ABSTRACT. Many students enter academia having been taught that writing is a universal skill: that if you can write grammatically-sound sentences, then you can write in any context. Paradoxically, students are also taught that their subject knowledge is directly correlated to their ability to write (Downs & Wardle, 2007). These beliefs, which are often proliferated by instructors, hide the fact that writing is used to mediate specific activities and target specific audiences (Bazerman, 2014). Using the language of Meyer & Land, we might understand the ability to write in a discipline as a “threshold concept,” or “a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress” (2006, p.3). In other words, despite their skills in their particular field, students do not necessarily enter a discipline such as game studies with the ability to expertly navigate its genres, audiences, and constraints (Grant-Davie, 2014). As board members of the international, student-run Press Start Journal (and consequently as a group of instructors), we recognize that some of the most important elements needed to help students write in our discipline is a clear conception of audience, familiarity with discipline-specific genres, and revision-driven feedback over time (cf. Bean, 2011).

[full panel proposal in attachment]

ABSTRACT. PDF.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we present the first results of an ongoing research project, focused on examining the European reception of Japanese video games, and comparing it with the reception in Japan. We hope to contribute towards a better understanding of how players’ perception and evaluation of a game are influenced by their cultural background. Applying a grounded theory approach, we conducted a qualitative content analysis of articles from German video game websites, user comments, written in response to these articles, as well as Japanese and German user reviews from the respective Amazon online stores and Steam. Focusing on the reception of three Japanese RPGs, our findings show that considerable differences exist in how various elements of the games are perceived. We also briefly discuss certain lexical differences in the way players write about games, indicating fundamental differences in how Japanese and German players talk (and think) about games.

ABSTRACT. Star Ocean: Till the End of Time is the third chapter of the JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game) series Star Ocean, developed by tri-Ace and published by Square Enix in 2004 worldwide. Its narrative is sci-fi with few fantasy elements and it is set in the future (A.D 2858) in our own universe. It specifically revolves around the final discovery by the playable characters that our world is just a huge simulation and that we are all just programs that resemble just in appearance their humanoid developers and users. The objective of the game is to save the universe from its deletion by God, who is just the main programmer of our world.

With this research, I intend to demonstrate how Star Ocean: Till the End of Time attempts a self-reflection on video game media from a Nietzschian perspective .

Firstly, I will analyze how Nietzsche’s critique of Platonic-Christian distinction between true world and false world is applied by Star Ocean: Till the End of Time to the distinction between real and virtual world. In fact, this game overturns the classic sci-fi version of the Plato’s Myth of the Cave - utterly embodied by the Matrix trilogy. I will then highlight how this approach suggests a positive acceptance of our possible status of simulacra in accordance to Deleuze’s point of view and in contrast to Baudrillard’s conception; all in a world were videogame and reality are fused.

Secondly, I will determine how Star Ocean: Till the End of Time embodies the same form of atheism supported by Nietzsche in his most symbolic statement ‘God is death’ from The Gay Science (1992). To do so: - I will display all the instances in which the belief in God and religion in general appears in this game, in order to prove how recurrent this topic is along the entire game - both through the gameplay and the narrative. - Afterwards, I will analyze the last section of the game, where you have to defeat the programmer of our universe (God) before he cancels it. This is necessary to demonstrate how this chapter of Star Ocean series embodies the same emancipatory, practical and not ontological notion of radical atheism supported by Nietzsche (and also by existential philosopher as such as Camus). In other words, did God exist and did he create us, we would not have any obligation to bow before him.

In the conclusion, I will link these two ‘Nietzschian answers’ given by till the End of to the intertwined questions ‘What if God existed?’ and ‘What if we were all computer programmed entities?’ to the relation toward technology and A.I. that this same game suggests us to have. In fact, this game does not just reinforce emancipation toward superior entities and acceptance of our condition of unsubstantial beings. It also warns us against acting as superb and careless divinities toward our own ‘technological creations’ (particularly Artificial Intelligence). Therefore, this final part will refer to Latour’s article Love Your Monsters: Why We Must Care for Our Technologies As We Do Our Children (2011), which underlines how technology (and then media as such as computer games) is not only a tool in our hand, not requiring any care from us, but the opposite of it.

This work contributes to DIGRA for two main reason. The first is because it illustrates the emancipatory potential game can assume by developing them in the same direction of products as such as Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. Moreover, it highlights how computer games can also be a means to reflect on the relation we should have with technology as a whole, which is not of fear, hilarity or worship but of care and caution.

ABSTRACT. Games can communicate values and messages in diverse ways. It can be argued the production of games on the margins of the industry, such as those developed in game-making clubs targeted at young people, can lead to a process closely connected to identity formation and cultural perspectives. However, this process of identity construction is not only dependent on cultural elements: we cannot overlook games’ specific language and design conventions. Some of these conventions can be read through the lens of genre, and although genres are socially constructed and in perpetual evolution, they are the basis for the establishment of a distinction among different games (Goddard et al. 2017), which might be a direct factor influencing personal game-making. Additionally, a similar challenge when promoting personal game-making activities might arise from the technical domain, especially if the middleware used to support the activities already incorporates some of these conventions, favouring specific aesthetics and game mechanics. In this sense, are these already incorporated conventions a hindrance on identity work through game production? The main aims of this work are to explore in which ways game-making activities can promote identity expression and how do game design conventions affect this process. By understanding how young people deal with different cultural influences and organise the available semiotic resources while producing their own digital games, I will explore what kind of identities can be claimed by young people in game-making contexts, how do these identities resonate in their games and how these productions can be read, both in relation to the broader game production and as a personal statement. In order to investigate this topic, I will bring results from two different game-making clubs organised and offered to young people in London/UK. To make their games, participants used MissionMaker, a software that allows non-specialists to create their digital games using ready-made 3D assets and simplified drop-down-lists based on scripting language. Results might be relevant to further research on the interaction between personal preferences and cultural and technical constrains on game-making, especially in terms of innovation and appropriation of specific semiotic resources, as well as to the mapping of the influence of genre(s) and gaming repertoire in game-making contexts.

ABSTRACT. This contribution aims at presenting some of the preliminary results of a research on the history of Italian video games that the author has been conducting since 2016. More specifically, the presentation will focus on what I will call the prehistory of Italian video games, by analyzing and commenting on a corpus of interviews and archival findings regarding the industrial and productive practices of the actors involved in the production and distribution of electro-mechanical and/or hybrid electronic/mechanical machines (e.g. pinball machines, early proto-video games, etc.) through the 1970s and 1980s in Italy.

ABSTRACT. Game studies has highlighted the need to consider video games from a combined perspective on their planetary dissemination (Consalvo 2006) and their specific contexts of production and consumption: national histories of video games that fall outside of the dominant ones from the US, Japan and ‘Western’ Europe “are only now beginning to be recorded” (Wolf 2015: 1). This study presents the results of research conducted on some of the Italian game production companies active during the early 1990s, including Simulmondo, Idea Software, Graffiti, Artematica, and Trecision. Adopting a perspective that “investigates games and gaming cultures at a range of scales” and identifies connections between local and supra-local markets (Liboriussen/Martin 2016), and expanding on initial research conducted on Italy (Gandolfi 2015), this study focuses on the emergence, from the end of the 80s and into the mid-90s, of a phase of video games production in Italy that involved small to medium work teams, distinct from both early bedroom-coding experiences and later production models of large companies and multinational firms established in Italy (such as Milestone and Ubisoft).

Drawing on primary material from original interviews with designers and producers from the era, as well as archival research and (para)textual and discourse analysis, the study discusses the work of Italian game companies of this period as a relatively marginal and yet distinctive chapter of video games production, for reasons that include these companies’ ambiguous relations with the European and international markets, their peculiar experimentation with distribution models, and their relationships with themes and brands from with Italian national and popular culture. Such companies are best known in Italy for their works for home computers such as the Commodore 64 and Amiga 500, exemplified by games such as Lupo Alberto (Idea Software 1990), Cattivik (Idea 1992), or Dylan Dog (Simulmondo, 1992-93), inspired by popular Italian comic book characters. Other games featured sports themes, sometimes with official license rights, such as racing arcade Millemiglia (Simulmondo 1991) and football games I Play 3DSoccer (Simulmondo 1991) and Dribbling (Idea, 1992). Overall, Italian games production in this era focuses extensively on themes from comics, sports, and geographical or historical settings that have to do with Italian culture (Profezia, Trecision 1991). Despite their popularity among a certain demographics of Italian gamers, such products rarely made it to the larger European or international markets, dominated largely by British and French distribution and production companies and by Japanese game consoles and video games (Donovan 2015).

Pointing to the successes and failures of such games (both in commercial terms, and for their legacy in gaming cultures), the paper focuses on the emergence of a distinct phase in Italian game production history that, while marginal or downright absent at a European or global level, still coincided with great popularity among local audiences. Moreover, it was characterised by the establishment of relationships between national game companies and more established Italian creative industries, such as that of comics. The legacy of such games beyond their nostalgic impact on a niche audience today is hard to assess, and products such as Millemiglia and I Play 3D Soccer may represent largely failed attempts to brand themes internationally associated with ‘Italianness’ (Bechelloni 1999) to break into a larger European market. Yet, games like the ones inspired by Dylan Dog, sold as a series of episodes at newsagents and presented in glossy comic-like cases, proved extremely popular in their home country, pioneering a serial and cross-media mode of production (Bittanti 2013) that drew on the language of cinema and the distribution channels of comics in ways that would only very recently re-emerge in the medium of the video game thanks to the emergence of the Internet.

Bibliographic References

Bechelloni, G. Televisione come cultura: i media italiani tra identità e mercato, Liguori, Napoli 1999.

Bittanti, M. (2013), Intermedialità. Videogiochi, cinema, televisione, fumetti, Unicopli, Milano.

Consalvo, M. (2006), “Console Video Games and Global Corporations: Creating a Hybrid Culture”, New Media & Society, 8, pp.117-137.

Donovan, T. (2015), “United Kingdom”, in M. J. P. Wolf (Ed) Video Games around the world, MIT Press, pp. 579-590.

Gandolfi, E. (2015), “Italy”, in M. J. P. Wolf (Ed) Video Games around the world, MIT Press, pp. 305-318.

Liboriussen, B., Martin, P. (2016), “Regional Game Studies”, Game Studies, v. 16, Issue 1, available at: http://gamestudies.org/1601/articles/liboriussen (latest access: 7 February 2018).

Wolf, M. J. P. (2015), “Introduction”, in M. J. P. Wolf (Ed) Video Games around the world, MIT Press, pp. 1-16.

ABSTRACT. Taking communication, marketing and entertainment as leading and intertwining landmarks of contemporary culture, this paper discusses an advertising piece from Brazilian McDonald’s restaurants, which uses a gaming interface to cast a branding message to its consumers. Acknowledging the prominence of digital networks in today’s mediapolis (Silverstone 2006), where mass self communication (Castells 2009) poses new challenges to understanding current modes of sociability and consumption, our focus will be directed to one promotional board game presented in the paper used to protect the food tray in McDonald’s Brazilian restaurants. Created by the Brazilian advertising agency DPZ&T and launched in October 2017, the game uses a “race to the end” mechanic and could be played from one to four players using a Facebook bot. To play the game, one player must scan the special code using the app “Facebook Messenger” in their smartphone. The code starts a special bot that sends quizzes, enigmas, and trivia questions about McDonald’s to the players. Each correct answer allows players to advance their pawn in the trail. The player who wins the race receives one special chance to earn a prize (pack of French fries, ice cream etc.) from McDonald’s. In the first part of the presentation, following the thoughts of Fullerton et al. (2008 15-16), we analyze the game design process for a promotional game. In the second part of the presentation, we highlight the strategic use of entertainment languages by companies in their marketing campaigns in the contemporary scenario. In conclusion, we present data and results from the McDonald’s paper tray board game.

ABSTRACT. Until very recently, games scholarship has directed little attention to the local game development scenes and their interrelations with regional and global production networks. Although the logic of globalization continues to erode cultural differences, regional aspects still importantly contribute to the forms of game development, producing characteristically glocal (global + local) assemblages of work and play. In this paper, we explore the different policies around national game industries, putting the focus on Nordic countries and especially Finland, Norway and Sweden. We believe that this work will be relevant for anyone who wants to understand cultural and creative industries in general, and the framings and contexts that shape the forms of game making in particular.

ABSTRACT. The following paper is presents an attempt to scrutinize a phenomenon of retro games as a medial form that allows us not only to keep in touch with the past and to transmit the game practices to the new generations of gamers by means of various nostalgic mechanisms, but also to identify the new condition of “computer game” as a medium. In other words, retro game might be considered as one of the manifestations of “matureness” of medium of computer game, which is defined as a stage when medium starts to reflect on its own form.

ABSTRACT. Vietnam Romance : A Gesamtkunstwerk to Game (a pre-postmortem)

Keywords game-art-and-art-games, process-and-reflection, cross-cultural-representation

ABSTRACT Vietnam Romance is an ongoing art project that involves many varied media components, a kind of contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk centered around an episodic computer game, and including an online store and economy that sells objects both digital and physical, museum and gallery installation, prints, drawings, a card game, live performances, dinners, puppet shows, props, kinetic art and books.

In this talk/paper I would like to discuss the processes and reflections on the project and my approach to synthesizing games and art as well as more detailed thoughts on visual and technical process – specifically hand drawn art and 3D graphics, as well as conceptual questions about historical and cross cultural representation and use of intertextual references to other art works in film, music and literature, and the differences and challenges of meaning making in the different forms that project entails - playable game, and participatory theatre, and museum installation.

The one-sentence-long description of the work goes like this: "If you hated the war but liked the movies, you’ll love this game!"

The paragraph-long description of the work goes like this: "Vietnam Romance is a tour of nostalgia for romantics and death match veterans pitting tourists vs. adventurers, history vs. its fantasies, and games vs. cinema. It recreates and interrogates the fictionalized history of the Vietnam War and its culturally commodified remains through a mash-up of cultural artifacts drawn primarily from Hollywood film culture as well as war literature, comic books, popular music, collectible war memorabilia, and adventure tourist packages. "

This project started fifteen years ago when I made a twenty-minute video titled Vietnam Romance (2003). The video is made up of eight vignettes, each created with recoded footage of me playing Vietnam War related video games accompanied by MIDI versions of classic ‘Namassociated tunes. Some of the scenes are improvisational riffs off the music such as the scene of repeatedly shooting a skull, blackening it to the sound of “Paint it Black,” or trying to destroy every piece of vegetation with a sniper rifle while Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” plays in the background. Most of the other scenes are reconstructions, in live videogame-play-recordingstyle, of iconic movie scenes paired with music in Vietnam War movies, such as the “Cavatina” hunting scene in the Deer Hunter, the “Flight of the Valkyries” and “The End” scenes from Apocalypse Now, and the “These boots are made for walking…me so horny” scene from Full Metal Jacket.

I would trace the starting point for the new ongoing Vietnam Romance meta game project to a particular eBay store that sells Vietnam war memorabilia, and specifically their sale of pornographic “desertion cards” and “psyops” leaflets. These printed materials for sale are fakes with prices ranging from $1.99 to $19.99 and in the many years since I started following their sales, their supply…and demand, both appear to be inexhaustible.

The sale and marketing of these artifacts got me digging deeper into the Vietnam memorabilia worlds, and much deeper into the history and myths surrounding the printed materials of the Vietnam War, and then later into reading more and more of the history and less known fiction from the war. Dispatches, published in 1977 by the journalist Michael, is a touchstone of the pop-cultural mash-up that enveloped the war as it collects his reports from Vietnam for Rolling Stone and Esquire during the war. But the book that catalyzed the new Vietnam Romance game, which is focused on an armored-personal-mounted time traveling adventure, was Larry Heinemann’s Close Quarters, published in 1974. Heinemann’s story is unforgiving and deeply implicating as it undermines the familiar cynical and cyclical war fiction of the heroic yet pseudo-anti heroic myth: “first I was a dumb hoodwinked grunt but now I can see the light and the war was bullshit and all that…but it was still kind of cool to be a man with this kind of history and now be able to write about it for you all so you don’t repeat my mistakes unless you may want to be the same kind of heroic man I was and am.” Close Quarters is brutal and emasculating – the grunts never get to be heroes as they bulldoze through the Nam in a massive fully armored personnel carrier and they don’t get to tell the kind of stories that future generations of teenage boys can drool over.

The current Vietnam Romance project began modestly in 2010 as a hand-drawn 2D side scrolling game where a playable skeleton character throws ace-of-spade death cards at large psychedelic skulls and military unit insignia while a medley of Vietnam war-related MIDIs plays along. It was, in essence, a playable music video game.

Several years later, after reading Heinneman, I opened up the old project and substituted in an Armored Personnel Carrier instead of the main skeleton character. I accidentally changed the camera settings from orthographic to perspective and this rendered an odd distorted 3D scene that looked like the façades of a row of billboards. I liked the look and then extruded all of the 2D images turning them into 3D models with a color texture in the front plane and black shading on all the other faces.

I was energized by this new look for the game and I started working on it full time, writing a narrative with Jessica Hutchins, building the world with Steven Amrhein, and programming with Garret Johnson and Peter Lu. The world-building process was slow and steady, we'd list the visual elements we needed from the game script, find references online, scale them, trace them, draw the outlines, watercolor, and then generate 3D models, assemble them together in the game engine and finally rig and animate them. Some models needed interiors and I asked Heather Penn and Adeline Ducker to help with some proper 3D modeling and texturing. Garrett left to work for JPL and Nick Crockett joined the project to take over the programming which by now was an involved process with many systems.

Midway through this process, I had the opportunity to go to Vietnam. Steven joined me and we spent two weeks doing the adventure tourist circuit documenting everything along the way in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. We had 4000 photos and lots of world-building still to do. The trip also helped solidify the conceptual framework around the game as a time traveling supernatural tour that would allow shifting between the war in 1965 and a contemporary 2015 tourist adventure with the fictional Vietnam Romance Company, a conflation of the Buffalo Tours agency we used in Vietnam and the Vietnam War memorabilia stores on eBay.

Throughout the writing process and especially after the trip to Vietnam, it became clear that the main character in the gamer should not the player or their avatar but the tour-guide-agent of the Vietnam Romance company. And this character needed a voice. I reached out to my friend Russell Salmon who acts and directs in the LA theatre scene to see if he knew anyone who may be a good fit to voice act the guide. Russell suggested Lucas Near-Verbrugghe as a perfect for this, and he was indeed. We recorded all of the guide’s dialogue with the help of Wilm Thoben, Micah Smith, and Phil Scott. Louis Pham translated the dialogue text for the in-game Vietnamese subtitles.

We premiered the game at the exhibition at the Beall Center and had completed four scenes: the drive to the Mojave Airport, the flight to Vietnam, the first tour of Vietnam, and “The Tracks of My Tears,” an APC driving karaoke scene. Since the Beall exhibition, the project has evolved in many ways. As of 2017, there are eleven playable scenes, and the game has expanded into other forms including live performances; dinner theater with an Americanized Vietnamese meal cooked in NYC by Food Party’s Thu Tran; one thousand(!) bahn mi’s made and sold alongside the game in Minneapolis by the local Vietnamese sandwich shop Lu’s Sandwiches; a puppet show with Deer and Rambo puppets; a cell phone interface (using Gregg Tavares’s Super Happy Fun Times software); a printed card game; a print edition produced and sold by Dundee Contemporary Arts; a multiplayer web portal with downloadable game levels (http://vietnam-romance.com), and various sculptural installations, props, and events. The project has some life left and in the summer of 2017, we headed to Berlin to workshop the next stage performances and to focus on sets, dialogue, and dramaturgy. The project when shown in NYC was also reviewed in the art section of the New York Times.

ABSTRACT. Even if an exhibition is focused on facilitating direct interaction with the videogames on display as the primary experience on offer, some visitors will inevitably prefer and enact different approaches, as Kidd (2014) observes in her analysis of visitor engagement with New Media forms in museums. Just as backseat gaming, speedrunning marathons, and YouTube channels devoted to recording casual gameplay sessions emerged without being explicitly condoned or encouraged, alternative behaviours will emerge in places where videogames are exhibited, even if they are not considered in the curation of the exhibition.

Therefore, curating videogames for both typical ideas of interaction and other forms of visitor behaviour is vital, not only because of varying degrees of visitor experience and comfort with videogames, but because there are elements of videogames that can only be demonstrated in this form. As examples, this paper will discuss multiple cases of indirect or non-interaction in exhibitions of videogames, which do not present the games as collectible material or industrial design objects, but instead in ways that engage with the process and history of playing without requiring direct play. These examples will draw from research and analysis of past and present videogame exhibitions as well as practical reflection on my own curatorial work.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims at examining the anti-game practice of artists that assumed a subverting behaviour inside video games. They hijack gameplay to turn it into a space for artistic intervention. The artists discussed in this paper are Ashley Blackman, Kent Sheely, Marque Cornblatt, Justin Berry, and Alan Butler. Their practice share similarities with the artistic interventions developed by Dada and International Situationist, two artistic movements that aimed at redefining the culture of their time thanks to subversive actions. The artists featured in this paper are defined griefers, deliberate troublemakers. Their works are then analysed along with the concepts of counter-gaming and ludic mutation defined by Alexander Galloway and Anne-Marie Schleiner to better understand the characteristics of their subversive behaviour.

ABSTRACT. In the recent years, a number of contributions within game studies have emerged, making use of existential-phenomenological perspectives. Common to these approaches has been the consideration of computer games as similar to “worlds”, sometimes also game-playing as comparable “being-in-the-world”, not necessarily in terms of the representations they contain, but in terms of their formal properties. This panel explores the potentiality of existentialist-phenomenological approaches into game studies. By addressing examples including eSports, mundane vehicle simulators, climate change games, art games, and games as sign systems, media, and design experiments, we will discuss what kind of insights on e.g. materiality, experience, perception, hermeneutics, meaning, simulation, and performativity can be gained from the existential-ludological perspective.

ABSTRACT. In 2013, “Internet Gaming Disorder” (IGD) was proposed as a formal disorder, by the American Psychiatric Association (APA). We present the results of a qualitative interview study wherein we apply a screening tool to “gaming professionals”. We compare our subjects’ perception of their own gaming habits, with how they are scored by a questionnaire and discuss where and how they differ or overlap. Our results indicate that screening tools designed to measure game addiction may not measure what they are intended to measure. Questionnaire items that are not properly contextualized may over-pathologize otherwise healthy players without appropriate context. The context of the individual’s everyday life is crucial to understanding and evaluating their relationship to gaming. We argue, that de-contextualized questionnaire items are insufficient to gauge whether a given behaviour is problematic and if those problems are best understood as an addiction or something else.

ABSTRACT. The study at hand analyzes an empirical dataset of two parallel respondent groups, digital fighting game players and analog taekwondo practitioners, with a goal to find tentative evidence for points of connection and disconnection among such activities that are arguably very similar and different at the same time.

ABSTRACT. Problem gaming and game addiction have not only attracted scholarly attention but is also becoming an issue of politics and policy. This paper follows the suggestion by Kardefelt-Winther (2016) above and aims to make a contribution to this discussion from the perspective of both patients who came out of treatment for problem gaming and those who treated them with the specific focus on the relationship of problem gaming and gambling from a treatment perspective. The researchers conducted focused semi-structured interviews (Minichiello et al., 2000) with social workers from Uppsala municipality called “The Youth Team” (Ungdomsteamet) and with treatment practitioners of the Game Dependency Organization in Gothenburg (Spelberoendes Förening Gothenburg). The results of the interviews show that there are a number of differences in the treatment of gamers and gamblers as well as a paradigmatic difference in the approach to the both that the practitioners were taking. There are a number of cases that clearly illustrate this difference between the treatment of gaming and gambling in both the practices used in treatment and in the interaction with the gamers.

ABSTRACT. Games are often defined as an interactive medium. In the many debates over the differences between games and movies, for instance, the argument that games are actively played rather than watched; the player is the one making the story. This argument is not only found in game studies papers: it is also one of the way players justify their playing. The World of Warcraft players I interviewed in 2008 often came back to the fact that "You don't interact with TV, you look at a screen. [...] When I play [...] I talk with real people [...] and we have real discussions" (Coavoux 2010, 53). Yet, games have always had an audience made up not only of players, but also of onlookers (Lin and Sun 2011). The streaming of game-related videos on platform such as Twitch.tv shed the public light to that aspect of video games. Nowadays, watching streams is an integral part of video game culture.

In this talk, I will examine spectatorship from a viewer's perspective: how does it fit into their player career? I use career with a symbolic interactionist meaning (Becker and Strauss 1956) to define not only professional career, but the history of an individual. Therefore, player careers are defined as the succession of games and ways of playing (embedded in social, professional, affective biographies) a player went through.

My empirical data is from an ongoing qualitative research on esports and video game streaming spectators. Ten interviews with regular spectators have been conducted, and twenty more will be in the coming month. Since I am writing this proposal based on the preliminary analysis of the first 10 interviews, results are subject to change. The participants are all adults aged 20-40, from various socio-economic backgrounds. The interviews were a mix of biographical and semi-directed interviews. In the first part, participants were asked to tell their life history as players (games they played, contexts they played in). I systematically asked them to link every episode to their status at the time (age, occupation, family situation, etc.). In the second part, the interview focused on contemporary stream spectatorship: what they looked at, how they picked streamers, etc.

I will focus on three dimensions of spectatorship in player careers. They are dependent on the fact that the interviewees are adult who used to spend a lot of time playing, and that some of them struggle to keep doing so.

First, game streaming spectatorship is intertwined between game spectatorship and general video streaming. Most interviewees have a long history of game spectatorship, beginning in their childhood, when they played with their siblings and watched them play. Moreover, they all watch other streamed content, like YouTube channels. In that sense, game streaming spectatorship needs to be understood in relation to global mutations in the use of video, and more especially the move from TV to the Internet.

Second, a strong motivation for watching that is overlooked by the current literature (Hamari and Sjöblom 2017) is staying up-to-date with current games. Because they have time constraints and face a gigantic video game market, interviewees use streaming to apprehend the new games. Streams have become for some players the main, and often the only, media about games. They do not read magazines, websites, or blogs. This need to stay up-to-date has various motivation depending on the life cycle: to some, watching has almost replaced playing (a young mom or a PhD student do not find time to play anymore); to others, it is a way to quickly judge new games.

Finally, spectatorship can be a surrogate for playing. Spectatorship might make up for lost time as was already mentioned; but more unexpectedly given current theories of interaction in games, some interviewee actually like watching more than playing, at least for certain games. This can be the case for very competitive games with an unfriendly community, such as some esport titles where new players, especially women, are subject to bullying. In one case, a 26 years-old women referred to League of Legend as "an amazing game", but one she could not play (too time-consuming, too unfriendly). This can also be the case when scouting for different games: streaming is a way to have new gaming experience without having to learn the tricks of the trade. Game watching must be studied seriously as an integral part of contemporary gaming cultures. Contrary to some theoretical and folk expectations, games are as much a medium that is watched than one that is played. Moreover, watching, as playing, is better understood through the social contexts it takes place in.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Becker, Howard S., and Anselm Strauss. 1956. “Careers, Personality, and Adult Socialization.” American Journal of Sociology, 253–63. doi:10.2307/2772919.X Coavoux, Samuel. 2010. “La Carrière Des Joueurs de World of Warcraft.” In Les Jeux Vidéo Au Croisement Du Social, de L’art et de La Culture, edited by Sébastien Genvo, Sylvie Craipeau, and Brigitte Simonnot, 8:43–58. Actes. Nancy: Questions de communication. Hamari, Juho, and Max Sjöblom. 2017. “What Is eSports and Why Do People Watch It?” Internet Research 27 (2). 211–32. doi:10.1108/IntR-04-2016-0085.X Lin, Holin, and Chuen-Tsai Sun. 2011. “The Role of Onlookers in Arcade Gaming: Frame Analysis of Public Behaviours.” Convergence 17 (2). 125–37. doi:10.1177/1354856510397111.X

ABSTRACT. Drinking rules. A silver sack of wine is attached to the clothesline and spun; if it stops in front of you: drink. We stood around a hills hoist – a rotary clothesline – in the backyard of a rented Airbnb on a sticky summer’s night. Although some of the Australians had never played it either, our international game developer guests had insisted that we played Goon of Fortune. Games, and the cultures of players and developers surrounding games, are dominated by a desire – and sometimes a pressure – to drink.

As the field of game studies has developed beyond fundamental questions of game ontology and disciplinarity, the recent decade of game scholarship has given increasing attention to the context of games. That is, to player cultures (Steinkuehler 2006; Shaw 2015), paratexts (Consalvo 2009; Jones 2008; Therrien & Lefebvre 2017), and an increasing attention for the influences and intricacies of game industry or development culture (Kultima, 2015). This paper cuts through these three layers of player, paratext and developer to find one of the most basic themes at the heart of cultural contexts: alcohol.

Games are a medium defined at least as much by the subculture surrounding it as by its ontological characteristics – categories of narrative, rules and play evade ‘what games are’ to the human beings making and using them, that related discussions that were deemed pertinent only 10 years ago have been dropped as farcical in retrospect. In other – more crasser – words, ‘game studies is a bathtub in which some researchers have taken a dump in, so now all new researchers have to deal with the shit, and the more they try to clean themselves with it, the more shit they splash onto themselves,’ (Anon in conversation 2017). Like the eurocentric and male dominated canon of early game studies, videogames’ subculture has been commented on variously from gender and queer game studies (c.f. Humphreys 2017; Ruberg & Shaw 2017) as one defined by white, male bodies – vocal, gatekeeping, semi-organized entities to which resistance from the margins of its subculture have only recently gotten a voice. Within the relevance of games’ cultural context, we insist – based on ethnography, interviews with developers, local bar owners, international event organisers, and attendees of games-drinking events, conducted in Australia between 2016 to 2018 – to turn towards the embodied practices of drinking in the games industry. Combining approaches from affect theory, feminist studies, and social sciences, we frame the intersection of drinking and gaming culture as an ecology of complex entanglements. At this junction meets particular ‘gamer’ and ‘Australian’ performances of masculinity (See Figure 1).

Figure 1: Spectator drinking a beer out of a shoe at IEM 2017 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive world championships in Sydney.

‘Every Friday, we all go for dinner and drinks together after work... I wanted our unit to be like a family,’ was the sentiment of a co-founder of a Melbourne-based company. He tells us about the importance of bonding with his team, before he delved into how overworking accelerated the breakdown of his relationship at home with his partner. Here, the post-work drinks locates an affordance of time. Australian games development is a young and masculine industry: 81% identify as male (IGEA 2018) and the estimated average age is 31.5 (Stack Overflow 2016). Pressure to attend professional-social networking congregations, often in the name of seemingly positive motivations of collegiality, ostracizes those who cannot afford the time. For instance, those who have carer duties – roles which are more than two thirds performed by women (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2015).

Western Sydney-based Bounty Hunter Brewing Co., a pop-culture infused brewery, approached owners of Bar SK (known for showcasing local and indie games) in late 2017 to stock Bounty Hunter beer. The advertisement used by the brewery depicts Princess Peach struggling against Piranha Plant vines as they restrained her in a style reminiscent of tentacle-rape pornography (see Figure 2). In light of the poor treatment of women in gaming, Bar SK refused to stock the beer for the culturally insensitive imagery. The brewery continued to insist that the illustration was intended to empower rather than demean women. The case is exemplary of overarching masculinity performativity across these two subcultures where the male-gaze reinforces the notion that women are outsiders of both gaming and craft-brew drinking spaces.

Figure 2: Princess Peach illustration used to advertise Bounty Hunter Brewing Co.

During the largest games developer gathering in the southern hemisphere, Melbourne International Games Week, at least three unique cases of sexual harassment had to be reported for one of the post-conference networking events. On hearing of the reports, a woman attendee said defeatedly, ‘When there’s alcohol involved, men start to think that that sort of behaviour is somehow acceptable... They use it as a lubricant for pushing boundaries.’ The safety of attendees remains to be the core concern at the heart of the debate around drinking venues. Complicating the discussion around alcohol and safety includes Australian liquor licensing laws which permit security enforcement against patrons who are exhibiting antisocial behaviour to be removed and banned from the venue (Fleming 2008). For instance, the organiser of the Sydney chapter’s IGDA monthly meetup ‘Beer & Pixels’ wrote, ‘Every time someone talks about moving away from a pub, I start to sweat a little, imagining that night without a bouncer. Imagining what effect one reckless agent can have on an entire community and its sense of safety,’ (Collin 2017).

This paper documents and analyses the themes of the rising debate in the games industry around the negotiation of booze-fuelled and booze-free spaces: safety, sexual harassment, masculinity, Australian nationalism, and religion. Certain forms of consuming alcohol have become central to developer gatherings: networking, collaboration, and personal branding are especially important for indies. Consequently, developers cannot easily opt-out of these spaces.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to acknowledge the time and efforts of our interviewees and the various people who’ve shared their knowledge and expertise with us, including: Krister Mathieu Collin, Louie Roots, Chad Toprak, Lee Shang Lun, Dr Brendan Keogh, and Dr Tom Apperley.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Australian Bureau of Statistics. 2015. Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers. Retrieved from http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/4430.0 Collin. K. M. 10 Nov 2017. @kristercollin. Twitter. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/kristercollin/status/928827035056717825 Consalvo, M. 2009. Cheating: Gaining advantage in videogames. MIT Press. Flemming, J. 2008. Rules of Engagement: Policing anti-social behaviour and alcohol-related violence in and around licensed premises. Sydney: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. Retrieved from http://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Documents/r59.pdf Humphreys, S. 2017. “On Being a Feminist in Games Studies.” Games and Culture. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1555412017737637 IGEA. 2018. Digital Australia 2018 Report. Retrieved from http://www.igea.net/2017/07/digital-australia-2018-da18/ Jones, S. E. 2008. The meaning of video games: Gaming and textual strategies. Routledge. Kultima, A. (2015, June). Defining Game Jam. In FDG Proceedings. Ruberg, B. and Shaw, A. 2017. Queer Game Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shaw, A. Gaming at the edge: Sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer culture. University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Stack Overflow. 2016. Developer Survey Results. Retrieved from https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2016#developer-profile-age Steinkuehler, C. A. 2006. “Why game (culture) studies now?” Games and Culture, 1(1), 97-102. Therrien, C. and Lefebvre, I. 2017. “Now You’re Playing with Adverts: A Repertoire of Frames for the Historical Study of Game Culture through Marketing Discourse.” Kinephanos, 7(1).

ABSTRACT. Notions of escape have long permeated accounts of digital play. Games continue to be portrayed as technologies of pleasurable dislocation, enabling temporary visits to worlds that are more alluring, empowering, or at least, fair, than our everyday lives.

Such notions have been thoroughly problematized by (primarily feminist and/or ethnographic) research that insists on the imbrication of games in the contexts of their play, and in the power relations that shape these experiences (Consalvo, 2009; Taylor, 2006). But there is something indispensable about approaching gaming as an escape, particularly when we shift our perspective away from games themselves, towards the spaces and times of play. The capacity to experience gaming unfettered from the demands of so-called everyday life is possible, but has historically been a privilege primarily afforded to men and boys (Jenson and de Castell, 2008). Neither ‘magic’ nor particularly ‘circular’, these experiences of escape are produced through processes that are always gendered, raced, and classed, and cannot therefore be explained through psychologistic concepts like ‘flow’ and ‘immersion’. Such architectures of exclusion and transportation appear throughout critical accounts of play, from arcades in the 1980s (Kocurek, 2015; Tobin, 2016) to LAN parties in the 2000’s (Taylor et al., 2014) to today’s esports team houses (Orlando, 2016). Attending to more mundane gaming sites, we can see this architecture enacted – or at least envisioned – by the ‘man cave’, the enclave of “technomasculinity” (Kocurek, 2015) at once part of, and removed from, the domestic sphere.

This presentation engages in a theoretical construction of gaming man caves, updating and extending existing research on domestic spaces of play (Bryce & Rutter, 2003; Chambers, 2012; Harvey, 2013; Simon, Silverman & Boudreau, 2009). Our theorization is driven by an empirical analysis of posts to online gaming forums. Using data gathered from the 2007 and 2015 editions of the online community NeoGAF’s annual “Post your setup” threads, in which members upload and comment on pictures of their domestic gaming arrangements, I address two concerns. First, what do these posts tell us about contemporary technomasculinity and its investment, on the one hand, in digitally mediated (homo)sociality and, on the other, in the allure of escape (Sharma, 2016)? Second, what has changed in the ways users portray their domestic gaming spaces between 2007 (1-2 years into the Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and Playstation 3 console generation), and 2015 (1-2 years into the current console generation), and how might these changes illuminate technomasculinity’s shifting relationships to the instruments of its reproduction – to the stuff of the man cave?

Our goal is to begin working out the dual role of the gaming man cave as it is portrayed on NeoGAF: that is, as a “media apparatus” (Packer, 2013) that promises both belonging and escape. As an apparatus of belonging, post after post on the “gaming setup” threads show immaculately staged scenarios of homosocial bonding through technologies of leisure, even while no people are actually present in the shots. Building from the insight that man caves are often unused by anyone other than the owner himself, representing an unfulfilled “fantasy” of homosocial contact (Smith, 2016), we consider whether the numerous images depicting couches with multiple controllers laid out demonstrates something similar – documenting not so much a reality of fraternal bonding in the spaces portrayed, but its virtual enactment, a fantasy of shared play. In this view, the homosocial belonging promised by the gaming man cave occurs not (only) through actual play, but through the act of “posting your setup” to a community of fellow cave-men.

These threads also reproduce a much older discourse that articulates male leisure as a reprieve from the work of social reproduction. The masculine subject articulated throughout the “Post your setup” threads is one who seeks escape -- from the domestic relations that limit his play time, from the supposedly feminized domain of the home, and not infrequently, from the calls for inclusion and diversity currently reverberating through the worlds of technology and gaming.

Our presentation concludes by historicizing this cave-man, situating him within a trajectory of masculine subjectivities produced by (and for) specific technological milieus. In particular, we draw from Beatriz Preciado’s Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics (2014). Preciado explores the groundbreaking work Playboy magazine did in the 1950s and 1960s, envisioning its idealized subject – the bachelor – as a man whose agency and (sexual) power is obtained through his mastery over domestic technologies of surveillance and representation (the camera, the two-way mirror, the home movie theatre), particularly as (Western, white) women found employment, and political power, outside the home. Like today’s gaming man cave, the “bachelor pad” constructed through the pages of Playboy was a thoroughly mediated environment, “an information-management center for the production of fictional media versions of the public sphere” (34).

While it is an oversimplification to see Playboy’s bachelor as the progenitor of the gaming cave-man animating the “Post your setup” threads, the connections and transformations between them can tell us much about the cultural politics of contemporary digital play. Like the bachelor pad, the man cave is a media nexus, an apparatus situated both in the home and in globalized networks of capital, data, and affects. But if the aim of the bachelor pad was the objectification of women via novel manipulations of representational media, the aim of the man cave is arguably to erase their physical presence altogether, to encounter them only through digital media. Similarly, where Playboy’s bachelor aimed for the extension of an unfettered early adulthood, the cave-man, for whom play is work, represents an indefinitely prolonged boyhood.

Like other fantasies of contemporary capitalism (Dean, 2005), the dual fantasies of belonging and escape associated with the gaming man cave operate to obscure the very grounds of their own production: in this case, the gendered labor associated with their upkeep. Therefore, a full theorization of the gaming man cave as a contemporary formation of gendered power must account of what the NeoGAF “Post your gaming setup” images, and other fantasies of ludic escape, hide from view.

Works Cited Bryce, J and Rutter, J. (2003). The gendering of computer gaming: Experience and space. In S. Fleming & I. Jones (Eds.), Leisure cultures: Investigations in sport, media and technology. Leisure Studies Association, pp. 3-22.

Chambers, D. (2012). ‘Wii play as a family’: The rise in family-centred video gaming. Leisure Studies, 31(1), 69-82.

Consalvo, M. (2009). There is no magic circle. Games and Culture, 4(4), 408-417.

Dean, J. (2005). Communicative capitalism: Circulation and the foreclosure of politics. Cultural Politics, 1(1), 51-74.

Harvey, A. (2013). Gendered Networks of Play: Regulating Video Games and Technological Subjects in the Home. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, York University, Toronto, CA.

Jenson, J., & de Castell, S. (2008). Theorizing gender and digital gameplay: Oversights, accidents and surprises. Eludamos. Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2 (1), 15­25.

Kocurek, C. (2015). Coin-operated Americans: Rebooting boyhood at the video game arcade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Orlando, A. (2016). Pretty boys and muscle shirts: The group dynamics of professional gaming teams. Paper presented at the Canadian Game Studies Association 2016 Conference, Calgary, AB, June 3.

Packer, J. (2013). The conditions of media’s possibility: A Foucauldian approach to media history. In J. Nerone (ed.), Media History and the Foundations of Media Studies. New York: Blackwell, pp. 1-34.

Preciado, B. (2014). Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy's Architecture and Biopolitics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Sharma, S. (2016). Do not enter, this is not an exit: Sexodus and the gig economy. Keynote presented at the Digital Bauhaus Summit. Berlin, Germany, June 20.

Smith, B. (Aug. 29, 2016). This guy studies man caves for a living; here’s what he’s learned. MEL Magazine. Online at: https://melmagazine.com/.

Simon, B., Boudreau, K., & Silverman, M. (2009). Two players: Biography and ‘played sociality’ in Everquest. Game Studies, 9(1). Online at: http://gamestudies.org/0901/articles/simon_boudreau_silverman.

Taylor, T. L. (2006). Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Taylor, N., Jenson, J., de Castell, S. & Dilouya, B. (2014). Public displays of play: Studying online games in physical settings. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(4), 763-779.

Tobin, S. (2016). Hanging in the video arcade. Journal of Games Criticism. Online at: http://gamescriticism.org/articles/tobin-3-a/.

ABSTRACT. This study aims to understand what the aspects are that make players identify with and relate to avatars, including discussions on issues of gender and sexuality. To carry out this research qualitative experiments were conducted using gameplay sessions and semi-structured interviews. The Massive Multiplayer Online game Rust (Facepunch Studios 2013) was chosen for empirical study because of its gender-based system, a controlled variable for the experiments. Volunteers from the study were divided into two groups: one with the gender of the participants matching the gender of the avatars they controlled; the other not matching. From the results we were able to determine: the level of identification between player and avatar was not so important and did not affect how they played; there were mixed feelings about the race of one of the avatars in the experiment; having avatars appear nude also made the participants feel uncomfortable, especially regarding the male avatar; female participants responded to gender questions more easily than males; overall, the participants were not aware that they were playing a game related to gender swapping; and even though they were not comfortable speaking about sexuality, the participants were able to recognize patterns in the representations as well as critique them and offer other suggestions.

ABSTRACT. This submission discusses preliminary findings from a first of its kind study of transgender men, transmasculine, masculine of center, non-binary, and genderqueer people who work in the digital games industry or are games journalists. To date nearly all research on gendered dynamics of these industries have focused on the experiences of women (Cassell & Jenkins, 2000; Kerr, 2005; Prescott & Bogg, 2011). Thus, the bulk of suggestions or best practices produced about how to correct gender disparity within digital games have focused on femininity and women. As this study demonstrates, however, transmasculinity offers another unique insight into how any why certain people are excluded from this ever-growing media industry in ways that are not reducible to specific gender identities.

ABSTRACT. 'Red Alert' is probably the most widely known subseries of 'Command & Conquer' franchise, and for years the leading one in the real time strategy genre (alongside Blizzard's 'WarCraft' and 'StarCraft' games). An alternate reality universe of the subseries (with its core concept of Cold War turning hot and the Soviet Union substituting the Third Reich as main threat to Western Europe in the early 1940s) has been initially conceived as highly realistic, with only minor additions of sci-fi; thus adapting not only real-life Soviet military equipment into the game world, but also various themes from World War II along with some historical characters. However, from the second installment onward, the poetics of the series changed significantly, evolving into camp, thus allowing more liberty in shaping virtual Russia. In essence, the image of the Soviet Union was reshaped not only by adapting more clichés of the Cold War era into the game (e.g. James Bond movies), but also by modifying various aspects of the game world (and mechanics) to achieve more clear polarization between the two sides of the conflict, visible not only on ethical, but also on technological level (as typical for the real time strategies of the early 90s). As a result, Soviet Union in late 'Red Alert' games is not fully 'modern' superpower, but rather malevolent 'Eastern' empire, bearing many characteristics of classic 'Orient'. This was also a typical way of diversifying two sides of other fictional conflicts in two other subseries of the 'Command & Conquer' franchise set in different alternate universes (i.e. Brotherhood of Nod fanatics in Tiberian series, as well as Global Liberation Army terrorist in C&C Generals [Sisler 2008]) which underlines the importance of the practice in question. It has been already shown that Postcolonial approach to strategy games (as well as other game genres, like FPS [Höglund 2008]) can be applied not only to those portraying wars set on Middle East, like 'C&C Generals' [Sisler 2008], but also to non-Asian cultures, typically perceived by the West as inferior in the past (like latinidad as shown in Tropico [Magnet 2006]). It can be also shown in relation to the Soviet Russia in 'Red Alert' (especially portrayed as in fact Asian, and not European power). To this end, three-dimensional game model of Espen Aarseth can be used, with modifications based on the approach of Elliott and Kapell, devised for historical games analysis [Elliott, Kapell 2013]. In the specific example of RTS, three layers of game content, goals and rules can be interpreted as game fictional framework (the plot on strategic level), the kind of missions the player needs to accomplish in the course of the campaign (the plot on tactical level), and arsenal available during subsequent missions. Each of those three layers differ heavily depending on the campaign (i.e. whether its Western or Eastern one); and on each of those layers, differences between sides are used to give Oriental characteristics to the virtual Soviets. On the strategic level, all Allied (i.e. Western) campaigns are the stories of self-defense against the Soviet aggression, which the player's character in turn has to direct in the Soviet campaign (with the exception of 'Red Alert 3' where the conflict is multilateral). This is not only a reproduction of a typical pop-culture scenario (like in John Milius's 'Red Dawn' referred to in 'Red Alert 2'); it's also shown as another iteration of historical 'Asian' invasions, by emphasizing the historical and cultural differences between Russia and the West in various ways, even regarding to characteristics clearly opposed by real Communism (e.g. golden domes of Orthodox churches on the roofs of Soviet tank factories!). The same can be observed on the 'tactical' level, where the player has to accomplish missions of different kind depending on the campaign; and although many Soviet missions allude to real events of World War II or the Cold War (e.g. Cuban missile crisis, attack on Pearl Harbor with the Soviets taking the role of the Japanese, or their Blitz-like airstrikes of Britain), particular goals of the majority of Soviet missions (including killing civilians, kidnappings or assassinations) tend to emphasize 'typical' lack of moral standards, cruelty, or 'Eastern' tendency for deceit, which are all distinctive features of Orient in Western perspective, as described by Edward Said. The same goal is achieved by giving different arsenals to the players of each side during the missions: 'Red Alert' pretended to be a 'historical' game by incorporating as many real-life planes or tanks from NATO and Warsaw Pact arsenals into the game, but the way the vehicles of different eras are mixed and distributed heavily distorts the image of both sides, portraying the Soviets as technologically inferior in the way that is almost grotesque (e.g. M1 Abrams tanks of the 80s coexist with Yak-9 piston engine fighters on the same battlefield), which is made even more visible in the subsequent games in the series where fictional weapons emphasize that handicap even more (e.g. Soviet airships servings as bombers in 'Red Alert 2' as opposed to British-made Harriers of the 70s). The practice of showing various 'Eastern' characteristics of Soviet army (like 'Asian' brutality) governs the evolution of almost any kind of weaponry throughout the series: from the weakest units of infantry (with Soviet conscripts being slightly cheaper, thus allowing the usage of 'human wave' tactics, iconic for Korea and Vietnam, but also underlining 'Asian' indifference to casualties) up to the 'ultimate' weaponry of each side (e.g. although Soviet nuclear missiles are based on real world R-7 missiles, thus alluding to 'missile gap' myth of the late 50s, the lack of nuclear weapons in American arsenal, and its substitution by more 'precise' high-tech technologies, is obviously ahistorical and is meant to underline the Western supposed inability of using weaponry perceived as illegal or immoral). All those practices are very similar to those used in two other 'Command & Conquer' settings (in regard to Middle Eastern terrorists), which emphasizes that characteristics given to Russia in 'Red Alert' are in fact those of 'Orient', thus suggesting that Postcolonial approach is a legitimate one in this case, even outside its original framework.

Bibliography: V. Sisler, Digital Arabs: Representation in Video Games, „European Journal of Cultural Studies” 2008 No. 2. J. Höglund, Electronic Empire: Orientalism Revisited in the Military Shooter, „Game Studies” 2008 No. 1. A. Elliott, M.W. Kapell, Introduction: To Build a Past that Will “Stand the Test of Time”: Discovering Historical Facts, Assembling Historical Narratives, w: Playing the Past. Digital Games and the Simulation of History, ed. A. Elliott, M.W. Kapell, Bloomsbury Academic, London 2013 S. Magnet, Playing at Colonization. Interpreting Imaginary Landscapes in Video Game Tropico, „Journal of Communication Inquiry” 2006 No. 2. S. Mukherjee, The playing fields of Empire: Empire and spatiality in video games, “Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds” 2015, Nr 3 (7).

ABSTRACT. This paper develops and applies the concept of implied playstyles. Implied playstyles are a part of Aarseth's (2008) "implied player" and can be identified through the analysis of game mechanics and the attributes of game objects and units. After conceptualizing these specific ways to play games, the paper applies the implied playstyles two to exemplary games and discusses the findings in regards to player behavior and possible future applications.

ABSTRACT. The aim of our project is to work out a typology of larps and larp games for both game theory (starting with the discussion of what makes larp a larp) and practical applications (such as, for example, expanding the player base). We situate larp in the context of activities that include live-action role-playing but are not necessarily recognised as larps. To categorise those games, we suggest an approach that understands larps as formal systems that represent specific attributes. As the result, a classification matrix can be constructed. At present, we have listed thirteen attributes and fourteen types of larps and larp games. The types are distinguished by the necessary presence of the minimal number of attributes.

ABSTRACT. With the development of video games, online gaming has emerged as a media form suitable for expressing political ideologies. However, given China’s background, diversity in the content of games is to some extent constrained. In particular, this is not a medium through which Chinese citizens are free to express what Bogost (2007, pp. 96-97) refers to as ‘videogame billboard’, instead, the central government has taken control of online gaming as a medium for disseminating its own political ideology. Officially sanctioned games encourage Chinese nationals to become more patriotic and sensitive to national ideology. Players no longer exist in a purely virtual sense, but are also expected to transport the values embraced in the game world into the material world. Online games encourage patriotism and a sense of belonging through structured play, as characters emerge victorious upon defeating foreign forces and resisting immoral temptations, this is a loyalty equated not only with nationality (e.g. Thompson, 2001), but is also associated with the pride of being Chinese and building a commitment to protect China’s image (Mathews, Ma, & Lui, 2008, p. 7).

Undoubtedly, when compared to traditional text-based and audiovisual media, online games are distinctive in terms of their multiple paths to “winning” or accomplishing various tasks. In practice, it is difficult if not impossible for governmental edicts to force players to choose specific, ideal paths; instead, the preferred strategy is to subtly prompt players towards feeling patriotic, proud of their homeland, and experiencing a stronger sense of belonging, in order to resist the “invasion” of liberal political values (Zeng, 2016). However, a number of questions remain, including how the theme of belonging is embedded within the texts of online games; what role a sense of belonging plays in online games; how these games promote the player’s senses of belonging; and what implied responsibilities Chinese nationals bring to the game experience. Examples of this sense of belonging will be drawn here from the game version of Learning from Lei Feng OL (学雷锋OL, Shanda, 2012), through the Chairman Mao’s reception, and the quotations from Chairman Mao, and depictions of the recapture of China’s “breakaway territories” of the Diaoyu Islands and Taiwan upon the surrender of the enemies in Glorious Mission (光荣使命, Giant Interactive Group, 2011).

Therefore, in this speech, my intention is to propose that this sense of belonging is the most important factor when it comes to designing government sanctioned games. I will discuss this premise in three parts. First, I will note the forms of belonging expressed and defined in online games whose production involves the government. Second, I will discuss the rhetorical strategies through which the government attempts to inspire players to practice this sense of belonging in other spheres of their daily lives, as well as the distinctions between online games and traditional counterparts. Finally, I will explore how this sense of belonging is realized and how it may influence education in the future, especially the design of online games relating to political education.

References

Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Giant Interactive Group. (2011). Glorious Mission (光荣使命). [PC], China: Giant Interactive Group. Mathews, G., Ma, E. K.-w., & Lui, T.-l. (2008). Hong Kong, China: Learning to belong to a nation. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Shanda. (2012). Learning from Lei Feng OL (学雷锋OL). [PC], China: Shanda. Thompson, A. (2001). Nations, National Identities and Human Agency: Putting People Back Into Nations. The Sociological Review, 49(1), 18-32. Zeng, J. (2016). The Chinese Communist Party’s Capacity to Rule: Ideology, Legitimacy and Party Cohesion. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

ABSTRACT. The digital games industry is and has been male-dominated for decades. This panel reports on the midway progress of a large-scale, five year project, initiated in 2015, which has as its goal the construction of new pathways and structures for equitable, safe, and rewarding participation in gaming. Funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the “ReFiguring Innovation in Games” (ReFiG) initiative takes an inter-sectoral approach, involving students, academics and industry partners towards the common goal of a more equitable and innovative game culture and industry. There is currently no research or project of this international and longitudinal scale that is taking up the challenge to systematically ameliorate the persistently and pervasively inhospitable conditions for women in games across multiple domains.

Dividing the panel according to the thematic streams addressed by the project (Informal Learning; Formal Learning; Games Industries; Games Culture), we discuss insights we’ve made, resources we’ve developed, and obstacles we’ve encountered. These include: i) the institutional and logistical challenges associated with administering an international, feminist research program -- one which functions very much as a platform rather than a typical project; ii) the contexts and communities in which feminist initiatives have been most welcome, and the domains in which we continue to struggle to find grounds for meaningful collaboration; iii) the tools and techniques we have developed and implemented that enable feminist epistemologies, methodologies, and politics to travel across localized gaming contexts and disciplinary domains.

ABSTRACT. This paper argues that embedded in David Sudnow’s 1983 descriptions of videogame play are methodological and epistemological interventions that could help contemporary game studies surpass its currently limited frames of reference for the videogame form. In this paper I hope to resolve this by devoting significant time to summarising Sudnow’s observations while drawing attention to the implications of some of his more enticing and evocative passages. The goal here is to excavate Sudnow’s more powerful insights and methods so that they may provoke questions on videogame expression that contemporary game studies would do well to debate.

ABSTRACT. With the objective of articulating an understanding of the existential structure of the player’s engagement with the gameworld, this paper draws on the notion of the ‘project,’ as developed in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1962[1927]) and, in particular, of Jean-Paul Sartre (1966[1943]).

The existential notion of the project could generally defined as an orientation towards an overarching goal that, at its core, reveals the aspiration to shape one’s individual existence in a certain way. The project is an activity of self-determination – a process through which the individual works towards being “a certain type of person” (McInerney, 1979, 667). It is in the light of this projectual disposition that things are recognized as meaningful to the individual. It is because of that attitude that the things a player encounters in a gameworld are interpreted as important, secondary, pleasant, unpleasant, negligible, desirable, right, wrong, etc. The in-game project frames game entities as resources, obstacles, boundaries, friends, foes, and it is in this way that the digital game environment, as the player’s existential situation, takes the conscious form of a meaningful world of possibility.

The paper’s exploration of the player’s engagement with the gameworld through the lens of projectuality shall be structured around two main questions. The first concerns the projectuality of the individual’s being in a non-actual context: how does an existential project give shape to the playing individual’s being in the gameworld? The second question, then, focuses on the relation between the individual’s being in the gameworld and her overarching existential project: in what way(s) does the practice of taking on a virtual project figure in the overarching project of the playing individual’s being?

This paper shall draw on existing existential approaches to the study of virtual world experience (Gualeni 2015), as well as player experience in gameworlds more specifically. In the latter case, the notions of the gameplay condition (Leino, 2010), the ludic subject-position (Vella 2015) and the gameplay situation (Kania 2017), in different but related ways, advance a position according to which the digital game environment is adopted as the existential situation for a subjectivity she develops within the gameworld – a “ludic subjectivity” (Vella, 2015, 22).

Tying in with the general recognition, in formalist attempts at game definition, of an orientation towards goals or preferred outcomes as being a key element of games, the three existential approaches to games mentioned above also identify a directedness towards goals or projects as being at the core of the player’s perception of the gameworld (eg. Avedon and Sutton-Smith, 1971, 7; Suits, 1990[1978], 34; Costikyan, 2002, 11-14; Juul, 2005, 36). Leino specifically involves Sartre, arguing that “digital games “simultaneously facilitate and resist a particular (kind of) project, which makes the particular (kind of) project stand out among all possible (kinds of) projects” (2010, 135). Vella writes that “the setting of goals towards which [the player’s] efforts are directed [...] makes the gameworld appear to the player in the light of these goals” (2015, 284). Likewise, Kania’s notion of the gameplay situation is intimately tied to the pursuit of a goal – the gameplay situation is “experienced as purposeful from the internal perspective [to the gameworld] with relation to its goal” (2017, 62).

In order to answer the first of its two questions, then, the paper will expand upon these understandings to highlight the ways in which the player’s goal-orientation, through shaping what Hans Georg Gadamer terms the “comportment” particular to a given playing, shapes the determination of an in-game ludic self.

To answer the second question, then, the paper will draw upon the notion of the “double perspectival structure” of ludic engagement (Vella, 2015, 55-71), according to which the player simultaneously inhabits a subjective standpoint internal to the gameworld (the ludic subjectivity) and her own subjective standpoint as an individual external to the gameworld. On this basis, this paper proposes an understanding of ludic subjectivity as standing in a nested relation to the individual’s subjectivity in the actual world, and argues that it is this relation that allows gameworld experience to gain significance in the light of the individual’s projectual existence.

The arguments advanced in this paper pave the way for a comprehensive understanding of the transformative, self-transformative, and therapeutic possibilities and advantages afforded by the exercising of ludic subjectivities in digital game worlds.

LIST OF WORKS CITED

Avedon, E. M., & Sutton-Smith, B. (1971). The Study of Games. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. Costikyan, G. (2002) “I Have No Words And I Must Design,” in Mäyrä, F. (ed.), Proceedings of the Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference, Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, pp. 9-33. Gadamer, H. G. 1989 [1960] Truth and Method. London: Sheed & Ward. Gualeni, S. (2015) Virtual Worlds as philosophical tools. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Heidegger, M. (1962) [1927] Being and Time. Trans. Macquarrie, J. and Robinson, E. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row Publishers Inc. Juul, J. (2005) Half-Real: Video Games Between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kania, M. M. (2017) Perspectives of the Avatar: Sketching the Existential Aesthetics of Digital Games. Wroclaw, Poland: University of Lower Silesia Press. Leino, O.T. (2010) Emotions in Play: On the Constitution of Emotion in Solitary Computer Game Play. [Doctoral dissertation]. IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark McInerney, P. (1979) “Self-Determination and the Project”. In The Journal of Philosophy 76:11, 663-677. Suits, B. (1990) The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Boston, MA: David R. Godine. Vella, D. (2015) The ludic subject and the ludic self: Investigating the ‘I-in-the Gameworld’. [Doctoral dissertation]. IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I will do a close reading of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, by utilising Georges Perec’s theory of the infra-ordinary. I will start by briefly explaining and situating Perec’s theory, within both his literary and political background. This will be followed by a textual writing of a short infra-ordinary playthrough of Pocket Camp, specifically focused on five chosen in-game areas. Through this playthrough, I will attempt to explain how the infra-ordinary is replicated within Pocket Camp.

ABSTRACT. This paper considers two games in which the implementation of the save system is ‘meaningful’ not just in Salen and Zimmerman’s sense – that of investing the player’s actions with a sense of consequence (2004, 34) – but also in the sense of eliciting reflection and interpretation. Christine Love’s Analogue: A Hate Story (2012) and Nier: Automata (Taro/Platinum Games 2017) both imagine science fiction futures in order to ask questions about data storage and the terms on which the past remains accessible in the present.

ABSTRACT. This paper describes a study centered on user attitudes and motivations for participating game crowdfunding campaigns. The study uses two datasets: a quantitative online survey on user motivations for participation and a qualitative section in the same survey, aiming to tease out respondent views on the value of crowdfunding participation in their own words. Identified themes include 'Product', 'Development', and 'Community', among others, with 'Development' being an especially interesting new finding, prompting analysis to consider a new type of consumption; how some backers now participate in campaigns to spectate development.

ABSTRACT. Game engines are code frameworks, software toolsets, and proprietary structures that enable videogame content to be produced and published on a variety of platforms. They tend to manage low-level computational routines such as rendering, physics, and artificial intelligence, thereby allowing game designers, artists, and programmers to streamline their development practices. It used to be that videogame companies would develop their own proprietary engines to optimize in-house development practices. Occasionally, companies would also license their engines to other companies, or make their toolsets freely available to modding communities. Since the mid-2000s, however, a small handful of third-party engines such as Unreal and Unity have come to monopolise videogame production across both professional and amateur contexts. These third-party engines tend to work on subscription-based models or, in the case of Unity, free-to-use (and rather opaque) platform-based models designed to monopolise network effects (see Srnicek, 2016).

This paper offers insight into the state of game engines today - that is, how game engines are being used and implemented in a variety of institutional settings and design practices - by drawing on interviews with Australian game designers (both professional and amateur) as well as tertiary game design students and educators. Interviews for this project are currently underway, though we have so far conducted 15 of approximately 17 planned interviews. The interviews are semi-structured, and typically last between 45-60 minutes. Participants are asked a range of questions about their thoughts and opinions on game engines, such as how differently engines influence the way they approach, learn about, or teach the process of game design. The interviews are then transcribed and thematically analysed through a process that involves coding the data based on common themes, responses, and concerns. We chose to interview Australian participants only so as to make geographically specific claims about the use of game engines in Australian contexts.

The paper will contribute to an existing (though limited) body of research that has, for the most part, focused on the history of game engines. For example, Graeme Kirkpatrick (2013: 104) argues that game engines both streamline and standardise the craft of game design. According to Kirkpatrick, game engines function to 'contain' potentially subversive or commercially undesirable uses of computer technologies. David Nieborg and Shenja van der Graaf (2008) make a similar observation, suggesting that open-source engines enable game corporations to co-opt the 'unofficial' practices of modders and hackers. Similarly, Ian Bogost (2006: 62) argues that game engines are essentially intellectual property, in that they bind certain games and genres to specific engines, both legally (as proprietary extensions of existing games) and materially (as software toolsets). John Banks (2013) provides perhaps the most comprehensive overview of game engines in his study of the SAGE engine, a short-lived engine developed by an Australian game studio in the mid-2000s. Describing SAGE as a "multiple object," he argues that game engines are "participants… in the making of co-creativity" (Banks, 2013: 53).

What is lacking, and what this paper aims to develop, is a more up-to-date perspective on the state of game engines today, especially in light of the recent widespread adoption of Unity as the 'engine of choice' for many game designers, students, and educators. In particular, we seek to answer the following key questions:

*What are the technical, proprietary, and economic functions of game engines; and how are they reshaping the industry and craft of game design? *What are the limitations and opportunities for people from non-programming backgrounds (e.g. artists, designers, and hobbyists) to access and utilise game engines? *How do game engines foster creative innovation in the Australian videogame industry? *How could they be used to more effectively harness creativity and innovation, especially for non-videogame applications (e.g. VR software development)?

To this end, we focus on game engines through a three-pronged approach: as technologies that are reconfiguring the landscape of game design; as intermediary platforms that bring together different industry groups and imply certain labour practices; and as economic and proprietary entities operating in a wider platform ecosystem.

Our preliminary analysis of the interview data reveals several key themes: firstly, that game engines are incredibly complex objects that possess different meanings and functions depending on how they are used and who they are used by. Several interview participants seem to view engines less as contained toolsets and more as networks that intermediate between different groups of people. This is especially the case when it comes to Unity's 'asset store' - which allows the user to develop, sell, and purchase assets and plug-ins from other users - as well as its support network of online forums. Secondly, interview participants tend to agree that third-party engines such as Unity shape their development practices in subtle - and often quite imperceptible - ways. By presenting users with 'component-based' design interfaces, third-party engines such as Unity remove the need for deep, object-oriented programming. Interview participants view this as at once both liberating and stifling, to the extent that it speeds up and simplifies the process of game design, but also limits the amount of control and customization available to the user. Similarly, students and educators tend to describe engines as though they are technologies that equally 'participate' in the education process by shaping tastes, preferences, and development practices. Thirdly, game designers - and especially teams of designers - describe needing to spend time working out what an engine 'wants from them' in order to work with it effectively. Once again, this tends to be viewed as a fair trade off, as the alternative is to spend months or perhaps even years developing in-house toolsets. The majority of interview participants also express significant confusion regarding the legal and proprietary functions of Unity in particular, which speaks to the platform's rapid growth and monopolisation of the market. Unity is constantly updating not only its terms of service but also its interface, which interview participants describe as a constant process of needing to play 'catch-up.' The analysis of the data is still underway, however, and will no doubt reveal further insights as the research progresses.

ABSTRACT. The Chinese-produced Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game, Honor of Kings (wangzhe rongyao, Tencent 2015) has been criticized by the Chinese Communist Party's official mouthpiece, the People's Daily, for distorting and trivializing Chinese history. This project explores how such criticism has been understood by players of the game. The project approaches Chinese history as a contested terrain between political, social and commercial actors. By understanding how players negotiate the conflict between their own consumption of the game and the Party's official stance, the project contributes empirical results to debates over propaganda in contemporary China, the relationship between political and commercial institutions in Chinese discourse, and the ongoing "moral panic" over computer games in China. We are currently conducting interviews with Chinese players and this paper and presentation will discuss preliminary findings.

ABSTRACT. As of 2016, the mobile gaming market in China was valued at more than 1 billion Yuan (Newzoo, 2016). In response to this explosive growth, the central government has gradually tightened the supervision of game imports and game content. After the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (国家新闻出版广电总局, SARFT) published Mobile Gaming Publication, Service, and Management Notification (关于移动游戏出版服务管理的通知) in July 2016, stipulating that the approval system used for films will be adapted to the publishing of mobile games, the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association (中国音数协) also issued The Regulations for Mobile Game Content (移动游戏内容规范), which communicated the government’s directives on game content to the public. Under this background, concern has grown with regard to interpreting the government’s rules for the game industry, and the extent to which the new regulations will affect the design and production of games.

To deal with these questions, it is necessary to summarize the current state of game regulation in China, as well as responses to this policymaking by scholars. In the latter regard, there are three focuses of current scholarship. The first is a consideration of existing cultural policies, a summary of the broad principles and strategies used in making policy, and an investigation of the status of the game industry within this framework (e.g. Keane, 2016). Second, it is useful to outline the specific regulations relevant to software, films, TV series, and music, and to consider how these rules align with the somewhat different form and content of games (e.g. Ramos, López, Rodríguez, Meng, & Abrams, 2013). Third, in studying the creative and marketing strategies of the domestic and international game industries, it may be assumed that the government, as well as regulating domestically produced games, will seek to control the importation and content of games created outside of China (e.g. Chew, 2015; Custer, 2014). Addressing the first two points above will involve looking for the introduction of new ideas and principles into the regulatory apparatus, while the last is aimed at concretely identifying and describing the new regulations. In any case, previous studies have shown that regulation of the game industry is inevitably aligned with particular political expectations and principles (See: Kraus, 2014), and that the intentions of regulations play an important role in understanding how China’s game standards have evolved (Cheung & Fung, 2016).

However, omissions, contradictions and misunderstandings have cropped up in the study of game rules and regulations. For example, no academic scholars have attempted to explain why the sale of console games was banned by the government [the most relevant analysis is from Liboriussen et al. (2016); however, this discussion doesn’t show why the government made the decision based on the situation at the time]. Meanwhile, on the issue of whether a verification system should be established in the gaming industry, Chinese and overseas scholars tend to have different opinions (e.g. Zhao, 2016). In addition, it is proposed in Kaene (2016)’s article that establishing relatively rigid norms for Chinese games, especially those dealing with game content, will hinder game innovation and the ability of games to more directly reflect social issues. However, even as the 2017 General Rules on Online Audiovisual Content Auditing (网络视听节目内容审核通则) prohibited the portrayal homosexuality, the first gay game Rainbow Town (Star-G, 2017) was developed and marketed for the gay community in China. Another factor complicating regulatory initiatives is the branching narrative form characteristic of many games, making it difficult for would-be censors to monitor content across multiple narrative threads. As a result, in comparison with specifications for conventional film and television content, current game regulations lack consistency, which in turn requires an investigation of the degree to which existing scholarship has addressed this conceptual area. Also, with the publication of Mobile Game Content Specification, it is more evident than ever that the government means to crack down on content that contravenes socialist values, and that enforcement measures are becoming more strict and systematic across the game market and the whole demographic range of game players. Therefore, it should be clear that the government's influence on game design and experience has existed since the first introduction of video games, and as more regulations are specially designed for the game industry, the study of game policies, as well the government’s evolving perspective on games and the industry, is more important than ever.

Thus, in this presentation, I will sort out the study of China’s game policies, explore scholars’ perspectives and outline the terrain of Chinese game regulation, thereby also exposing some of the most significant existing research gaps. I will start by chronologically enumerating the main developments of Chinese game regulation. Then, based on an identification of categories of game policies (within a broader network of cultural policy), I will address immediate issues, including intellectual property, copyright, privacy, rating systems, violence, addiction, and the cultural politics of games. I will consider the conceptual background of existing research, the time frame of research from the 1990s to the present, as well as scholars’ stated and implied attitudes towards games. Finally, I hope the study will provide a better understanding of the operational benchmarks of the Chinese gaming industry, which will be of benefit to latecomers in the analysis of China's game policies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cheung, C. K., & Fung, A. (2016). Globalizing the Chinese Online Game Industry: From Incubation and Hybridization to Structural Expansion in the Past Two Decades. In A. Fung, Global Game Industries and Cultural Policy (pp. 71-90). Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Chew, M. M. (2015). Online Games and Society in China: An Exploration of Key Issues and Challenges. In L. Hjorth, & O. Khoo, Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia (pp. 391-401). Oxon; New York: Routledge. Custer, C. (2014, July 2). China Doesn’t Censor Skeletons: The Truth About Game Censorship in the Middle Kingdom. Retrieved from Tech in Asia: https://www.techinasia.com/china-doesnt-censor-skeletons-the-truth-about-game-censorship-in-the-middle-kingdom Keane, M. (2016). Before the Gold Rush: Culture Without Industry in China. In A. Fung, Global Game Industries and Cultural Policy (pp. 53-68). Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Kraus, R. C. (2014). Policy Case Study: The Arts. In W. A. Joseph, Politics in China: An Introduction (2nd ed., pp. 342-351). New York: Oxford University Press. Liboriussen, B., White, A., & Wang, D. (2016). The Ban on Gaming Consoles in China: Protecting National Culture, Morals, and Industry within an International Regulatory Framework. In S. Conway, & J. deWinter, Video Game Policy: Production, Distribution, and Consumption (pp. 230-243). New York; London: Routledge. Newzoo. (2016, September 13). Chinese Games Market 2016. Retrieved from Newzoo: https://newzoo.com/insights/infographics/chinese-games-market-2016/ Ramos, A., López, L., Rodríguez, A., Meng, T., & Abrams, S. (2013). The Legal Status of Video Games: Comparative Analysis in National Approaches. WIPO. Star-G. (2017). Rainbow Town. IOS. Star-G. Zhao, E. J. (2016). Beyond the Game of Cat and Mouse: Challenges of Discoverability and Piracy in the Mobile Gaming Market. In A. Fung, Global Game Industries and Cultural Policy (pp. 253-270). Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

ABSTRACT. This paper is about “true line of sight” (hereafter TLOS), one of a “layer of rules” (Priestly and Lambshead 2016) that determines which miniatures on the tabletop can see and therefore attack the other. TLOS is crucial to W40K gameplay but it is also a curious concept through which we can explore complex relations of bodies in play.

ABSTRACT. In November 2014 in France, the release of Assassin’s Creed Unity, a videogame where the action takes place in Paris at the beginning of the 1789 French Revolution, has been followed by a public controversy. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of a left-wing party, had denounced the standpoint of the game, which he characterized as depicting that major political event from the point of view of those in power, and the overwhelming place given to their history rather than the history of the people. The importance of that controversy was not the novelty of the criticism – ie the well-known fact that videogames might convey dominant representations of the society – but the fact that it was supported by a major political figure, a candidate for the 2017 presidential election. Thus, the more videogames gain in cultural legitimacy, the more it becomes necessary to address the issue of their political and social content. A large part of Video Game Studies have been dedicated to the analysis of ideology and social and spatial representations conveyed by videogames. Pioneer studies from Fuller and Jenkins (1995) and Frasca (2001) have laid the theoretical and methodological foundations for the analysis of a videogame content. Bogost enriched them with the notion of “procedural rhetoric” (2007). The issue of violence has been particularly addressed, whether to criticize the “militarized masculinity” (Kline, Dyer-Whiteford & De Peuter, 2003) conveyed by videogames or the way videogames were used to make apology of (American) warfare (Halter, 2006 ; Huntemann, Payne, 2010). More recently, in France, Mauco studied the social and political critique in Grand Theft Auto IV (2013). But while much attention has been given to ideological messages in videogames by academics and public figures alike, we still lack ambitious empirical studies on the reception of videogames by the general audience. Do players actually decode (Hall, 1980) those messages to find the meaning analyzed by the ideological critiques? Does it actually matter to them? We argue that game studies should focus more on how videogame play is embedded in social forms, and that the meaning of play is built in relation with those forms. To address these issues, we propose to discuss the results of a mixed method research on French videogames players. We carried out a phone survey about videogames on a sample of the French population aged 11 and more (n= 2 542) in 2012. The originality of this survey was that it targeted the whole population rather than the sole gamer population, allowing us to go beyond the traditional, unsatisfactory typology into hardcore, casual and non-players. It was supplemented by 30 in-depth interviews with players from a diversity of backgrounds. We also used data from representative surveys of cultural consumption in France (produced by the research departement of the Ministry of Culture). In this paper, we mostly focus on the distribution of videogame genres use (what games are played), sociabilities (with whom they are played, engaged with and talked about) and daily life (in which contexts they are played). First, for children and teenagers as well as adults, the most played videogames are Solitary, card games, browser games, and dance or music games, rather than those who come first in the top market sales, so that Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto are pretty far in our survey. This shows that violent videogames and 18+ games (in the PEGI classification) make up but a small fraction of actual uses and that we should also focus on more casual games. Yet, public issues such as violence and addiction are often brought up by interviewees. While media debates do have an impact on the framing of videogames, actual uses are quite removed from ideological worries. Second, the meaning of games lies in how it is shared with other people. This is clear for children and teenagers: almost everyone aged less than 18 in our sample had played videogames the year before, and more than two third were playing every week or more. At this age, games are a shared culture: they are a way to emancipate from parents’ culture, and to bind to peers. On the adults side, videogames as well as board games play is very much linked to family configurations, but while boardgame use shows a soft decline with age, videogame use decreases even more strongly, so that people aged 40 and more currently play boardgames more often than videogames. Finally, it is worth underlining the growing importance of videogame use during transportation even if domestic space still represents the main place for videogame practices. This shows the importance of “ordinary” practices, framed as much by taste as by material contingency of everyday life. What matters there for the players is whether they can mingle their videogame practice with the activities and rhythms of their daily routine. It appears that the largest part of videogame players in France look for games not according to the message conveyed, or the social or political issues they can address, but according to their affordances, their ability to fit in the interstices of everyday life, to fulfill their function of pastime, leisure and socialization. This might be the main message of videogames.

References Bogost, I. Persuasive Games, MIT Press, 2007. Coavoux, S. & Gerber, D. “Les pratiques ludiques des adultes entre affinités électives et sociabilités familiales”, Sociologie, vol. 7, no. 2 (2016), pp. 133-152. Frasca, G. Videogames of The Oppressed. Videogames As A Means For Critical Thinking And Debate, Master’s Thesis, Georgia Insitute of Technology, 2001. Fuller, M. & Jenkins, H. “Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing : a Dialogue”, In Cybersociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, edited by Steven Jones, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 1995, pp. 57-72. Hall, S. “Encoding/decoding”, In Culture, Media, Language. Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-1979, edited by Johannes Angermuller, Dominique Maingueneau & Ruth Wodak, 1980, pp. 128-138. Halter, D. From Sun Tzu to Xbox. War and video games, Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York, 2006. Huntemann, N. & Payne M. T. (eds), Joystick Soldiers, Routledge, New York, 2010. Kline, S. Dyer-Witheford N. & De Peuter G., Digital Play. The Interaction of Technology, Culture, and Marketing, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal, 2003. Mauco O., GTA IV, l’envers du rêve américain, Questions théoriques, Paris, 2013. Rufat S. Ter Minassian H. & Coavoux S. “Playing Videogames in France”, L’espace géographique, 2014, vol. 43, no. 4 (2014), pp. 308-323. Ter Minassian, H. & Boutet, M. “Les jeux vidéo dans les routines quotidiennes”, Espace populations sociétés, vol. 1, no. 2, (2015).

ABSTRACT. In this paper we want to argue for a more inclusive understanding of the notion of gameplay which implies practices that are normally considered non-default, marginal, transgressive, subversive or other forms of gameplay. Instead of considering these practices of gameplay as non-standard forms which exist at the margins of whatever could be considered gameplay, we argue that these practices should very much be considered as standard forms of gameplay as much as “normal” gameplay. We believe that these practices are essential for a comprehensive understanding of the medium. While this idea seems not to be controversial in game culture or in the realm of game praxis it seems that especially computer game theory and the computer game industry are driving this form of “othering”. In both cases the distinction which comes with this provides certain discursive agents (such as theorists and industry representatives) with power over other agents (practitioners and players).

To show these mechanisms we will first re-read common notions of game-play and show how non-standard practices of gameplay are either given different, at times derogatory names, or completely omitted in order to mark them as “other” forms of play. We will then look at notions of non-standard forms of gameplay such as spoil sporting, cheating, innovative gameplay, transgressive, subversive play, authentic gameplay and show how this othering is here perpetuated on the theoretical level while although most of the authors of these analyses paradoxically intend to rehabilitate these practices as belonging to a wider notion of gameplay.

Eventually we will suggest an inclusive perspective on gameplay which is based on a wide notion of gameplay and which not only includes practices that are commonly considered marginal but puts them in the center of gameplay.

ABSTRACT. In early 2015, Gamasutra, a popular online website featuring a variety of topics on game design and development trends, publishes an article “The rise of games you (mostly) don’t play” (Parkin 2015), introducing a niche “idle” games genre to a wider audience. Idle games (e.g. AdVenture Capitalist, Clicker Heroes, or Dreeps, amongst many others), also referred to as passive, self-playing or clicker games, are characterised by automated or delegated gameplay, which makes the player’s participation optional or entirely redundant. In other words, there is minimal or no active engagement required from the player in order for the game to progress.

“Idlers” and other examples of self-playing games have left the gaming and academic community puzzled. After all, until now games have been primarily understood as objects to be actively engaged with, conflicts to be resolved, and meaningful actions to be taken (Huizinga 1949/2002, Caillois 1958/1961, Crawford 1982, Juul 2003, Salen and Zimmerman 2003). Digital games are supposed to be ergodic, requiring a non-trivial effort from their participants (Aarseth 1997; Aarseth and Calleja 2015). If anything else, games have been described as inherently interactive (Crawford 1982; Ermi and Mäyrä 2005), and oftentimes in contrast to non-interactive or less interactive media such as films or books. In other words, most digital games, staged in the medium of a computer, could be described as “explicitly participational” (Manovich 2001, 71).

How then to understand the ludic paradox? How to make sense of games that barely require human agency, effort and the execution of meaningful choices, and yet ask for human attention? In other words, what to do with games that we (mostly) don’t play?

In this paper the author will investigate self-playing games through the lens of interpassivity, a concept developed by Robert Pfaller (1996, 2008, 2011) and taken over by Slavoj Žižek (1997) to describe the aesthetics of delegated enjoyment. While the interactive media invite the observer to participate productively in their reception and take over parts of the artistic effort, interpassive media take the effort of participation away. As Pfaller explains:

Interpassivity is delegated ‘passivity’ - in the sense of delegated pleasure, or delegated consumption. Interpassive people are those who want to delegate their pleasures or their consumption. Interpassive media are all the agents - machines, people, animals, etc. - to whom interpassive people can delegate their pleasures. (2017, 55)

The concept of interpassivity, originally introduced within the context of art, has travelled into many other domains, such as media studies, film studies, political science (Feustel, Koppo, Schölzel 2011); even areas as remote as marketing and business (Walz, Hingston, Andehn 2014). In video games research, interpassivity has remained virtually unnoticed. It has been mentioned as an analytical possibility to understand the avatar-player surrogate relationship through the Žižekian interpretation of Jacque Lacan (Falkowska 2011; Wilson 2003; Thorne 2016). Pfaller’s foundational work has been overlooked altogether. This contribution aims at introducing interpassivity to a wider Game Studies community, and offers an alternative perspective to reflect upon digital games in general, and self-playing games in particular. As the author will argue, with idling and other examples of games with a predominant self-play element, we have arrived at a point, where interactivity, agency, and utter absorption do not suffice anymore as predominant conceptual frameworks to talk about digital games.

References

Aarseth, E. Cybertext - Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Aarseth, E., and Calleja, 2015. “The Word Game: The ontology of an indefinable object.” In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG 2015), Pacific Grove, CA, USA, 2015. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6c85/bdd2216a56e296cdc708af0480c4a20cd21c.pdf?_ga=2.77012053.1158569559.1501311498-1466169220.1501311498. Caillois, R. Man, Play and Games. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. 1958/2001. Crawford, C. The Art of Computer Game Design. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1984. Ermi, L., and Mäyrä, F. “Fundamental components of the gameplay experience: Analysing immersion.” In Proceedings of the Digital Games Research Association Conference (DiGRA 2005), Vancouver, Canada, 2005: 15-27. Falkowska, M. “Gry wideo jako medium - podstawowe kategorie badawcze.” Kultura i Historia (Culture and History Journal), 2011. http://www.kulturaihistoria.umcs.lublin.pl/archives/2390#_ftnref14. Feustel, R., and Koppo, N., and Schölzel, H., eds. Wir sind nie aktiv gewesen. Interpassivität zwischen Kunst- und Gesellschaftskritik. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos Berlin, 2011. Huizinga, J. Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. New York: Routledge, 1949/2002: 74. Juul, J. “The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness.” In Proceedings of Digital Games Research Conference (DiGRA 2003), edited by Marinka Copier and Joost Raessens, Utrecht: Utrecht University, 2003: 30-45. Manovich, L. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001: 71. Parkin, S . “The rise of games you (mostly) don’t play.” In Gamasutra. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/237926/The_rise_of_games_you_mostly_dont_play.php. Pfaller, R. “Figuren der Erleichterung. Interpassivität heute.” In Wir sind nie aktiv gewesen. Interpassivität zwischen Kunst- und Gesellschaftskritik, edited by R. Feustel, N. Koppo, H. Schölzel, pp. 17-27. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2011. Pfaller, R. “Um Die Ecke Gelacht”, Falter 41/96, 1996, 71. Pfaller, R. Ästhetik der Interpassivität. Hamburg: Fundus, Philo Fine Arts, 2008. Pfaller, R. Interpassivity. The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2017. Salen, K., and Zimmerman, E. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. Thorne, S. “Perverse and interpassive gaming: Enjoyment and play in gamespaces.” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 22 (1), 2016, 106-113. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/pcs.2016.8. Walz, M., and Hingston, S., and Andehn, M. “The magic of ethical brands: Interpassivity and the thevish joy of delegated consumption.” Ephemera. Theory and Politics in Organisation 14 (1), 2014. http://www.ephemerajournal.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/contribution/14-1walzhingstonandehn.pdf. Wilson, L. “Interactivity or Interpassivity: a Question of Agency in Digital Play.” https://www.academia.edu/1367070/Interactivity_or_interpassivity_A_question_of_agency_in_digital_play. Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997.

ABSTRACT. We explore the ways that a collegiate esports team’s play and performance evidences micro-level shifts in learning, domain mastery and expertise through simultaneously collaborative and competitive game play. Specifically, to this aim, we evaluate how esports provide evidence of processes and practices that are important for learning-relevant trajectories in and beyond higher education. Collegiate players demonstrate decision-making, reflection and elements of individual and collaborative learning during high stakes matches. Our findings help highlight evidence of perceptual learning, as it occurs over time and through the refinement of individual and collective skills, which is demonstrated through the players’ flexibility to adapt to increasingly complex challenges. We further see evidence of task cohesion and psychological safety, which corresponded with productive risk taking and group potency (or collective self-efficacy). Players also exhibit integration of effective reflection techniques and improved task and outcome interdependence. We contend that findings underscore the importance of esports as meaningful and noteworthy learning ecologies.

ABSTRACT. My research is concerned with the ‘metagame’ practices amongst competitive Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft [Hearthstone] (Blizzard 2014) players, and seeks to explore the players’ attitude and play styles performed at live tournaments in the United Kingdom (including Insomnia Gaming Festival and local Manchester tournaments). Observations from my completed Ph.D. (Law 2016) have suggested a strong sense of community and identity amongst competitive Hearthstone players surrounded with discussion and negotiation on the game that has been in a state of constant flux due to frequent updates to the core game - hence, it should be noted that rules and regulations at live tournaments were observed to be inconsistent. Although there are standardised tournament formats in Hearthstone, these have been subject to change, as well as other tournaments that have continued to test the skills and adaptability of players, and cater towards entertaining their live streamed audiences. Therefore, using the notion of ‘metagaming’ (Boluk and LeMieux 2017), my ongoing research seeks to explore the extent of players practical and critical engagement with ‘metagame’ practices that either conform or push the boundaries of competitive gaming in the twenty-first century.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the experience of physically attending a live eSports event in Australia. Although Australia has historically been relatively absent from globalised eSports, recent international interest has seen Australia host several major popular eSports events in 2017. To fully understand the appeal of these new prominent additions to the Australian eSports landscape, we must understand what characteristics constitute an Australian eSports event and how attendees experience it within the Australian cultural context. To achieve this, a case study and grounded theory-based approach was employed. 19 semi-structured interviews with attendees at two major Australian eSports events were conducted, observations of the events conducted by the researcher and video recorded of the online event streams. The four characteristics of entertainment, education, socialisation and active support, supported by 10 axial codes were found to constitute the experience of attending a live Australian eSports event in person.

ABSTRACT. Although the concept of permadeath has only relatively recently been embraced by videogames (Chang, Constantino, & Soderman, 2017; Keogh, 2013), boardgames have offered a form of permadeath for many years, in the form of player elimination. BoardGameGeek.com defines player elimination as “when a player can be eliminated from the game and the play continues without the eliminated player.” A player who loses all their money or resources, or is permanently defeated, loses agency within the game and is unable to participate, experiencing a form of permanent exclusion or death within the game context.

ABSTRACT. As the DiGRA 2018 theme notes, games affect us by altering how we make meaning and understand ourselves. However contemporary mainstream gaming cultures demonstrate how those alterations have failed to effect true change: instead, they continue the same marginalizations in a new media context. In other words, the message of games as a medium has too often been exclusionary, and will continue to be so unless we actively work to change it. This panel presents different opportunities to do this by seizing the queer potentials of games, and ensuring that their systems do more than reinscribe unjust power dynamics. By expanding the toolbox of queer game studies, the panel contributes to transforming current heteronormative and patriarchal gaming cultures, and to imagining more inclusive and empowering alternatives. The field of queer game studies has grown exponentially in recent years, thanks in large part to groundbreaking publications such as Adrienne Shaw’s Gaming at the Edge, Queer Game Studies (Ruberg and Shaw 2017), Gaming Representation (Malkowski and Russworm 2017), and special issues of QED (Summer 2015) and Game Studies (forthcoming 2018). Yet queer game studies has historically been stuck in discussions of representation: because of the dearth of major LGBTQ characters and narratives in games, the field often focused on identifying the few existing examples and arguing for more. At its worst, this manifested as a queer game studies that limited queerness to the presence of queer characters in what Edmund Chang calls “bird-watching for queer characters” (2017, 232). While representation remains a crucial part of queer game studies, the field has recently started to explore other forms of queerness in games. Examples of this include Chang’s concept of “queergaming,” the possibility of queer controllers (Markotte 2017; Sicart 2017; Bagnall 2017), and the potentials of queer failure (Halberstam 2017; Youngblood 2017; Ruberg 2017). This panel seeks to continue these discussions, and to introduce new queer concepts for challenging normativity in games. Adrienne Shaw will present a paper titled, “What isn’t a Game?” It will unpack the drawbacks of setting down rules for what counts as a game. For example, many have dismissed indie games as not “truly” games. That the texts often under attack are those that express or represent queer subject positions or are developed by tools that make queer game production possible is unsurprising. Queerness, as a mode of boundary questioning and structural critique, is particularly suited to pushing back on assumptions that any medium or genre can or should be or mean just one thing. In mapping how games have been defined, this paper will also interrogate the unintended violence of those definitions. Bonnie Ruberg will present a paper titled “Should Queer Games Represent Queer Sex?” As queer game studies scholars like Edmond Chang have argued, video games that include LGBTQ content often do so in limited ways. For example, such games often exclude representations of queer sex, arguably pandering to the homophobia of toxic gamer cultures. Yet, queer sex has a presence in the work of LGBTQ independent game-makers. Among these, Robert Yang and Christine Love stand out for their explicit foregrounding of queer sex. Others, such as Liz Ryerson and Dietrich Squinkifer, intentionally choose not to represent queer sex. This paper draws from original interviews conducted with queer indie game-makers to address tensions between the politics of representing queer sex and deliberately refusing to do so. It moves beyond representation by addressing the question: are there elements of queer experience that video games should not represent at all? Cody Mejeur will present a paper titled, “Playing/Queering Narrative Form,” which examines how games alter our conceptions of narrative through the fluidity and variability of play. As Shira Chess argues, games demand a reconsideration of narrative because they reject heteronormative expectations of climax and catharsis that dominate other narrative media, and instead embrace a “narrative middle” that emphasizes process and open-endedness (Chess 2016, p. 88). Building on Chess’s work, this paper argues that games challenge perceptions of narrative form as static or determined, and that they instead reveal how play animates, warps, and shatters forms such as signs, interfaces, and rules. Using The Vanishing of Ethan Carter as an example, this paper demonstrates how play queers narrative forms by blurring their boundaries and exploding their structures, and suggests that narrative is a living, playful process with emergent and queer potentials. Michael Anthony DeAnda will present a paper titled, “Queering Design Research for Games.” This paper focuses on methods for conducting design research with LGBTQ audiences and then applies the findings to game design. In this context, queerness serves as a method to critically analyze normative power structures and allows for refocusing and reconsidering how we normalize identities, existences, and systems. Game design researchers must understand how surveys interpellate subjects into certain categories, which is tricky when attending to the fluidity of gender identity and sexuality. DeAnda argues that surveys may leverage folk knowledge as a means for research subjects to better present themselves and demonstrates this through his experience developing the survey and analyzing the data that informed his Alternate Reality Game, Battle Against the Bulge, which comments on idealized masculinity within the gay community. Joshua D. Savage will present a paper titled, “Dare Not Speak Its Name: (In)visible Queer Representations in Mainstream Digital Games.” Using theorists including Shapiro and Buchbinder as a lens, this paper looks at queer codings of characters in digital games that include ambiguities allowing segments of the audience to ignore or deny these representations. Examined are two mainstream console series localized from Japan to the West, Nintendo’s Fire Emblem series and Bandai Namco’s Tales Of series, identifying queer codings of the characters, how these were (or were not) translated for Western audiences, and how they have been interpreted in online commentary, including debate (and abuse) that has arisen online. The paper theorizes that coding and response are shaped by a combination of culture and psychology, where resistance to recognizing characters as queer is also a resistance to identification with different sexual orientations.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we describe narrative game design as an area for empirical research and aim to promote additional work on this area. The focus of our paper is therefore on the process. We start by discussing the relationship between the design of the narrative aspects of video games vs. non-narrative aspects and in comparison to earlier narrative media. On this basis, we identify specific challenges from the perspective of design. Then, we define "design conventions" and introduce our method for identification and verification using empirical methods. In this context, we discuss methodological issues and advocate best practices. Finally, we report on early results and outline future work.

ABSTRACT. This article uses Jacques Rancière’s notion of aesthetic regime of art and Nicholas Bourriaud’s idea of relational aesthetics to assess the role of aesthetics microtransactions in Path of Exile (2013-, Grinding Gear Games). Three main roles of aesthetics microtransactions are concerned: 1) signifiers in social, in-game interaction between players 2) awards which motivate specific practices of play and 3) tools of agency used outside the conventional play frame. The main claim of the paper is that aesthetic layer of the game, while formally disconnected, nevertheless governs the practices of play and constructs underpinnings for game’s post-release cycle.

ABSTRACT. Humor is an essential part of storytelling, but it has not been studied in the field of interactive emergent narrative. We begin with an overview of various theories of humor and use them to examine examples of humor within the digital media field. This juxtaposition aims to bring together concepts from both fields in order to find a feasible direction. We hope to contribute a framework of humor that can be used in the near future for an interactive emergent narrative project. Our conceptualization of humor frames it in terms of “pleasant surprises” which enable players and other emergent AI actors to stretch the boundaries between plot and discourse.

ABSTRACT. Video games are becoming one of the most important digital and cultural industries (Wijman, 2017). This trend is reflected by statistics. For example the population of gamers is growing, with increasing amounts of money and time being spent on this hobby (see Lenhart et al., 2008; ESA, 2016; ISFE, 2012). Of course, this significantly affects different categories of social structures, including family life. Moreover, the growing population of gamers involves children, for whom gaming is not only a leisure activity, but also a sphere of socialisation and an opportunity to establish relationships with other people. Therefore, the relationship between video games and young gamers should be taken into consideration. However, in this presentation I will not limit myself only to gamers, but expand my considerations to the family environment. As a result, this presentation will discuss the most important conclusions from a study regarding the role of video games in the life of a modern Polish family. I decided to research this issue by focusing on families that live in rural areas in Poland – from where I myself come from – to emphasize the role of personal experience in social research. As a result of the complicated reality of family life, the study employed quantitative and qualitative methods – a questionnaire survey and an interview. Such methodological triangulation [Silverman and Marvasti, 2008, p. 156-157] allowed me to capture the views and experiences of both parents and adolescents (mainly school age children). Moreover, family has multiple functions such as sexual regulations, reproduction, economic cooperation, socialisation, education or emotional support [Anastasiu, 2012]. Considering this complexity, I decided to focus on different aspects of video games presence in Polish families: the socio-demographic characteristic (including technological and cultural competencies) of young gamers and parents living in the studied families; the level of parental knowledge about video games; the issue of verbal communication between the child and the parent with regard to video games; the general role of video games in the life of a particular family and finally the role of social environment (social groups, schools, institutions) in supporting caregivers who rise young gamers. Some alarming phenomena were observed in the group of twenty-four surveyed families, particularly in the aspects of low cultural and technological competencies of parents, insufficient level of parental control, limited parent-child communication and parental involvement in gaming activities among children, as well as the lack of support from the school and other institutions, which may be important for the process of raising young gamers. In general, the observed situation might be theoretically explained by referring to the Margaret Mead’s concept of culture divided into three different types (postfigurative, cofigurative and prefigurative) (Mead, 1970) and William Ogburn’s idea of cultural lag (Ogburn, 1922). This presentation will be an attempt to deepen the analysis of the impact that video games have on the family environment. This is particularly important due to the growing popularity of this medium as well as its specificity, which makes games notably different from non-interactive media, which can be unclear to or disregarded by older generations of parents, educators and teachers. Unfortunately, such negligence was observed among the surveyed parents, including families of kids who were significantly involved in gaming. I also hope that my presentation will demonstrate some complexity of this subject and draw your attention to the problems of a group that seems to be underestimated in the field of game studies, namely country dwellers, who often face the problem of limited access to knowledge and institutions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anastasiu, I. (2012). The social functions of the family. In: “Euromentor Journal - Studies about education” 2, p. 133-139. ESA. (2016). Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry 2016. Online: http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Essential-Facts-2016.pdf [30.01.2018]. ISFE. (2012). Videogames in Europe: 2012 Consumer Study. Online: http://www.isfe.eu/sites/isfe.eu/files/attachments/euro_summary_-_isfe_consumer_study.pdf [30.01.2018]. Lenhart, A., Kahnei, J., Middaugh, E., Macgill Rankin, A., Evans, C., Vitak, J. (2008). Teens, Video Games, and Civics. Online: http://www.pewinternet.org/files/old-media/Files/Reports/2008/PIP_Teens_Games_and_Civics_Report_FINAL.pdf.pdf [30.01.2018]. Mead, M. (1970). Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap. New York: Natural History Press. Ogburn, W. (1922). Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature. New York: Huebsch. Silverman, D., Marvasti, A. (2008). Doing Qualitative Research: A Comprehensive Guide. London: SAGE. Wijman, T. (2017). New Gaming Boom: Newzoo Ups Its 2017 Global Games Market Estimate to $116.0Bn Growing to $143.5Bn in 2020. Online: https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/new-gaming-boom-newzoo-ups-its-2017-global-games-market-estimate-to-116-0bn-growing-to-143-5bn-in-2020/ [30.01.2018].

ABSTRACT. This study takes the alternative history video game 1988 as the locus, probes into how video game works as an crucial yet overlooked agent in digital activism in the context of post-Umbrella-Movement Hong Kong.

Once an international media spectacle, Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement in late 2014 is now crystalized as a crucial moment in the city’s turbulent pursuit to democracy and political liberty. The movement, while witnessing a new generation of disobedient citizens pouring to street occupation, also instilled an overwhelming sense of failure among its participants without so much as an official statement from the Chinese government. Worse yet, Hong Kong’s political situation keeps exacerbating in multiple frontiers ever since, which contradicted the initial faith in the movement to bring about tangible change.

Avid participants made efforts to learn from the failure and become able to project onto a future where political actions could make (or preserve) a Hong Kong that they want. Among them, Cheng Lap (鄭立), an independent game designer slash a vocal political activist, developed a couple of “alternative history” games, and distributed them on Internet as a political action. These games boldly envisage a Hong Kong independent from China’s regime through overt struggle with hegemonic power. Considering the current political climate in Hong Kong, where anything relevant to autonomy, liberty, and independence would be interpreted as separatist violence, producing such a game is inherently an dissident act.

This study selects his 2015 production 1988 (光輝歲月) as the research subject. Marketed as “the most local video game” and based on “our collective memory”, 1988 generated an alternative history starting from 10 years prior to Hong Kong’s handover to China. With hindsight of current political dilemma, Cheng believes the cause of the problem lies in Hong Kong’s golden age, and 1988 is the last opportunity to rewrite history. In this mixture of AVG and visual novel, player assumes the role a female teenage immigrant from Mainland China, who would meet various Hong Kong cultural, social and political figures (real and fictional) as her friends, teachers and enemies. All together these characters could change Hong Kong’s future (present in reality) through countless street fights and life choices, beating the hegemonic power that is the collaboration of Chinese Communist Party and Hong Kong real estate tycoons.

Since its inception, 1988 was made to be “more than a game”, but also a constructive cultural agent enabling players to understand the forgotten history of contemporary Hong Kong and contemplate on how to change current situation. Not only the story, the character and the promos in the game is infused with political symbols, the production and reception of 1988 is also imbued with collective political rapport, which is most apparent to see in the online interaction among the producers and players of 1988 on social media.

Following game scholar DeKoven’s (1978) starting point, I regard 1988 as both an cultural artifact and social community of engaged players. Therefore, this study explores two layers of “Hong Kongness” brought by 1988. The first one is the good old yet fictional Hong Kong constructed in the game with abundant visual and linguistic elements; the second is the online community built around 1988, where players and designers enthusiastically construct a should-be Hong Kong, and where playing 1988 itself is recognized as a progressive political act of being real Hong Kongers. Methodologically, this study first takes a close reading of the game world in 1988, including the textual and visual contents of the game and their references, the texture and the style and the level design, etc. Then, I’d like to combine my own gameplay experience as Hong Kong resident with a mainland China background together with Hong Kong youtuber’s broadcasted gameplays, to explore the strategies, motives and actions 1988 enables its players to take. And a discourse analysis of social discourses generated around 1988, sources including 1988 Facebook page and the discussion session of the official 1988 website, both are constantly updated by users with heated discussion of political affairs. Last but not least, the linkage between the game world and the social community is analyzed, for instance, I look into how the Cheng Lap and his team update the game with suggestion and even resources contributed by players.

Through the above analysis the text and context in and beyond 1988, this study examines how, by simulating and reconstructing history, 1988 actively builds and disseminates an identity myth, Hong Kong local, as a emerging nationality in a highly politicized society.

In a young-generation-led social movement such as Umbrella and its successors, digital activism becomes a common mean to beak into established discourse, generates previously overlooked power. Playfulness, creativity and avid political action are brewed together, hence competent to deliver the message in the private sphere. In the case of 1988, video game, and alternative history genre in particular, creatively captured a complex emotion and anxiety of Hong Kongers’ projection onto the past, the present and the future. The game both commentates on the social turbulence players experience in everyday life and becomes a part of that turbulence.

ABSTRACT. This presentation focuses on representation, performance and quantification in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. The first part draws on Mitchell and Snyder’s work on disability as 'narrative prosthesis' (2000) in order to analyse disability and ability in the game-as-played. Questions are raised about the protagonist, Adam Jensen, who manages to be normate (Thomson 1997) and abject at the same time. Part two turns to Adam Jensen’s issues with happiness, and a consideration of discourses that conflate happiness with productivity while constructing disability as antipathetic to goal attainment.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the white normative figure under duress, through videogames that present a crisis in American narratives of progress: The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013), set in a melancholic post-apocalyptic U.S.; and Tomb Raider (Crystal Dynamics, 2013), a reboot of the now-classic Lara Croft narrative that recasts the heroine as desperate and far from invincible. Using key concepts from critical whiteness studies, popular panics around the demographic shifts in the U.S. away from a white majority, and Richard Dyer’s theorizations, I show how "making whiteness strange" can decouple it from the normative, and rescue it from unattainable ideals and self-annihilating tendencies. Running the gauntlet between representing universal humanity and traumatized victimhood, whiteness in games takes a beating within a fraught Post-9/11 and Post-Obama moment of national transition. Through critical analysis of identity politics around whiteness in video games, larger cultural stakes are revealed.

ABSTRACT. This paper considers cities in single-player fantasy role-playing games, identifying recurring tropes in terms of the spatial functions by which they shape the player’s lived experience of the gameworld. The functions of centring, demarcation of inside and outside, movement and encounter will be considered, both in terms of the spatial organizations determining them, and in terms of the spatial practices they give rise to. The analysis shall be anchored in a close engagement with a number of representative titles, including Baldur’s Gate, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Dragon Age: Origins, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and The Witcher III: The Wild Hunt.

ABSTRACT. This paper will examine a detective games as a corpus to understand the relationship between gameplay and storytelling in games. Detective fiction is a narrative genre that is already playful by teasing the reader to figure out the solution to the mystery before they get to the end. By exploring the narrative nature of detective games, how detective stories have been turned into games (digital and non-digital), and how genre expectations and conventions shape gameplay, we can gain a better understanding of the integration between gameplay and narrative. Contradictory as it may sound, this paper uses inductive methods to infer general approaches to game narrative by concentrating on a specific corpus of stories and games. It is not within the scope of this paper to cover all aspects of game narrative, nor go into all the implications deriving from the comparison. Rather, this paper will be limited exploring two key aspects to demonstrate the kinds of insight that we can gain through this method.

ABSTRACT. The main focus of the presentation is the phenomenon of the abandoned MMO games. The special emphasis will be put on both the process of transformation of the MMO world into an abandoned one, and the outcome of this process, analysing not only the MMO as a space of exploration but also the ontology of the MMO as a digital artefact. To better explore the problem, I will use premises of Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Tadeusz Kantor’s concept of the poor object and theoretical works about exploration of modern ruins. My research will be based on autoethnographical study of Meridian 59 and analysis of paratexts created by the players, such as in-game message board, blog posts, YouTube videos, and reddit comments.

ABSTRACT. Studies have repeatedly observed the comical excess in the so-called classic adventure game genre. The hacker humor of the original Adventure (Jerz 2007; Lessard 2013), the technical jokes of the subsequent text-adventure era (Yorke-Smith 2002; Montfort 2003), the witty design of later point-and-click adventures (Fernández-Vara 2009; Black 2012) and the self-reflexive parody that oversees the evolution of the genre to our days (Bonello Rutter Giappone 2015) have all been mapped out throughout the years. But why is this comic excess, in its various and diverse forms, typical of the classic adventure game genre in particular? Moreover, what are its implications for adventure game thematics and sensitive themes such as sexuality in general? This paper sets out to answer the first question and thence hypothesize answers to the second questions through the following chain of argumentation:

Premise 1: The nature of challenge in classic adventure games is heavily reliant on puzzles. Premise 2: Puzzles and jokes operate on similar structural principles. Conclusion: Since classic adventure games rely on puzzles, and puzzles resonate with humor, it is logical for the designers to favor humor as a thematic component.

Our understanding of the classic adventure game, in concert with the previously cited scholars and many others (e.g. Pias 2004; Douglass 2007; Salter 2010), grounds the genre’s specific challenge in the structure of puzzles. Hence, we do not discuss Premise 1 further here but accept it as an established assumption in the present context.

The principal contribution of this article lies in providing a reasonable theoretical basis for Premise 2. Here, our point of departure is a wide-ranging review of puzzle theory, from those of early riddles (Kaivola-Bregenhøj 1996; Pagis 1996) and analog puzzles (Bryant 1983; Danesi 2002) to the modern fiction puzzles of videogames (Crawford 1984; Karhulahti 2013). A unifying factor in these is the dual nature of the structure of such puzzles, one side being open to exploration and observation, and the other to be accessed via deduction and interpretation. Pagis (1996) offers a summary:

"Every riddle contains two parts of unequal length: the encoded text and revealed solution. These parts are opposites that seek to unite, thus eliminating the tension of opposition between them. The riddle, however, exists for the sake of that very tension, which reflects the social tension, the contest between riddler and riddlee. ... The moment the riddle is completed, it also ceases to exist." (83–84)

Interestingly, as an elaboration of this structure, Danesi (2002) tentatively suggests that the “puzzle instinct is comparable to what might be called our instinct for humor” (35). In agreement with the analogy, Karhulahti (2013) proposes that puzzles in videogames tend to be “supporting the game’s fanciful themes [and] a thematic coherence with the narrative is vital for a strengthening effect to take place” (214).

The structural components of the above puzzle theories are largely consistent with those of humor and jokes. For instance, the recurring pattern of a set-up followed by a surprise, delivered through a striking and sudden contrast – even the popular ‘rule of three’ structurally pivots on one turning-point (see Double, 2005, 207-8). Likewise, the standard ‘Pull Back and Reveal’ formula depends on a surprise or turnaround, uncovered in the punch-line (see Stewart Lee 2010, 197). Puns and other kinds of wordplay also depend upon a highlighted incongruity, but often tend to resolve this in a surprising convergence, a pleasing seeming coincidence that is shown, finally, to confirm appropriateness and coherence (see Attridge 1988, 201), where the two terms might be revealed to have more in common than expected at first. In these cases, where the joke ends in resolution, the ‘satisfaction’ that comes at the end of the joke-structure (Zupančič 2008, 136-137) bears significant comparison with the completion of the riddle that ‘ceases to exist’, in Pagis’ terms.

The above-shown structural resonance between puzzles and humor rationalizes the classic adventure game’s comical treatment of its themes: since the players (and designers) of the genre appear to enjoy puzzle solving, they should also value the hermeneutic resolutions of the comic.

The above finding also paves the way for an advanced comprehension of what is persistently addressed as gaming’s general “lack of seriousness” – though it suggests, alongside this, the possibility of a more critical approach through comedy too (cf. Flanagan 2009). With specific reference to the classic adventure game and its thematic treatment of sexuality, our examples explicitly foreground both humor and sexuality. We suggest that the theme of sexuality (in puzzle-heavy adventures generally and our examples particularly) tends to be brought to the fore through humor: thematically given comic treatment inhabiting the puzzle-riddle-joke structure. Our examples are 2064: Read Only Memories (MidBoss 2015, 2017), the Deponia series (Daedalic Entertainment 2012-2016), the Leisure Suit Larry series (Sierra Entertainment/High Voltage Software/Team17/Replay Games 1987-2013), and Leather Goddesses of Phobos (Infocom 1986).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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