Video Games as Cultural Knowledge: Intermediality, Transmedia Remediation, and Ludonarrative Agency

Contemporary video games have matured into a foundational cultural language for organizing experience, memory, and social imagination. What characterizes them is not conventional storytelling but the way they rework inherited symbolic traditions into interactive worlds in which interfaces, spatial design, and player agency converge. This Research Topic has two central goals: to examine how video games and their transmedia adaptations encode and translate cultural values across national and linguistic contexts, including how gaming communities interact across cultural borders and co-create fandom storytelling; and to analyze video games as epistemological artifacts, cultural systems through which players encounter, test, and interpret ideas about society, history, identity, technology, and the future. Our guiding premise is that video games do not merely depict reality: they model temporalities, values, conflicts, and forms of social knowledge through interaction. A game can translate a philosophical claim into a rule, a historical memory into a navigable ruin, a cinematic grammar into player-driven rhythm, a literary myth into a quest structure, and a social anxiety into the management of scarcity, failure, repetition, or moral choice. This Research Topic builds on the ludological tradition inaugurated by Aarseth (1997), the narrative and spatial account of digital media advanced by Murray (1997), Ryan (2006), and Jenkins (2006), the procedural argument of Bogost (2007), the ethics of play developed by Sicart (2009), and work on intermediality, transmedia adaptation, and fictional worlds by Bolter and Grusin (1999), Rajewsky (2005), Hutcheon (2013), Scolari (2009), Pérez-Latorre (2015), Fernández-Vara (2015), Cuadrado-Alvarado and Planells (2020), and other scholars in game and media studies. It takes as a more immediate starting point the work of Freire-Sánchez, Vidal-Mestre, and Fitó-Carreras (2024) on video-game-to-series adaptation and intermedial translation in Fallout, which shows how a playable world can move across television, platform culture, and fan interpretation without losing the specificity of play.From this starting point, the Research Topic invites manuscripts that study video games and their transmedia expansions into streaming series, cinema, animation, comics, social media, mods, wikis, and fan communities as forms of cultural knowledge. We welcome contributions on• intertextuality • intermediality • transmedia adaptation • remediation • paratextuality • procedural rhetoric • player agency • mechanics • spatial storytelling • environmental narrative • world-building • cultural memory • myth • ideology • identity • trauma• mental health • posthumanism • artificial intelligence • dystopia • ecological crisis • historical imagination • and philosophical critique in video games and related popular media.The collection seeks to connect game studies with communication studies, media studies, visual culture, film and television studies, adaptation studies, philosophy, literary theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities. Contributions may include case studies, comparative media research, theoretical models, methodological proposals, systematic reviews, and empirical work on reception, interpretation, and player experience. We are especially interested in submissions that examine game-to-series and game-to-film adaptation; the translation of mechanics, lore, interfaces, and player experience across media; the role of paratexts and interpretive communities; the epistemological value of agency; and the ability of video games to communicate social, ethical, and existential questions to contemporary audiences.This Research Topic will bring together international scholars across communication, the humanities, and game studies to examine how video games have become one of the defining symbolic languages of the twenty-first century: not only stories to be watched or read, but worlds to be inhabited, questioned, and interpreted through play.Information and Instructions for AuthorsManuscript SummariesManuscript summaries (Frontiers' name for abstracts) of up to 500 words will be considered until 30 September 2026. Authors are strongly encouraged to submit a manuscript summary before submitting a full manuscript.Article TypesWe welcome submissions in the following formats: Original Research, Review, Systematic Review, Methods, Hypothesis and Theory, Perspective, and Conceptual Analysis. More information on each article type can be found here.Open Access and Publishing FeesFrontiers in Communication is a gold open access journal. At the point of publication, all articles are immediately and permanently accessible online free of charge. Articles are published under the CC-BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and the source are credited.A publishing fee applies to accepted manuscripts. For questions about fees and discounts and waivers, please contact communication@frontiersin.org. Topic editors: Alfonso Freire-Sánchez, Montserrat Vidal-Mestre, Yago Lavandeira Amenedo, Roser Serra Florensa Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/82099/video-games-as-cultural-knowledge-intermediality-transmedia-remediation-and-ludonarrative-agency