The Game Studies Watchlist newsletter, curated by Prof. Dr. Rudolf Inderst, is published weekly on GamesMarkt. This week's topics include an analysis German hit indie game Signalis, board games, truckers playing Truck Simulator and more.
AHOI there, game studies operators!
Signalis means philosophical survival horror that turns old design conventions into tools for exploring memory, identity, and love. And what a package it is! It’s retro-futurist, queer, existential, and deeply mechanically intentional, so basically a ... goldmine for Game Studies. No wonder then that Honey Bat almost sings "Völker, hört die Signalis!"
Signalis is a strange fever dream of a game that really unravels ideas around personal identity. Memories distort and interweave and those uncanny intersecting boundaries between people was something I really wanted to write about given how much I love Gothic things!
Developed by the small German studio rose-engine, Signalis draws heavily on Japanese survival horror and anime traditions, blending these with European modernist and cosmic horror sensibilities. Such hybridity opens productive avenues for examining transnational flows of style, genre, and affect in contemporary game design.
The game’s distinctive retro-futurist design synthesizes pixel art and lo-fi 3D environments to evoke a sense of technological decay and melancholic nostalgia. In doing so, it not only references the visual and mechanical conventions of 1990s survival horror but also reconfigures them through a distinctly European and post-digital sensibility. The interface itself, radio static, CRT distortion, and diegetic menus, functions as an extension of the game world, offering an exemplary case for examining how user interfaces can become narrative devices rather than mere mediators of play.
Game scholar Aurelia Brandenburg pointed to Curiosity and Computer Stores: Case Study on GATE (Bright Software 1991); this is the first part of our two-part case study on the game GATE. Two parts are now live.
Hypotheses is an academic blogging platform for researchers, students, and institutions, mainly in the humanities and social sciences. It promotes open science by hosting research blogs, project updates, and conference reports. Scholars use it to share ideas, document ongoing work, and make research accessible to a wider audience. And really—how has no one grabbed gamestudies.hypotheses.org yet? It’s such an obvious address that its emptiness feels almost suspicious, like an unclaimed parking spot in front of the Louvre. Well ... I might have some ... ludolectual afterthoughts ... about that.
What History are we playing today? An analysis over 50 years of historical board games, written by Xavier Rubio-Campillo (University of Edinburgh) has been recommended by Jeremiah McCall on LinkedIn, so I took a deep dive into board games and extended my (rather limited) knowledge.
Here, I came across a paper by Rainforest Scully-Blaker that examines truckers who play American Truck Simulator while on the road, drawing on theories of container technologies to explore how their gaming setups reflect and reproduce neoliberal capitalism. Through three scales of containment, the game, the truck cab, and the logistics industry, it shows how each holds and circulates capitalist logics.
Uhm, what's the deal with this Steam Machine everybody is talking about? And no, I am not playing Anno 117: Pax Romana right now.
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