Kone Foundation has granted funding for two doctoral research projects in Game Research Lab from early 2025!
Julián Gutiérrez Carrera: Representations of Suicide in Videogames
This doctoral dissertation is the first long-term, long-form research project on representations of suicide in videogames. In it, I research how videogames depict, simulate, and represent suicide, since videogames offer crucial insights into suicide, particularly into how it has been understood and how it should be understood. Videogames do this through a mix of depiction and simulation, representing suicide through its language and imagery as well as through interactive, reactive models that the player can affect or is affected by. This project is guided by a broad research question: “how do videogames represent suicide?” In order to answer this question, I will write four articles partly answering it from various perspectives, like the meaning of suicide in virtual worlds, the social contexts outside videogames and their representations within them, and the player’s agency to make player and non-player characters die (or not die) by suicide. I will analyse various videogames as case studies for every article. I have chosen videogames that are exemplary in their representations of suicide, either by virtue of their semiotic complexity or of their explicit representation of their real-life contexts. My analysis is done through close readings of videogames, guided by New Formalism as described by Caroline Levine and by New Historicism as described by Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt. I close read videogames by analysing the social forms—units, hierarchies, social networks, rhythms—represented in videogames, then putting those forms in conversations with cultural and political discourses from the videogame’s context of production to track how those discourses are represented within the videogames. The results of this research project will serve as a detailed framework for understanding suicide in and through videogames.
Mark Maletska: LGBTQIA+ Gender Identity Exploration Through Video Game Mechanics
The project is aimed at revealing connections between playing video games and exploring LGBTQIA+ gender identities. In my doctoral dissertation for Tampere University, I examine how video game mechanics, interactive elements of games, are involved in self-exploration of representatives of gender minorities with different national backgrounds. I focus on a national background of players because for gender minorities, the differences between environments they were brought up in often crucially change their perception of media and art. This is the first player study involving gender diverse participants with different cultural backgrounds to explore game mechanics. The foundations of the study lie on the intersection of game studies and gender studies, strengthening its interdisciplinarity. The core idea of the study is to allow gender diverse people speak for themselves to challenge established views regarding diversity in and around video games. The war in Ukraine and migration of Ukrainians, which caused the growth of the number of gender minorities in Europe as well, is the reason why I chose Ukrainians as one of two target groups. Another target group is international to lay grounds for further smaller-scaled studies. The research material consists of qualitative surveys and interviews in two languages. Ukrainian-language ones are aimed at participants born in Ukraine and English-language ones – at international participants. I apply reflexive thematic analysis to the collected data to reveal connections between playing video games and self-exploration in terms of gender identities.