiences. This collective endeavor seeks to solidify video games' standing as one of the defining symbolic languages of the twenty-first century—not merely stories to be consumed, but worlds to be inhabited, questioned, and interpreted through the act of play.
Source Insight: This report was curated based on original coverage from frontiersin.org.
Source: frontiersin.org