ABSTRACT. As artefacts, gameworlds are designed and developed to fulfil certain functional and creative objectives. Players infer these purposes and aspirations from various aspects of their engagement with games. Based on their socio-cultural background, their sensitivities, gameplay preferences, and game literacy, they construct a subjective interpretation of the intentions of the creators of the game. In analogy to Wayne C. Booth’s notion of the implied author, we will call the figure to which players ascribe those intentions ‘the implied designer’. In this paper, we introduce the notion of the implied (game) designer and present an initial account of the way players ascribe meaning to gameworlds and act within them based on what they perceive to be the intentions of the implied designer of the game.

ABSTRACT. This paper interrogates how the videogame medium produces an engrossing and complex spectatorial experience, consistently challenging the user’s dimension of engagement. A reflexive analysis of the Witcher III: Wild Hunt (2016) encompasses a principal methodology; considering how play, spectatorship, and engagement merge into one. This paper homes in on how narrative directions and choices manipulate the will of the player, facilitated by preconceived and ongoing spectatorial influences. Semiotics, narratology, cinematography, ludology, and focalization theories fortify a conclusion that deconstructs the inherent fallacy present in narrative-based ludic choices, uncovering that their presence is a more an upholding of an inherent hegemonic structure and its boundaries.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I seek to highlight the various ways in which the work of feminist technoscience scholar Donna Haraway has been read and used in game studies discourses, and to contrast this with the ways in which she herself has commented on videogames—our field’s object of study. I argue that Haraway’s “metaphoric cyborg” (Hayles 1999, 115) has been used mostly in its role as a utopian figure that takes pleasure in transgressing boundaries, rather than as a being that is fully complicit in the militaristic and patriarchal systems of oppression present in cybernetic technologies. The fact that the techno-optimistic aspects of her work are so clearly favored over the pessimistic ones is a sign of game studies’ more general tendency to avoid investigating how videogames participate in systems of oppression—a tendency that she herself has explicitly rejected (cf. Haraway and Nakamura 2003).

ABSTRACT. This paper explores how the deep but often unseen link between reverse colonization and overtly imperialistic storytelling has continued into such newer narrative media as the videogame, particularly examining how Mass Effect: Andromeda embodies both the genres of imperial adventure stories as well as reverse colonization fiction. In doing so, it argues for a critique of the Mass Effect games as following a tradition of science fiction that continues from the nineteenth century to current times, that remediates the logic of colonialism across newer media, whether it is in television series and films such as Star Trek or more recently, in videogames.

ABSTRACT. In 2019, I embarked in a Art & Games World Tour in order to decentralize myself and my curatorial and artistic practice to promote voices and creations that have been placed on the margins of the hegemonic West. By choosing to travel, meet and interview game developers with a queer, feminist and decolonial focus, I wanted to go to the edge of the margins, to hear and make heard voices from the margins of their society in Global South countries. If marginalized populations are not looking for representations in the media according to Adrienne Shaw, it is often because when these representations are present, they are only caricatures and it is up to the content producers to take in charge the representation issue by offering more diversity. My Art & Games World Tour on the margins plans to focus on content producers who offer counter-fictions to elaborate a "counter-hegemony" in the face of the dominant powers.

ABSTRACT. The present paper discusses questions related to the histories of videogames, more specifically about how we approach videogames in Global South. By using Zeebo, a Brazilian console produced in the late 2000s as an epistemic tool, I discuss the limitations of universalist, mainstream-centric epistemological models for exploring videogames as cultural phenomena. By investigating Zeebo’s discourses about piracy, I argue that this platform can be seen as a partial decolonial project, destabilising conventional historical narratives about South-North relationships in videogames, but refraining from challenging a mainstream, Global North oriented epistemology. This exploratory work, therefore, elaborates on how a decolonial project of history of videogames, one that is more epistemically just to Global South, can be sought.

ABSTRACT. My proposal focuses on the analysis of a specific aspect of these reframing processes: the changes in play spatial and temporal boundaries which took place in Japan since the late ‘70s, in relation to the evolution of game systems (arcades, home consoles) and the transformation of play contexts (theme parks, entertainment districts, arcade venues). This proposal is part of a broader in-progress research period in Japan, dedicated to the analysis of the Japanese historical dynamics that contributed to the global development of ludicization. In the presentation, I will investigate how the historical changes in Japanese play contexts and boundaries since the ‘70s challenged the traditional play frames and perceived separatedness, leading to forms of autonomous playscapes, which will contribute to the rise of pervasive and interstitial play. To do so, I will discuss specifically the evolution of arcade venues, modern entertainment districts, theme parks and the home console boom.

ABSTRACT. Video games are now recognized as an important part of our culture and history. However, this redefinition of the cultural value of video games has received scant academic attention. In this paper I explore the transformation video games have, and are undergoing by: 1) drawing on the event of the first excavation searching for video game history in the Alamogordo Landfill in New Mexico and 2) interviews with collection and exhibition experts in charge of video games in two U.S. museums: MoMA, New York and MADE, Oakland. Results explore how video games have gone from trash to treasure as exemplified by the excavation of the 1982 Atari game E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. As video games enter museums they become valued using traditional western ideals on how cultural heritage is defined, based on ideals of age, materiality, monumentality, and aesthetics. Yet, the interactivity imperative of video games makes new evaluation structures relevant.

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on how a games’ characters and story reflect changing cultural norms in the period during which a game series was developed and released. This is done through qualitative evaluation of the Dragon Age series (2009-2014) and compared to two other game franchises with similar release dates and production location: the Mass Effect Trilogy (2007-2012) and the Uncharted series (2007-2017). Stories reflect cultural and societal norms of the periods and places that crafted them, providing a unique avenue of second-person stories, containing bits and pieces of their creators and their sociocultural biases. Using these digital games as artifacts and texts of focus, a change in social and cultural values and norms of modern society appears when evaluating and comparing the content of previous games in a series to the current ones, as these works reflect the environment in which they were created.

ABSTRACT. Through this extended abstract, we attempt to critically examine animal ethics in digital games by firstly describing the history of relationships between animal ethics and anthropocentric culture of humans. It will be continued by examination of digital games’ expressive capabilities (Mayra, 2008; Bogost, 2010), followed by analysing different animals’ representations in digital games, and finally making assessments.

Our motivation is rooted on prevalent issues of cultural hegemony in digital games culture (Font et al, 2007) where digital games are construed around ideologies of certain groups of society which would later be imposed on others (Winner, 1986; Bogost, 2010). Through this extened abstract, we would like to bring a discussion that cultural hegemony is an interspecies phenomenon.

ABSTRACT. By looking at both art games and innovative game play as social sculptures, this short essay traces the overlap between computer games and the art historical background of social practice art in order to rethink the social potential of games and play through analysis of Molleindustria’s art games and the innovative play in Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo EPD, 2020). It continues the discussion of how games can raise social consciousness (Frasca 2001), reveal social reality (Galloway 2004), alter social imaginary (Kirkpatrick 2013), and goes further to demonstrate how computer games can penetrate into society and be exercised for social betterment, performing as “social sculptures”. In so doing, it not only opens up a new perspective to justify computer games as art, but also provides a new way to reassess the social value of games and play.

ABSTRACT. Speedrunners challenge and reconfigure the relationship between developer and player by radically circumventing boundaries set in place to organize the user experience within a game. In this paper, we address the potential of speedrunners’ actions to deterritorialize and reterritorialize videogames. We explore this by analyzing the relationship between player, developer, videogame text and the online platforms on which speedruns are typically shared, as a form of assemblage. We conduct textual analysis of a number of videos of speedruns contained in the YouTube series Devs React to Speedruns (IGN, 2019-2020), as well as the Developer Commentaries series made available through the popular Games Done Quick video on demand website (Games Done Quick, 2014-2020).

ABSTRACT. This paper examines cultural and economic behavior on live streaming platform Twitch.tv, and the monetization of live streamers’ content production. We explore a seven-part typology of monetization extant on Twitch: subscribing, donating and “cheering,” advertising, sponsorships, competitions and targets, unpredictable rewards for viewers, and the implementation of games into channels themselves. We explore each, considering how streamers use the affordances of the platform to earn income, and invent their own methods and techniques to further drive monetization. In doing so, we look to consider the particular kinds of governance and infrastructure manifested on Twitch: specifically how rules, norms, and regulations of Twitch influence and shape the cultural content produced and consumed. Examining Twitch via monetization will thus advance our understanding of the platform, its users, and their behaviours; methodologically, we draw on over 100 interviews with successful live streamers, and extensive ethnographic data from live events and online Twitch broadcasts.

ABSTRACT. We argue that small streamers face challenges unique to their position in the livestreaming ecosystem and that their lived experience merits attention from researchers. Our complete findings are too large to communicate here, so we have decided to focus on one recurring theme: Fatigue. This theme was apparent throughout our interviews, our survey data and dovetailed with our autoethnographic data. The vast majority of streamers we interviewed spoke to us about the increasing and ever-present fatigue that is instilled by the affiliate and partnership programs streamers are enrolled into. Our findings show that this fatigue is also exacerbated by harassment and systemic inequalities that target women, neuroatypical individuals, disabled people, queer folks and people of colour at exponentially higher rates.

ABSTRACT. Toxic behaviours such as harassment and verbal aggression are deeply rooted in competitive games today. While these behaviours have been shown to have a detrimental impact on community engagement, little is known about its presence in game cheating communities, where players with avid interest in cheating go to hone their skills. In this paper, we carried out interviews with 27 users from Counter-Strike’s cheating community. We offer a refined taxonomy of toxic behaviours seen inside the community using grounded theory. We discuss the socio-technical implications of the wide-ranging toxic behaviours, including the new types that pose a cyber threat on target users. Our work facilitates an extended understanding of toxicity situated in the wider gamer culture.

ABSTRACT. The global game industry can - amongst other methods of subdivision - be divided into regional industries, and the size of companies. To understand the industry as a whole, we approach these sub-parts from different perspectives: We invite researchers and professionals, who illuminate and discuss their respective regional game industries and their own areas of expertise. The aim of this panel is to understand game production inter-regionally, and inter-professionally.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract presents the research process, aims and first results of a literature review of publications on game design. In an ongoing study, proceedings of three major game conferences were carefully analyzed for distinct principles and aspects of game design. The main objective is to provide a holistic perspective on the state of a research area which is rapidly growing and transforming. Single sources were added to the pool of reviewed publications to account for multidisciplinary overlaps between game design and other fields of research. Publications were furthermore screened for research gaps to create an overview of undiscovered topics. The aim is to give an exhaustive taxonomy of game design research publications as well as research gaps. Key research areas we identify are; design aims, design process, serious games, forms of representation, character design, game design taxonomy and ontology, gameplay, gamification, narratology, social interactions in play and game analysis.

ABSTRACT. This study aims to explore the way in which entertainment digital games are used as spaces for political persuasion in electoral campaigns, employing the use of Fortnite (Epic Games, 2017) during Joe Biden’s campaign for the 2020 U.S. presidential election as a case study. In the field of game studies, digital games have been defined as cultural artifacts full of meaning that can be used to persuade specific audiences in specific situations. The study of persuasive communication related to games is mostly focused, however, on the use of serious games. Studies on the use of digital entertainment games as spaces for persuasive communication, particularly as tools for political marketing, are still scarce. This paper approaches the understanding of this phenomenon from a holistic perspective, using qualitative mixed methods to answer the research question: How is political marketing, and specifically electoral propaganda actions, integrated into entertainment digital games?

ABSTRACT. Based on discussions of existing research and qualitative studies of forum discussions and player interviews, this paper investigates ludo-political mergers in game culture: areas in which the playful and ludic aspects of games and game culture interact with political ideologies, values, attitudes, and topics.

ABSTRACT. It has been more than a decade since digital newsgames received their substantiative research (Sicart 2008) and public attention (Bogost et al. 2012). Not only have the games experienced a season of blossoming and dwindling, but they’ve even been subject to the retrospective examination by one of their original champions (Bogost, 2020). Newsgames, for all their promised opportunity, were evidently swept in the howling wind of gamification (Deterding et al, 2011) and similar exuberance for games to address a variety of challenges in everyday society. As that dust settles, the heartiest elements of adding games to everything from workout routines (Oh and Yang, 2010) to scientific research (Von Ahn and Dabbish, 2008), have revealed some specific characteristics about what lasts in ludic explanations (Lopezosa et al, 2021) and what does not (Callan et al. 2015).

ABSTRACT. As game narratives enter a renaissance, evidenced by an interdisciplinary flowering of narrative across genres, technologies and disciplines (Hyvärinen 2010), industry and research have responded with increased focus on the importance of storytelling in games. Game development pedagogy, however, has yet to embrace the importance of game writing. One of the few dedicated game writing curricula is at University of Skövde, Sweden, which has a twenty-years long history in game development curriculum. As the Game Writing program has grown since its establishment in 2012, it has become one of the most popular programs at the university, attracting roughly four times the applicants for available slots. Now the curriculum is entering its first revision. In this paper we share details of curriculum design and make a case for game writing curricula within game development programs.

ABSTRACT. Computer games have come a long way in terms of being considered a creative practice, even an art form. Apart from dedicated festivals, also established electronic art institutions have embraced computer games. Previously separate practices of computer games and interactive art (Wilson 2008; Leino 2013) are slowly converging. However, I argue that this has been possible only because a fundamental conflict ‘built in’ to computer games as a “medium” (cf. Sharp 2015), between the artist and the player, has been conveniently overlooked. The game artist wants to express themselves through their creations, while the player wants a new instrument to play (with). Apart from either side compromising on their interests, there is no reconciliation in sight; hence the “tragedy”.

ABSTRACT. Realism has been a very vague and broad concept and term regarding videogames. While many related concepts are often subject of study, like representation, presence, historical accuracy, or immersion, there still is no language that can be used to talk about realism in a productive and precise manner. However, the term and concept have been discussed and analyzed in art history and some language exists in that field. This paper reviews perspectives on realism in art theory and analyzes their applicability to videogames. The result is a concept of counterfeit realism, the quality of how well an artwork resists inquiry of its particular properties. The artwork can be said to be realistic to the degree to which the inquiry is unable to detect the artwork as a representation.

ABSTRACT. This paper compares the concepts of the ludic and the critical, describing their similarities and differences from a critical and philosophical perspective. It argues that the rise of the ludic is displacing the importance of the critical and that the playful attitude toward life increasingly manages, contains, and diffuses the power of the critical attitude. This paper argues for retaining the importance of the critical over the ludic and bringing the former to bear on the latter.

ABSTRACT. The proposed paper will offer a close analysis of two video games - Anno 2070 (Related Designs/Blue Byte, 2011) and Fate of the World: Tipping Point (Red Redemption, 2011) - that thematize one of the timeliest challenges of our time: climate change. Both titles explicitly foreground the dramatic transformations of the planet as a result of climate change, but they do not necessarily help raise awareness of the phenomenon. By looking at three interconnected layers of game signification – narrative (narrative analysis), game graphics (visual analysis), and rules (procedural rhetoric) – the presentation seeks to see whether – and if so, to what extent – the selected video games suffer from the dissonance between the thematic preoccupation with global warming as expressed in narrative and visuals and the procedural rhetoric, which ideally should compel the players to reflect on the phenomenon.

ABSTRACT. Sustainability is a topic of concern in the design of modern cities. In the interest of evaluating how popular media may reflect this value, we modified an indicator-based framework designed for evaluating the sustainability of real-world cities to fit virtual cities. We then applied this modified framework to seven video games in the city-building genre and examined how each category of indicators (water, land use, energy, clean air, social wellbeing, population density, and trade) was represented in each game. We found that social wellbeing played the most significant role in the long-term success of a city: cities with poor wellbeing struggled to maintain or increase population. Additionally, we found that games with pre-industrial settings generally rewarded sustainable practices while the industrial and post-industrial games did the opposite. Post-industrial games also significantly prioritized city growth over sustainability. Thus, the setting was a significant predictor for modelling sustainability.

ABSTRACT. We assume that global responses to the climate crisis depend largely on the knowledge about the climate which is available to different societies, cultures, and subcultures. Climate knowledge is largely created by means of different media involved. For this paper, we are, thus, specifically interested in the climate scenarios proposed by strategy games. Hence, our research question is: Which scenarios of the climate do those contemporary strategy games suggest that were produced in recent years since the climate crisis has risen to a discourse-determining topic which can no longer be ignored? To answer this question, we propose to analyze the recent strategy games Civilization VI: Gathering Storm (Firaxis Games 2019), Frostpunk (11 Bit Studios 2018), and the Anno Series, specifically Anno 1800 (Blue Byte 2019), Anno 2205 (Blue Byte and Related Designs 2015) and Anno 2070 (Related Designs and Blue Byte 2011).

ABSTRACT. In this paper we investigate the popularity of the damsel in distress motif in the 8-bit video games of the 1980s and 1990s. Our initial hypothesis is that the narrative trope of the damsel in distress was uncommon in the 8-bit video games produced for microcomputers and is much more typical for the console and arcade market.

ABSTRACT. This research examines the evolution of the 1980s and 1990s videogame magazine from advocate to celebrant of the home-computer as games machine. This is achieved via an analysis of the escalating review scores meted out by various magazine brands, alongside a close textual reading of the editorial manifestos and review guides that accompanied launch issues. Such an approach enables a comparison of the manifest editorial content, what the magazines explicitly declare as their position, with the latent meanings coded into the rating scores.

The gaming magazines studied in this research informed many of the debates around computer usage, and gaming identity, that attended the expansion of videogames as an entertainment industry in the 1980s. At this germinal moment in gaming history the videogame magazine acted as a key producer of meaning for gamers/games producers, and provided the dominant consumer access point to the early gaming commodity.

ABSTRACT. As video games have evolved, video game characters have evolved as well. This extended abstract explores the way in which characterization theory might be beneficial for studying the history and evolution of video game characters (a field of study that is still in its infancy) by offering distinct categories through which a video game character can be considered.

ABSTRACT. Current game publishing typically involves an ongoing commitment to maintain and update games after initial release, and as a result, the reception of games among players has the potential to evolve; it is then crucial to understand how players' concerns and perceptions of the game are affected by ongoing updates and by the passage of time in general. We carry out a data-driven analysis of a prominent game release, No Man's Sky, using topic modeling-based text mining of Steam reviews. Importantly, our approach treats player perception, not as a single sentiment but identifies multiple topics of interest that evolve differently over time, and allows us to contrast the patching of the game to the evolution of the topics.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to contextualize and describe the design process behind the creation of Rook and in doing so to propose some reflections on playfulness, citizenship and data visualization. Rook is playful data visualization device aiming at the dissemination of air quality data. The Rook unit accesses the database of the Hollandse Luchten (henceforth HL) project, which collects data on air quality in Nord-Holland via a network of sensor kits distributed to the local population and displays it in an interactive way using lights and mist. The eerie and mysterious effect of the colored mist aims at a playful and enticing effect on its users, while, at the same time, spreading awareness on one of the key sustainability issues of the region. People can interact freely with the machine so to explore its working and the data it conveys.

ABSTRACT. The explosive success of Minecraft (Persson 2011) accelerated the proliferation of sandbox games based on the mechanics of exploration, crafting, building, and ultimately, survival. Hit titles Space Engineers (Keen Software House 2013) or Subnautica (Unknown Worlds 2018) afford gameplay that is, in many ways, less constricted than in other avatar-based genres, such as action-adventures or first-person shooters. In fact, notions of freedom and creative play are often associated with such design, which evoke questions about agency. This paper interrogates the implications survival-crafting games’ design has for player agency. As part of a larger project looking at agency in a variety of avatar-based genres, this paper draws on previous scholarship framing player action as an affordance of game design (Juul 2005; Salen and Zimmermann 2004; Sicart 2008), and conceptualizes agency as the possibility space for player action as expressed through avatar action that manifests in multiple dimensions (cf. Calleja 2011).

ABSTRACT. The main focus of this presentation will be to identify and analyse obstacles in the processes of artistic adaptation and translation of a game with a number of national references, based on "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt". Analysis will be conducted from the game production studies’ perspective and four main encounters will be describe here: book adaptation, “porting”, localization, and players’ initiatives. The main aim here will be to describe the obstacles, and present possible strategies of dealing with them to preserve the national content but also to make the game localized and playable for the players worldwide.

ABSTRACT. In this presentation, I will talk about a new approach of video game localization. The field of research of video game localization is said to be "market-driven" (O'Hagan, 2013), and since commercial considerations tend to take precedence over other aspects, cultural traces are often neutralized when a game is localized so as not to risk financial losses (Mandiberg, 2015). Thanks to an approach based on game design and the concept of contingency, it is possible to go beyond the current focus of this field. In this way, we can improve our knowledge of the localization process and take full advantage of the cultural potential of video games.

ABSTRACT. Submission is an extended abstract.

ABSTRACT. This panel focuses on the present-day relationship between video games and pedagogy, examining how innovative teachers and learners use games to solve problems across diverse academic disciplines.

Video games are the stuff of everyday life for today’s high school and college students, who dedicate more time, money and effort to them than any other type of media. Meanwhile, in recent years, video game forms and genres have proliferated.

Educators from any field can find themselves at a loss in light of these continuous waves of new technologies, even while they wish for positive ways to harness their students’ gaming interests and apply their skills to other dimensions of learning. This panel examines how games can contribute to the learning process across different academic disciplines, looking at specific practices and methodologies that teachers and learners can use to approach important topics and issues by playing and critically analyzing video games.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concepts of cyborg and companion species and extending upon the discussion of virtual companion games, this paper suggests that computer games can be seen as a vivid example of digital companion species. In so doing, it broadens the descriptive scope of companion species from labeling particular game genres to characterizing the relations between players and games in general. Following Haraway’s companion species, this paper proposes the notion of “techno-symbiosis” as a radicalization of the idea of “techno-intimacy” (Allison 2006) implied in virtual companion games to reimagine player-game relations. The conceptual shift from cyborgs to companion species, from techno-intimacy to techno-symbiosis, can problematize the separation of computer games and players as bounded entities that underpins anthropocentric views of computer games, echoing posthumanist and new materialist approaches to game studies (Janik 2018; de Petris & Falk 2017) that attend to the reconfiguration between players and games.

ABSTRACT. Study of video game performance workshops, focus on the non-human agency.

ABSTRACT. This paper interrogates the increasing conflation of database narrative and environmental storytelling in video games by proposing a poetics of object-oriented storytelling that depends not on a marionette-like avatar but on interdependent objects, not on a simulated space but on an organic environment, not on an enclosed diegesis but on an open system. Staging a conversation between Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “polyphony” and contemporary “object-oriented” discourses, the paper defines object-oriented storytelling by revisiting three critical terms of game studies: object, environment, and system.

ABSTRACT. This paper will analyse the “Immigration” duo by creator and activist Creatrix Tiara, What the $!#&@! Do They Need Now? (2017) and Here’s Your Fuckin’ Papers (2017), Borders (Gonzalo Álvarez, 2017), and Not Tonight (Panic Barn, 2018) in order to study how these game represent and discuss questions of borders and migration and how these could be further analysed as myths of the present.

ABSTRACT. This paper looks at traditional studies of the American Frontier to learn about the role this liminal space plays in the configuration of (American and non-American) identities in video games. The American Frontier is studied here as a trope whose history and symbolism influence the political articulation of spaces beyond the American Far West. As a result, after studying the American Frontier as well as some games that take place within this liminal space, this paper will suggest a connection between the narratives and identity discourses produced around the unexplored territories of the Far West and other frontiers, such as the ones present in dystopian visions of the future in which radiated wastelands are predominant.

ABSTRACT. The relationship between humankind and technology is fundamental, but also a longstanding source of unease, particularly as that relationship has become ever more intimate and irreversible. In this paper, I connect this age-old anxiety with the age-old figure of the giant, a monster similarly intertwined with ancient questions on the boundaries of humanity. I focus on two examples: the Human-Reaper larva in Mass Effect 2 and Liberty Prime in Fallout 3 and 4. Although different in approach, these examples demonstrate a use of a phenomenon I call the ‘techno-giant’ to explore and reflect the powerful anxieties in our cultures to do with the future of the human–technology relationship. In particular, both examples expose the human–nonhuman boundary as being exceeding difficult to define and place, despite a constant desire to. The figure of the giant offers a powerful focal point for these representations.

ABSTRACT. As virtual worlds in video games arose and quickly established themselves, questions surrounding digital platforms captured anthropological attention. Researchers such as Boellstorff (2008), Malaby (2009), Nardi (2010), Pearce (2009), and Taylor (2006) gave us ethnographic glimpses into the daily workings of life amongst the pixels, asking what it means to be virtual, to create, to be a team, to share, and to watch your world die. This panel continues to expand upon this work by focusing specifically onthe dynamism of virtual worlds as ever-changing sociotechnical spaces with multiple temporalities. Notably, virtual worlds are subject to versioning—digital objects are recreated and reconstructed with each new release. Although these versions are often fashioned as technological updates, the changes invested in digital platforms often reshape player experience, gameplay, and the visual landscape of the digital space.This panel proposes we understand a virtual world as we do the actual: as complex, processual, and indeterminant. In looking at multiple facets of virtual worlds, be it the versioning implicit in the labeling of Final Fantasy XIV expansions as 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0, the shifting affordances of bodies over time in VRChat, or the death of a virtual world’s creator, this panel explores the multiplicitous ways in which virtual worlds change over time. In doing so, the panelists encounter similar questions: why should the understandings of virtual worlds remain fixed in particular moments in time? How have the surrounding communities influenced the requirement for alterations of digital platforms? And, how do they change our interactions and sociality? With this, this panel seeks to extend the study of virtual worlds in games in ways that give nuanced understandings of their histories, evolutions, and present temporalities.

ABSTRACT. This paper explains how Animal Crossing: New Horizons allowed players to “play a|part together” during the COVID-19 pandemic. It describes how this life simulation game helped to fulfill the needs for sociability during the lockdown, based on the conclusions of a collective autoethnography and computer-assisted text analysis. It examines how the game’s affordances helped or prevented players in overcoming physical isolation when they were confined to their house or practicing social distancing. It also investigates the appropriations made by players to tailor the game to their social needs in this unprecedented context.

ABSTRACT. The paid co-playing service, is a video game practice in China, in which customers pay gamers to play video games with them. Paid co-player as service workers dedicate to improving customers’ game experience by offering their gaming proficiency, in form of considerate and caring communication, and pleasant voices. This study investigates how emotional labor “exists” in paid co-playing practices, which is mainly focusing on the paid co-players to see their feeling rules, experiences and the consequent impact on themselves by providing emotional labor in paid co-playing service. Two ethnographic methods, participant observatory and in-depth interview, are adopted with three findings. Firstly, unspoken feeling rules regulate paid co-player’ behaviors to affect gamers and make them ‘feel good’. Secondly, gender discrimination and harassments exist in the paid co-playing practice. Thirdly, Endless work makes it ambiguous between play for themselves and play for work.

ABSTRACT. Increasing and sustaining women’s participation in gaming spheres is a persistent problem DiGRA audiences are familiar with. This paper looks at the barriers to increasing and sustaining women’s participation on Twitch through examining the experiences of women streamers. Emotional labor (Hochschild 1983) is used as a framework for interpreting how these women’s individual experiences resonate within larger societal contexts of work and play more broadly. The paper relies on data from 8 in-depth interviews with international, English-speaking women who receive a primary or secondary income source from Twitch streaming videogames. The results of this study show that participants performed emotional labor, on top of the mental and physical labor of playing videogames on a live stream, and this emotional labor has potential negative implications for the longevity of their streaming career.

ABSTRACT. Digital games are entangled within the dynamics of ecology on many levels. On the one hand, games have been explored and praised as powerful tools for behavioural and social change. On the other hand, a growing number of studies demonstrate the infamous role they play within the context of climate change. Also, the very production and development of video games is exposed to unsustainable practices. It is only recently that the topics of greener coding or environmentally conscious workplaces, have gained visibility. In game studies, we have also looked for ecological frameworks to approach ecology-related topics. The relationship between digital gaming and ecology is a complex one and requires perspectives across disciplines. This panel is an invitation to rethink video gaming within the context of (un)sustainability. In five position statements, we will map out exemplary crossovers between gaming and ecology, opening the floor for audience debate.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents and evaluates the use of a live-action role-playing game (larp) to explore ethical questions raised by the use of machine vision technologies such as facial recognition, emotion recognition and other forms of algorithmic visual surveillance. Pervasive surveillance has become possible in ways that were unimaginable a couple of decades ago. This means that the general population is frequently required to make ethical choices about new technologies with a societal impact. The goal of the larp was to put participants in simulated (role-played) situations where they needed to make ethical choices about how to use or respond to machine vision technologies so as to develop a practical ethical awareness

ABSTRACT. The paper examines whether games and play are inappropriate for particular spaces and themes, provides reasoning as to why this is the case, and suggests a game design concept based on the personal history of a WW2 concentration camp survivo rthat could overcome such limitations.

ABSTRACT. Can digital games be tools for dialogical teaching? And if so, how? This presentation will attempt to answer these questions by reporting on initial findings from two case studies of how teachers are using a digital game, The Walking Dead (Telltale Games, 2012), as a tool for dialogical teaching of ethics. The study pays attention to how teachers include the game in their pedagogical design, and how this design is carried out by using dilemmas from the game’s narrative as a framing device and catalyst for class discussion. Findings suggest that the game’s narrative and its ambiguous dilemmas serve a key role as a resource for how teachers facilitate classroom dialogue, as well as an important element in how students give voice to different perspectives, thus creating fruitful conditions for teaching ethical theories through dialogue.

ABSTRACT. In which Cyberpunk (2029, RED, 2077) game designer Mike Pondsmith talks about the experience of creating realistic dystopia universes, as well as the structural limits and necessary elements to make those universes exciting and immersive for their audiences.