“Avatar theory,” or the study of avatars and related phenomena (player figures, playable characters, player-controlled components, etc.) is continuously expanded as scholars dive deeper into the configurations of interaction with and within digital games and the worlds they project. The topic has been approached from a variety of perspectives, ranging from theoretical investigations rooted in phenomenology (Klevjer, 2007; Vella, 2015; Kania, 2017) and game design (Jørgensen, 2013; Willumsen, 2018) to theatre and puppetry (Blanchet, 2008; Westecott, 2009; Georges, 2012) and player engagement (Linderoth, 2005; Bayliss, 2007; Lankoski, 2011), to name a few. Research from psychological and social-scientific angles (Waggoner 2009; Ducheneaut et al 2009; Yee 2014) has also considered the significance of avatarial engagement on personal and social identities. At the same time, the term has been criticized for being a cultural appropriation of a Hindu object of worship (de Wilt et al., 2019), and the expansive nature of the avatar, as indicated by the great diversity in theories, suggest that it might be time to organize existing theories to be able to compare and discuss whether and how the term can be productively used in future studies of digital games.

Thus, the workshop will bring together different researchers interested in exploring the avatar and related concepts, to examine, compare, and debate the uses and applications of the different approaches and how the community of scholars studying games may best handle the present challenges to avatar theory.

Guided by the pragmatism of the feminist eco-humanities, this workshop will deploy theories and consider methods (Hamilton and Taylor 2017) to politicize ways of conceptualizing, designing, and organizing games for agency beyond human centrism. How can critical game scholars address and advocate for more inclusive, democratic, and sustainable forms of play, understood as performative outcomes of an array of interdependencies between humans, environments and non-human entities? As an artistic and economic expression of the mediated technicity of our current age, videogames crystalize the conundrum of individual agency that has beset our screens and bedevilled our politics. Videogames also embed critiques of this conundrum that are often ambivalent but occasionally trenchant. How can critical game scholarship on post-human agency intervene in pressing debates about persuasive technologies’ manipulation of human volition and its long shadow over the mechanisms and institutions of collective decision-making that constitute democracy?

The game centres of urban Japan in the latter third of the 20th century were the sites of convergence of a playful urbanism with a new design culture, the emerging game industry. This workshop welcomes proposals for work from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives on the social, cultural and industrial histories of the game centre and arcade game industries in Japan from the 1960s to the early 1990s. We are especially interested in design history and urban studies perspectives.

Gameplay design patterns were introduced as a game design approach in the early 2000s (Kreimeier 2002; Holopainen and Björk 2003; Björk, Lundgren, & Holopainen 2003) with the first major pattern collection published in 2004 (Björk and Holopainen 2004). Since then the approach has gained some momentum in both academia and industry with considerable variation in the details and aims (e.g., Björk and Holopainen, 2006; Barney 2020; FDG Workshop on Design Patterns for Games series.) The authors are planning to release an open access anthology collecting various patterns approaches to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Patterns in Game Design (Björk and Holopainen 2004). The authors are running a series of workshops for developing the contents for the anthology and this would be the first one.

This 2-hour hybrid workshop aims to address the challenges that game educators have faced during the recent lockdowns due to worldwide COVID19 regulations, and invites them to share the creative solutions, newly invented practices and novel insights that they may have derived from having to teach their game design courses online.

The workshop will consist of two parts: in the first half the workshop coordinators and a number of selected participants will provide 5-10 minute presentations. The second half of the workshop will focus on further dialogue between participants, with smaller groups dedicated to discussing the challenges they have faced during their game courses, as well as solutions, practices and novel insights they may have gathered on those aspects.

Participants are requested to provide short biographical information, explaining their interests and their level of knowledge about this topic, and if possible also 2-3 examples of challenges, solutions and/or insights they consider relevant to share in this session. The workshop is open to everyone working in this field or interested in the topic. Participants who have submitted examples of their own experiences in advance may be invited to give a short presentation at the start of the workshop

The major objective of this workshop is sharing of ideas and experiences, which will ideally lead to a collective publication in which we will present our insights to the broader game community. In this publication, we hope to come up with a number of suggestions about practices of game education that originated during lockdown, but that have also proven to be useful in post-pandemic times.

Like other disciplines, game studies is also compelled to confront the impact of the Anthropocene on the production, circulation, and reception of video games: in the economic, material and technological dimension (environmental crisis, biodegradation, material shortages); in the sphere of the political and social economy (collapse of specific consumerist forms and social structures, global migration, environmental impact on societies); and in the cultural dimension (what game texts say about the human relationship with the planet and other species and how they do that, how game-related practices are entangled with the Anthropocenic processes and phenomena). To illuminate these issues, and more, the workshop seeks presentations engaging the various intersections of video games and the Anthropocene.

The aim of this workshop is to critically scrutinize the relationship between digital games and national cultures. We would like to consider the presence of nationalistic game-related rhetoric in traditional media and on digital platforms, as well as the influence of the national cultures over game design practices and game content (e.g. due to both legal restrictions and ideological influence). For this purpose, we identify “national culture” as official cultural policy of the nation-state. This encompasses but is not limited to: official symbols such as the flag, the coat of arms and the anthem; the geography as divided by state borders; the history as presented in schools and public sphere; the literary and artistic cannon; the state-sanctioned language dialect; the officially cultivated ethos; the national stereotypes allowed in the public sphere; and all other cultural factors forming the basis for the imagined national community (Anderson 2006, Bhabha 2013), national mythologies and invented traditions (Hobsbawm  1994, Zubrzycki 2011) and practices of low-key, banal nationalism (Billig 1995, Edensor 2002).

This Diversity Working Group workshop will promote current and emerging research on diversity in game studies, including but not limited to race, gender, sexuality, class, caste, disability, nationality, decoloniality, and other related topics. Workshop presenters will share their work with an audience of colleagues and experts, and participants will discuss current trends and network to better support diverse work in game studies. Presenters and participants will also help guide future initiatives and planning for the DiGRA Diversity Working Group, and will have the opportunity to propose new projects and collaborations.

Research on games is a relatively new field, but still sufficiently established that the original trailblazers now are well-established researchers and scholars, swamped by university and community service, with major responsibilities to students, colleagues, organisations, employers, and society. Simultaneously this group is still so young that there are very few true seniors, emeriti professors, who might act as inspiration and support for scholars deeply embedded in the wide range of activities of an academic who is the most senior in their field at their institution. In the time-poor lives of senior academics, inspiration, innovation, and space for further growth is rare and precious, and this workshop aims at finding ways to share the tips and tricks our fellows use.

Game design is a process used for creating games. Some authors create games by using as a reference another well-done game and adjusting its metaphor (Battistella & Wangenheim, 2016). However, such games lack detailed information related to the method used and the way the method was implemented for creating the new game incorporating emotional design (Gomez, 2010; Marfisi-Schottman et al., 2010; Ahmad et al., 2014; Zin et al., 2009; Morales, 2015). We propose the Metaphor-based Game Design (MBGD) as a method for creating games by changing the metaphor of an existing game and creating a new game with a new theme (Begy, 2010). Such a method was represented by using the quintessence kernel including a description of the practices, activities, work products, activity spaces, game design phases, roles, and competencies required for accomplishing the method activities (Henao,2019). In addition, MBGD comprises an emotional design by incorporating the emotional transition pattern graph (ETPG) based on narrative events (Kim & Doh, 2016).

As global media industries continue their push towards “metaverses” of persistent, real-time networked 3D environments, game engines and their attendant data infrastructures are becoming increasingly entangled throughout our media ecosystem. In response, engine development companies such as Epic Games and Unity Technologies are investing more money and development labor to integrate databases, file formats, web protocols, and translational algorithms into their engines to allow media platforms to share data and media assets seamlessly. Some of these efforts are institutional: Epic and Unity, for example, have spent billions acquiring technology companies that can enhance easy asset portability across platforms, including photogrammetry company Quixel and Weta Digital’s tech division, respectively. Other efforts are technological: graphics company NVIDIA’s “Universal Screen Description” (USD) file formats promise interoperability among various 3D design platforms, including game engines, VR/XR renderers, and web-based spatial graphical interfaces. NVIDIA has described these hybrid technical-institutional partnerships as constructing the “plumbing” of the metaverse (NVIDIA 2020). Our focus on “plumbing” mobilizes games researchers to interpret and intervene in the techniques, technologies, and practices that enable massive real-time 3D digital spaces to flow and transact. Interrogating these platforms through the problematic of “plumbing,” this workshop invites games researchers to understand how digital systems are designed to regulate technical interoperability, to map how power and capital become centralized and distributed throughout the back end of the metaverse, and to politicize how social practices and subjectivities are negotiated through technological architecture. The workshop will be structured around presentations of position papers around the following themes: (1) Realism—how race, gender, orientation, and ability will be computationally rendered; (2) Platforms—how game engines undergird the metaverse’s assemblage of play as sociotechnical tools that consolidate power; (3) Vignettes of metaverses as an exercise in future-thinking as a counterpoint to corporate prognostications of the metaverse. 

After the workshop day of the conference, we invite you to blow off some steam in a place well-known to all regulars of Kraków game studies conferences: Cybermachina pub at Stolarska 11. There you can either chill out over drinks (that’s on us!), or play one of multiple digital games available, solo or with friends. 

Due to the limited space the attendance might be limited as well: please check availability and register for the event at the reception desk!