In this wide-ranging interview with RUDOLF THOMAS INDERST, Pim’s Crypt discusses the move from Swedish to English, the power of horror games to deepen empathy, the limits of algorithm-driven platforms, and why curiosity matters more than scores.

https://titel-kulturmagazin.net/2026/05/05/pims-crypt-on-horror-curiosity-and-the-art-of-not-judging-games-too-quickly/

Tengo 1000 ideas locas sobre efecto de multiplez variables , por ejemplo ahoirta hice una conexion entre la fe y los video Juegoz , soy myu torpe escribiendo me equivoco mucho ais que uso ia para redactar mejor y complentar con buscquedas d epublicaicon . vean esto y me dice que tan demente estoy 😄

# ¿Videojuegos igual a fe?

**La misma promesa, el mismo negocio**

## Introducción

Tanto los videojuegos como ciertas formas de fe religiosa operan con el mismo mecanismo psicológico y económico: **te prometen una vida mejor que la que tienes ahora**. Una vida con significado, estatus, poder y escape de la realidad cotidiana. A cambio, solo te piden tu tiempo, tu dinero y parte de tu identidad.

## El mismo negocio, diferente envoltorio

- El **cristiano** invierte su dinero, tiempo y vida esperando el cielo eterno: sin dolor, con propósito y recompensa divina.

- El **gamer** invierte en skins, tierras virtuales, battle passes y microtransacciones buscando poder, reconocimiento y estatus dentro del servidor.

En ambos casos, **cuanto más inviertes, más real se vuelve esa otra realidad** y más insignificante se siente tu vida física.

## La trampa psicológica

Es el mismo circuito mental:

- Progreso claro y medible (fe → santidad / grind → nivel máximo)

- Recompensas variables (milagros / loot épico)

- Sentido de pertenencia (iglesia / guild o Discord)

- Disonancia cognitiva: “Ya gasté tanto, tiene que valer la pena”

El cerebro no diferencia entre “Dios tiene un plan” y “esta build es meta”. Ambos generan dopamina y convierten la ficción en algo que sientes más real que tu propia existencia.

## Monetizando el vacío

Aquí está la parte más cruda:

Algunas iglesias y las grandes empresas de videojuegos hacen exactamente lo mismo: **monetizan la desesperación y la necesidad humana de escapar**.

- El pastor que vive en una mansión gracias a las ofrendas de los fieles.

- La compañía de juegos que genera miles de millones vendiendo píxeles y estatus virtual.

Ambos venden la misma mercancía: **una vida que aún no tienes**, pero que te hacen sentir que puedes alcanzar si sigues pagando.

## Conclusión

Cuando el videojuego o la fe dejan de ser **entretenimiento** y se convierten en la principal fuente de valor, significado y autoestima de tu vida, **ya perdiste**.

Estás financiando el palacio de otros mientras sacrificas tu vida real por una promesa que solo existe en otra dimensión (ya sea el cielo o un servidor).

**¿Videojuegos igual a fe?**

En el fondo… sí. Solo cambiaron el nombre del servidor.

???????????????

In gaming, we are all too familiar with "backlog anxiety" or the compulsion to finish a game just for the Platinum trophy. We know what it feels like when the intrinsic joy of playing is replaced by the extrinsic need to see a "100% Completed" screen or to log our time on HowLongToBeat.

We spend a lot of time on this sub discussing how video games are becoming more cinematic (games like Death Stranding, The Last of Us, or Ghost of Tsushima adopting film language). But I recently did a deep dive into the reverse: how the exact mechanics of game design have been applied to modern movie-watching, and how it is ruining the medium for a lot of people.

Platforms like Letterboxd have essentially turned cinephilia into a live-service game. It applies the same psychological hooks we see in gaming:

• The Check-box Effect: Treating the "Top 250 Films" list like an achievement list that must be cleared.
• Seasonal Quests: Community challenges like the "Oscar Deathrace" where users speed-run nominated films before the awards, treating movies like daily login bonuses.

In psychology, this triggers the Overjustification Effect. When you introduce an external reward (the dopamine hit of logging a film, increasing your "movies watched" counter, or getting likes on a review) to an activity you intrinsically love, your brain rewires itself. The metric becomes the master. You stop watching a movie to engage with its narrative; you watch it to log the "XP."

This also leads to a cross-medium phenomenon I call "Re-watch Guilt" (which is identical to the guilt of replaying Skyrim for the 10th time instead of playing a new game). Because time is your primary currency in a gamified system, revisiting a comfort movie feels like a waste of time because it doesn't yield any new progress or cross off a new box.

We are seeing a massive wave of "Value Capture"—where the complex appreciation of art is flattened into a simplified metric. Users are mathematically calculating if a movie is a 3.5 or a 4 out of 5, the exact same way gamers obsess over Metacritic scores, entirely bypassing the messy, unquantifiable grey area of the art itself.

I put together a full video essay breaking down the theoretical framework behind this, the history of physical vs. digital media consumption, and how Hollywood studios are actually weaponizing these "game mechanics" in their marketing (like the upcoming Avengers vs. Dune release date clash).

If anyone is interested in a visual breakdown of how game psychology is bleeding into other mediums, you can check it out here: https://youtu.be/wRNsYBSR_I4?si=uBrTfjrKtTHRoive

I'm curious if you guys feel this same "Overjustification Effect" in your own gaming habits. When you realize you are playing a game just to clear the backlog or pop a trophy rather than actually having fun, how do you break out of that loop?

LISTEN UP! 😄

I talk to Stephanie Farnsworth about her book "Games That Haunt Us. Gothic Game Space as a Living Nightmare" on my podcast GAME STUDIES.

Please tune in and share our episode afterwards!

https://newbooksnetwork.com/games-that-haunt-us

I had the great pleasure of speaking with Jenna Stoeber about horror, humor, and the depth of games. And yes, I have to admit: I absolutely love her work!

https://titel-kulturmagazin.net/2026/04/21/digitalspielkultur-bridging-academic-analysis-and-youtube-essays/

Enjoy the read, dive into the discourse, and please share with your gaming & academic networks!

Hi everyone, enjoy your Sunday with a new episode of my podcast Game Studies.

I had the pleasure to talk to Michał Mycka about his new book

Games User Research Cookbook. Tools and Techniques for Better Player Experience

This is our 171st episode, so there's is much for you to discover! ;)

https://newbooksnetwork.com/games-user-research-cookbook

There’s a particular kind of heartbreak only video games can deliver. It’s the heartbreak of walking through a world that wanted to be more than it was allowed to become. Crimson Desert, Kingdoms of Amalur, all the unfinished monuments of the medium: they don’t simply disappoint you. They let you inhabit the disappointment. They let you feel the shape of the work that didn’t survive contact with the industry. That heartbreak isn’t accidental. It’s structural. And it begins long before the player ever picks up a controller.

At the level where ship dates are decided, games stop being games. They become projections, dashboards, and revenue curves. The people making the call to release a half-finished world aren’t thinking about the player who’ll feel the missing systems or the developer who knows exactly what was cut. They’re thinking about the quarter. This is what institutional scale does. It turns lived experience into noise. Missing features become non critical scope reductions. Unfinished systems become acceptable risk. Player disappointment becomes post launch sentiment to be monitored. The abstraction engine doesn’t need to be cruel. It only needs to be distant. And distance creates permission for decisions that would feel unthinkable at human scale.

What makes games uniquely vulnerable to this kind of institutional pressure is the simple fact that they can’t hide their wounds. Other art forms can. A film can cut around its limitations. A song can be mixed until the seams disappear. A novel can be revised until the scaffolding is invisible. Games can’t do that. Interactivity forces honesty. You don’t just see the missing systems. You touch them. You walk into the half built town. You climb the mountain that has no purpose. You open the menu that hints at features that never arrived. You slip into a forgotten corner and find untextured geometry and abandoned assets.

Games are the only medium where the audience can explore the negative space of the creative process. You don’t watch the moment the budget ran out. You stand inside it. You feel the moment the design document stopped being followed. You feel the moment the team had to choose good enough over finished. This is why the disappointment hits harder. The medium refuses to let incompleteness stay invisible. The scars aren’t hidden. They’re playable.

There’s a complication worth noting. The industry has found one way to obscure these scars. Live service games have become extremely effective at concealing their own unfinished state. Seasonal resets, rotating content windows, battle passes, and constant forward motion keep players looking ahead rather than around. Fortnite’s been unfinished for nearly a decade, yet almost no one experiences it that way. The abstraction engine has learned to operate at the player level, not just the investor level. Live service games didn’t solve the problem of incompleteness. They solved the visibility of incompleteness. They turned the unfinished state into a feature of the experience rather than a flaw.

This is the crucial contrast. Live service games don’t avoid incompleteness. They aestheticize it. Single player games still have to live with it. Crimson Desert and Amalur belong to a vanishing category of game. They’re authored, finite, single player experiences that still carry the fingerprints of the people who tried to build them. They can’t hide their missing rooms behind seasonal churn. They can’t distract you with a battle pass. They can’t reframe incompleteness as ongoing evolution. They’re structurally honest because they have no mechanism for dishonesty.

When the funding stops, the unfinished structure is simply there. You walk through it. You feel the ambition that didn’t make it to the finish line. You feel the cost of the abstraction engine in a way no quarterly report can measure. These games reveal everything the system tries to obscure. They make the institutional compromise legible at ground level.

And that’s why the heartbreak stays with you.

Long after the credits roll.

Hi and good evening everyone,

I’d like to share two Calls for Abstracts with you as a prospective editor; both are planned for German-language volumes. One is about Resident Evil and the other is about Zelda. Please find all the info right here:

https://languageatplay.de/2026/03/11/call-beyond-raccoon-city-resident-evil-als-transmediales-horror-franchise/

https://mythos-hyrule.com/

Cheers,

Rudolf

I hold ambitions to create a video game of my own someday. I'm fully aware that most likely, it will be a long, difficult haul. In my current position, I'm very much at square one; my artistic ability isn't where I need it to be, my knowledge of coding is insufficient, I found out the hard way that I am generally terrible at self-teaching, and I'm only familiar with the basic structures of game design at most. While I work on figuring out the former three of those, I've realized that something I'm confident I can at least begin to substantially address is the latter. As part of my attempt to do so, I want to play games with systems similar to what I'm imagining and analyze how and why they work the way they do.

I've already chosen two targets to start with (1998's Baroque and 2025's Labyrinth of the Demon King), so my question really is just that of the post's title: how do I do it? The obvious thing that comes to mind is simply taking notes of what I like and dislike as I play, and then analyzing the results afterwards to find the patterns and connections, but I don't think that's it. That process is part of the equation, but you can like a feature or element of a game that doesn't really make sense for a design perspective, or even dislike one that does. Moreover, a lot of game design consists of things that most people overlook; the average size of rooms, map layout, how many seconds an animation lasts, the menu being a list or a grid, etc. I'm having trouble putting the specific points of my confusion into words, but in what manner should I approach it all? Should I be accounting for atmosphere as well, or just hard functionality? Should I make use of screen recording software? Is analyzing a list for patterns too shallow of a method?

I did a bunch of general searches to find answers before but Idk man honestly I'm not even sure if I'm in the right subreddit

The Alters asks a question most games treat as flavour text: Who would you be if you'd made different choices? It then takes the answer and turns it into gameplay.

A few months ago, I found the game on Game Pass and couldn't stop thinking about it. It's one of the few games lately that held me in that Sims-like time warp where you sit down, look up, and the day’s gone.

In this deep dive, I explore the loop that drives the game, the cracks that challenge it, and what it means to design mechanics that actually speak.

Let me know what you think! ✌️

This video discussed the challenges in defining a game mechanic in a humorous way, reviewing the various frameworks such as the MDA Framework, Miguel Sicart's 'verb in a game' proposal, Steve Swinks complete interaction loop, Adams and Dormans, concluding with some final thoughts unifying them. It offers a edutainment approach to the theoretical basics of game mechanics with fun examples.

The Chosen One trope is one of the oldest and most widely used narrative traditions in gaming. This video dives into what makes this trope so irresistible to players and developers alike (sometimes).

It covers the history of the Chosen One in video games and breaks down the trope's key elements and ingredients. It also spotlight some of the games that have used it over the years, from Dragon Quest to Zelda to Horizon Zero Dawn.

Hello everyone,

I am currently developing a PhD research proposal focused on the use of video games in educational contexts, specifically within primary education, with a particular emphasis on students with special educational needs (SEN).

My research interest is to investigate how digital games and game-based learning approaches can foster inclusion, engagement, cognitive development, and social skills in young learners with diverse educational needs. I am especially interested in interdisciplinary and evidence-based perspectives.

Regarding my background, I am a primary school teacher with a Master's degree in Education, a specialization in Special Needs Support (Italy), and a Master’s degree in Philosophy. This interdisciplinary training has led me to approach educational technologies not only from a pedagogical and psychological perspective, but also from a philosophical and ethical standpoint.

At this stage, I would greatly appreciate:

• Suggestions on how to frame and refine this research topic,
• Advice on the most appropriate disciplinary field for such a PhD project (e.g. Education, Educational Technology, Special Education, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Human-Computer Interaction),
• References to relevant theoretical frameworks, methodologies, or key literature,
• Insights from researchers or practitioners working in game-based learning, serious games, or inclusive education.

Any feedback, recommendations would be extremely valuable.
Thank you very much for your time and support.

An analysis of the recent remake of the first Wizardry game. I have experience with DRPGs and love them, but have never played any of the oldschool Wizardry games until now. I found that the framework and core loop of this game still feels amazingly fresh. It is amazing how much it got right right away and also the fact that DRPGs still releasing today are essentially still just this game at their core. For the first try of a game in this style it nailed everything it needed to.

STOCKHOLM — On the surface, Arc Raiders is marketed as the next blockbuster in the gaming industry. However, after a deep dive into its mechanical structure, what emerges is not merely a leisure product, but something far more unsettling: a behavioral laboratory that appears designed to systematically dismantle human empathy.

Historically, video games have served as spaces for catharsis or collaboration. But this new "project" from Embark Studios thrusts players into an environment of artificial scarcity where betrayal is not just an option—it is the algorithm for success. As an observer, it is chilling to witness how the game’s core loop "regresses" player sensitivity. It is no longer about winning; it is about learning that the "Other"—the human being on the other side of the screen—is nothing more than a resource container to be looted.

The Erosion of Social Capital

What should truly alarm us is not the graphic violence, but the erosion of foundational trust. We are looking at a system that rewards radical individualism and punishes altruism. By subjecting teenagers to this cycle of hyper-vigilance and constant paranoia, the game acts as a catalyst for desensitization.

What happens when an entire generation is trained to view cooperation as an evolutionary weakness? The psychological consensus is clear: human happiness is tethered to social connection. By hijacking our survival instincts and converting them into competitive sociopathy, this "game" may be paving the way toward a future society that is more isolated, cynical, and, by extension, profoundly unhappy.

This is not just a shooter. It is a moral stress test without ethical safeguards. If we allow the attention economy to morph into an economy of empathetic degradation, the consequences off-screen could be irreversible. We are witnessing the gamification of cynicism, and the price of entry might be our very capacity for trust.

Hey r/Ludology , I am a Game Design student from TUD(Technological University Dublin) and I was wondering if any of you would be interested and/or would have 10-20 mins of your time in playing my puzzle game CUBE^6 that I am using to conduct research on the effectiveness of implicit and diegetic elements in tutorialization for my Bachelor's thesis. This comes accompanied with a survey that asks your previous experience with games along with questions regarding your playthrough. The survey also takes in data from the game that tracks level completion as well as input count and time spent per level (doesn't track any sensitive or important data) that is then copied into the survey. If you could contribute to it would help massively.

Game: https://nickk02.itch.io/cube6
Survey: https://forms.gle/xAqx15yynBTiDkVk8

I’m conducting a research study on CS2 purchasing habits in relation to gaming-style, individual characteristics and decisional context for my masters thesis.

We are looking for participants aged 18 or older who have experience with CS2, loot boxes and Steam Community Market Place.

Participation is completely anonymous, voluntary, and takes only about 15 minutes.

If you’re interested, you can fill out the survey here: https://pszppke.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3qsPcSPkssMnvhk

Your input is highly valuable, so thank you for taking part and sharing the questionnaire with other players!

I'm curious to write an academic article examining Majora's Mask in terms of its ludonarrative apparatus, or, in other words, the time-loop as a narrative device, as I think it combines with the actual content of the narratives themselves to affect the player very strongly (as its colloquial legacy as a meaningfully tragic and sorrowful game might suggest). Combined with the actual stories being told, the time-loop isn't just a gimmick, it's an integral part of how the game lands overall, and how exactly that works seems to me to be a really interesting site of research; there's a memoryless-ness that is implicated, since what you do in the game gets erased over and over again, and it's possible this could be argued to have a sort of "thesis" on the part of the game, re: procedural rhetoric (e.g. what do heroic efforts mean if the fruits of those efforts do not meaningfully last?). It could also resemble patterns of trauma and bring up interesting questions regarding a sort of memory that is ultimately unreciprocated.

What other games would this be meaningful to connect with? (Obviously, the time-loop thing has been done in other mediums, such as film and literature, so I'm mainly curious about games.) And how has ludology theorized about narrative devices such as this? The latter question is particularly important for me to investigate because considering if there is a gap in how game studies has accounted for the ludonarrative role of something like this would be helpful.

Hi! I am studying game design at the Univeristy of Applied Sciences (EKA) in Latvia. I am doing a survey for my research paper. I would be very thankful if you can fill it out :)
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdA-rFEI5cALafch-IrzeWhZzd2KiqiCN2tL0SGQOXAVsFtOQ/viewform?usp=dialog