Laura DeCarli's Portfolio
Academic Writing
My main areas of interest as a games scholar are the player experience, narrative, the formal elements of videogames, and game design practices. In my academic work, I've investigated the following questions:
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What is created by the interaction between the player and the game (especially in regard to the creation of stories)? Which is a type of question that I've explored in my Bachelor's thesis The Player as Co-Narrator: a Case Study of This War of Mine (2022) and in my paper Playing with plot and fabula: a case study of Golden Glitch's Elsinore (2023).
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What are the practices of different communities and what kinds of player experiences these mods seek to achieve? Which has been the area of study I've chosen for my paper Typologies of Pokémon ROM Hacks (2024).
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How can we better understand design processes and practices, with the objective of improving as game designers? Which is the topic that I've researched for my Master's thesis The practical role and application of Cooperative Game Design Principles in game design processes.
Academic Writing
The Player as Co-Narrator:
a Case Study of This War of Mine (2022)
Bachelor's Thesis
in «Communication, Media and Advertising»
While playing This War of Mine (11 bit studios, 2014), I noticed that my playstyle had a significant impact on the narrative development of my playthroughs. This prompted my investigation about the relationship between game design and narrative development. Specifically, I wanted to critically assess my contribution as a player.
These initial questions were eventually followed by others: What is the relationship between the game’s anti-war message and the narratives produced by the player with their own experiences? Does the process of co-creation reinforce This War of Mine’s political and moral position?
These are the main questions that guided my analysis of This War of Mine’s design and of other player's experiences with the game.
Playing with plot and fabula:
a case study of Golden Glitch's Elsinore (2023)
Term Paper for the course «Games & Culture»
from my MSc in «Games (Design Track)»
My objective with this paper is to analyze how Elsinore allows the player to engage on a metanarrative level with the fabula, the events, and the existents (things, places and characters). Firstly, I will use three different frameworks to analyze the game and compare how effectively do they describe how the player interacts with the game to create stories and how they use the mastery of creating stories to complete the game.
The purpose of this case study is to analyze how Elsinore requires the player to play on a metanarrative level to complete the game. After summarizing the game to give context to this analysis, I will argue that the player creates stories by interacting with Elsinore, and that the understanding how to use this videogame's characters and game mechanics to create different stories is necessary for the player's success.
Typologies of Pokémon ROM Hacks (2024)
Term Paper for the course «Advanced Topics in Game Studies» from my MSc in «Games (Design Track)»
This term paper provides an overview of the typologies of ROM Hacks developed by modders of Pokémon games, with a focus on ROM Hacks of the core series and almost all examples featured in PokéCommunity’s ROM Hacks Showcase page. The paper also discusses the motivations for ROM Hacking, how the pokémon modding community shares resources and is influenced by the rest of the pokémon players community at large, how these ROM Hacks often re-create the conventions of the original game but also how they differentiate themselves from them in both narrative and gameplay.
The practical role and application of Cooperative Game Design Principles in game design processes (2025)
Master's Thesis
in «Games (Design Track)»
In this paper we seek to investigate the practical role that cooperative game design principles can play in the design & development of two-player local co-op videogames (Kultima, 2018; Kultima & Sandovar, 2019). We decided to take a practical approach to answer our research question by developing a game demo. In this paper describe the design framework, our design & development process and report of playersʼ experience with our demo. With regards to the role of the design principles, we observed that they did have a positive impact on both our process and that they were reflected in the players' experience. We conclude that design principles can play the role of goals for the player experience and game, general attitude to the process, and practical guides to make choices during development. When setting the game design principles of a game-project it is important to identify which roles they will play in the process.