ABSTRACT. This project will thus aim to uncover whether sportification has driven the lack of diversity in esports participation, while looking at cultural differences in the countries mentioned: South Korea, Poland, UK and Portugal.

ABSTRACT. In my presentation I examine the imaginary of "all female players play Mercy". This imaginary refers to a widespread claim among the players that most female players playing Overwatch, a team-based multiplayer online first-person shooter game (Blizzard 2016), would play Mercy. Mercy is support hero, depicted as cute and helpful, and widely considered as very easy hero to play. I trace this constructed imaginary through multitude of sites, including my own play experience, discussions forums, streams, and user created videos. I furthermore argue that "females as Mercy players" is an gendered imaginary created to negotiate female players position in the player communities.

ABSTRACT. The present research aims to find out how game streamers on different platforms choose to build their online identity, and to introduce the concept of open-source identity as a central theme. The research will discuss and study a representative sample of the streaming community as a whole and aim to establish patterns based on the type of content streamed and the approaches taken by the streamers.

ABSTRACT. Currently educational institutions are failing to engage students in managing their time. To address this issue we propose the use of game elements, as games are considered to be inherently engaging, A gamified study-planner application has been created for tertiary level students to aid in their time-management that includes game elements such as an interactive interface that encourages play and a companion that provides positive reinforcement, challenge, and feedback to students. These game elements are being studied to determine their effects in engaging students with their time-management.

ABSTRACT. This dissertation explores design activities within the indie game scene. It focuses on identifying, analyzing and classifying the different design actions undertaken by indie game designers in their creative practice and contrasting them against principles and models from Game Studies proposed by academics and industry veterans.

ABSTRACT. This research project brings game studies into dialogue with cultural memory studies with a special emphasis on intersecting marginalized identities. By analyzing specific cases of digital games that mediate the past, I explore and uncover their meaning-making potentials of how we are invited to remember the past through their narrative and procedural design (Chapman 2016). I complement this analysis with qualitative interviews with developers, critics, and players. These findings are then contrasted with each other to explore the encoding contexts of production and decoding contexts of play. In its future stages, the research project will consider the implications of these findings through an ethical-philosophical perspective. Thereby the research project contributes to the development of an apparatus for both the conceptual design and the critical analysis and understanding of historical digital games. As such, the current research trajectory centers on the intersection of production studies, cultural memory politics, ethics, minority rights, and practices of play.

ABSTRACT. (for the extended abstract, see pdf-file) In this paper, I will adopt H.-G. Gadamer’s interpretation of the notion of ‘empathy’, as defined in the field of the philosophy of history, to discuss whether, and to what extent, the activity of playing a first- or third person digital game can contribute to developing a sense of ‘historical perspective-taking’, as defined in the field of history didactics.

ABSTRACT. In this PhD project I examine social networks of adolescents in and around online games, how these online networks may lead to conflict with offline social networks with non-gaming friends and family, and if and how these online social networks could lead to excessive and compulsive gaming.

ABSTRACT. In the past year Australia has seen international interest as an eSports market being mostly exclulded from globalised eSports for years. While this new interest has clear benefits for Australian eSports, we currently lack the knowledge required to captialise from this and turn Australia into a regional eSports capital. In order to do this, we must understand what motivates eSports consumption in Australia and how Australia's unique cultural context shapes eSports practices.