Journal of Digital Media & Interaction ISSN 2184-3120 Vol.4, No. 11, (2021), pp. 5-7 DOI: 10.34624/jdmi.v4i11.27235 © 2021 Mário Vairinhos, Liliana Vale Costa & Pedro Cardoso This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license. Cultural Representations in Digital Games (Editorial) Mário Vairinhos University of Aveiro, Portugal mariov@ua.pt 0000-0002-4483-8126 Liliana Vale Costa University of Aveiro, Portugal lilianavale@ua.pt 0000-0003-2451-3073 Pedro Cardoso University of Aveiro, Portugal pedroccardoso@ua.pt 0000-0001-8546-4194 Welcome to this new issue of the Journal of Digital Media & Interaction. As we are heading towards New Year’s Eve, it is our pleasure to devote this entire issue to the production of a Dossier dedicated to the exchange of meaning that our language may convey within physically simulated or fictionally recreated worlds in digital games. In fact, shared meanings shape our identity, emotions, and attachment to other beings (Hall, 1997), marking out a certain culture. When representing these meanings, our sensorial perceptions may defy the limits of time and space to migrate from daily practices and consciousness to the depicted or crafted gameplay environments (Castronova, 2005). As such, editing an issue that discusses the role of digital games to facilitate representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation (i.e. the circuit of culture [du Gay, et al.,1997]) of signs and symbols is not only very ambitious but also constitutes a noble aim. Games have been part of our identity from ancient to today's civilizations. These have been playing a key role in connecting people (players and game creators) of multiple universes, providing them with the abilities to explore, expand, subvert, reframe, intervene, restore, and rebuild historical and cultural realities, contexts, or settings. As players strengthen their interconnections with depicted territories, characters, and artifacts, game artists start to incorporate architecture, urban planning, history, and resource management knowledge in their practices. That way, an achiever’s experience may no longer be sufficient and other associated pleasures in self-expression, creativity, and storytelling for place regeneration are also put at the forefront. Hence, this Dossier aims at gathering state-of-the-art, study cases and critical analysis of the usage, (co)creation and assessment of cultural representations in digital games. Specifically, the papers contained in this JDMI issue discuss the representation of culture in some examples of games, methods used to involve the players in game design, and unravel some biases that may be brought to game production, and use of digital games as ‘memory-making’ texts. We expect the topics discussed in this Dossier to be of interest and readership to the research community in game design, cultural analysis of media, and research of socio-cultural aspects in gaming. It consists of five scientific contributions: In “Using Netnography for Studying the Language Transformation Process in the game Valorant”, Felipe Melquiades, Rafaelly Ferreira, and Diogo Araripe lay groundwork on players’ language appropriation and transformation with the community of the multiplayer first-person shooter published by Riot Games entitled Valorant. As language understanding and usage tend to affect the adopted gameplay strategies and determine who is valorant or immortal (highest rank) and mercenary