Procedural Feminism Through Game Design: Towards an Analytical Framework for Situating Games as Feminist Artefacts

Digital games are increasingly recognised as cultural artefacts that encode worldviews, power and possibilities through play. However, dominant frameworks for game analysis do not sufficiently account for power, epistemology and labour, limiting feminist critique to representation alone. This paper proposes the SPIRAL framework (Situated Production, Identity, Rules, Agency and Labour) as a feminist analytic intervention, extending beyond existing frameworks in some dimensions and reworking their categories in others, organising game analysis around epistemology, care and embodied practice to make visible how power is organised procedurally through play. Grounded in feminist technoscience, affect theory, decolonial feminism and procedural feminism, the framework is demonstrated through close readings of Mutazione , Flower and Stardew Valley . Comparative analysis then shows how feminist potential emerges relationally along dimensions. SPIRAL offers a framework for designers and scholars to guide both the development and evaluation of how games shape power and relations through systems.