ABSTRACT. As we approach the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, the ways that Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) are perceived has drastically changed. Actual Plays, where players performatively take part in TTRPGs which are spectated or listened to by large audiences, are becoming an important element of the gameplaying ecosphere. As a result, their popularity has led them to directly effect player behaviour and the current development of roleplaying games. Aspects such as social interactions on screen, the collective negotiation of difficult issues, and fairly persistent shifting of rules during play, has led to an influential understanding of how TTRPGs are played; whereas the integration of larger Actual Plays into the production of games like Dungeons & Dragons – for example via licensed expansions of the Actual Play worlds, or streamed events in which well-known players showcase new or upcoming content, have changed the perception of TTRPGs and led to strong dialogical relationships. This talk examines some of these implications, and the relative influence of TTPRGs in the gaming landscape.

ABSTRACT. This talk will focus on how the limited draft format of Magic: the Gathering Arena requires players to re-habituate their own acquired playing dispositions in a dynamic process of conscious reflection. Studying this re-habituation has implications for how we think about the manner in which players acquire a durable yet flexible ‘gamer habitus’ (Kirkpatrick 2012). I will draw upon instructional videos released by professional players to explore how players (re)apply classification schemas and heuristics that influence their style of play. Taking into account critiques of how Bourdieu’s (1977 [1972]) concept of ‘habitus’ has insufficiently addressed a crucial dimension of agential consciousness (Crossley 2001, Noble and Watkins 2003, Toner 2017), I argue that the acquisition of a gamer habitus for Arena involves a to-and-fro between conscious learning and then ‘forgetting’. This allows us to grasp how players manage the balance between ‘receptivity’ and ‘resistance’ in their own habituation (Carlisle 2014).

ABSTRACT. This proposal looks to demonstrate how the digital service D&D Beyond has situated itself as the missing link, bringing together the worlds of TRPGs and digital video games. One may think that the virtual nature of D&D Beyond makes the platform more in line with video games, another electronic media; but it is the manner in which information is stored and relayed by the service that changes the experience of playing Dungeons & Dragons from its analog roots to one akin to playing a video game. This is not a video game adaptation, but Wizards of the Coast (the publishers of D&D) using the inherent attributes of digital platforms to supplement the playing of the original tabletop game

ABSTRACT. This presentation investigates contemporary player motivations in the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons [D&D]. Although there has been consistent academic interest in the motivations of digital game players, further attention must also be directed towards understanding motivations of play for non-digital games. Drawing on data collected from an ongoing research project into the contemporary play and players of D&D, I argue that existing player motivation models often overlook or minimize the implications and appeal of creativity as a motivator for play. In this presentation, I aim to discuss my research findings on the most common motivators of play for contemporary D&D players, highlighting the need for a more nuanced understanding of creativity in play for future player motivation models.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we aim to explain how the relationship between tabletop roleplaying design and literature is understood by examining early collaborations (being Thieves World and the rogue the central piece of our analysis) between tabletop roleplaying game designers and fiction writers.

ABSTRACT. Repeat play is often seen as key to the experience of interactive stories such as storygames. This is arguably quite different from repeat experience of non-interactive stories. While work has been done to investigate motivations for repeat experiences of storygames, the impact of the relationship between the narrative and the playable system on repeat experience is underexplored. In this paper we examine this question through close readings of two storygames that encourage repeat play: Bandersnatch and Cultist Simulator. Observations suggest that as players experience a storygame, they shift focus between the narrative and the playable system. This shift impacts both the type of closure experienced and the desire to replay, and suggests the degree to which the player treats a work as a storygame, or its storygameness, is not an inherent property of the work, but instead is an experiential property that can change over the course of a traversal.

ABSTRACT. A research project that calls into question how Queer/LGBTQ+ visual novel games are deploying a universal narrative of sexuality and utopia which reaffirms the colonial project of white supremacy. Games that deploy situated sexualities and acknowledge oppressive systems in the narrative of sexuality disrupts this trend which is crucial for anti-colonial work achieved through games and challenging hegemony.

ABSTRACT. Inspired by the notion that online sources had declared Final Fantasy VII Remake as a celebration of queerness, this study analyzes the ways in which the game has been adjusted. After an exploration of the concepts of queergaming and queer representation, the promotion of homophobia and heteronormativity that was abundant in the original FFVII is discussed. An in-depth description of main character Cloud Strife is provided in which his androgynous masculinity is viewed from the perspective of specific Japanese aesthetic traits. By focusing on two scenes that have their roots in the 1997 original - and were rewritten for the remake - the representation of (non-)heteronormative identities, desires, and practices is analyzed. It is concluded that although the term ‘queer celebration’ may be exaggerated, by drastically removing FFVII’s efforts to degenerate any form of homoeroticism, at least the most prominent of disadvantageous social dimensions in the game have been considered.

ABSTRACT. The Hong Kong 2019 anti-government protests leveraged the potential of digital games in an unprecedented breadth. Play and games were employed to gain visibility, create a sense of belonging, and to explain wearing topics through a common language among young people. This provides strong support to the idea that play can take place “everywhere”, as the DiGRA 2020 conference theme suggests. Our aim is to document and categorise this innovative and wide-ranging utilization of games in a protest. The games utilized encompass a wide range of types and genres. Their representations, mechanics, community features, and game cultural meanings were adjusted to fit the specific purposes of the protest. The appropriations discussed here, however, are unique in respect to how widely they addressed different games and uses for a single cause within a short period of time and efficiently appropriate capitalist entertainment structures for anti-government protests.

ABSTRACT. The development of digital technology and its material conditions transformed the relationship between games and humans. However, with the existing academic tendency to divide culture from technology, there is an insufficient effort in the academic field to understand the new gaming phenomenon and culture in a holistic viewpoint with relation to technology. Thus, this ongoing research will attempt to incorporate an understanding of the material conditions of technology and how technology and culture co-evolve to establish the current esports phenomenon and its expression and experience. This research will be constructed into two parts; First, through the critical reading of philosophy of technology and object-oriented approaches, I will attempt to re-conceptualization the concept of technicity in three dimensions. Second, through the empirical research of a South Korean esports league, I will analyze the technicity of certain technoculture.

ABSTRACT. This paper will introduce the Exploitation Ecosystem model (ExEc), which is based upon the foundational work of Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter (2006), Crane (2013), and Barrientos et al. (2013). The ExEc model organises and synthesizes research in slavery, exploitation, and precarious work into a more focused structure that can be applied to understanding exploitation in affluent modern economies. The model re-categorises the work of previous researchers and integrates them in a holistic approach, represented across two layers in the proposed model. The basic architecture of the model is introduced, revealing three aspects to exploitation: organisational, societal and individual and is illustrated via examples. The ExEc model is particularly relevant to domains that rely heavily on fan passion and third-party content creators for their success, such as the games industry.

ABSTRACT. This undergoing work explores with a survey and interviews the participation of women and the gender discrimination and sexual harassment they suffer in the Mexican video game industry and, in consequence, the impact on their job satisfaction. Participants include women between the ages of 18 and 45. Despite previous studies have been conducted on gender discrimination or sexual harassment at work and its effects in male-dominated spaces, little research has focused on the Mexican video game industry.

ABSTRACT. This article repurposes Colin Campbell’s (2005) concept of ‘the craft consumer’ to generate a new theory of videogame consumption, which proposes that the material practices typically associated with craft labour may be identified within acts of videogaming. We draw on case studies from popular videogame titles, including Dark Souls (From Software, 2016; 2018) and Super Mario Maker (Nintendo, 2015; 2019), to make our argument, suggesting that a grasp of the controls initiates material practices, like repetition, which provide the groundwork for craft skill. It is from this position that we argue that consumers initiate a craft-like ‘dialogue’ (Sennett, 2008) with the game’s design that reveals the experimental and creative nature of videogame consumption.

ABSTRACT. Games and game-based applications are part of entertainment, learning, socialisation, and many other daily life activities. Arguably, most accessible designs are single player. Gaming, however, is often a social activity and game-based applications are often used in social contexts, such as, for example, in classrooms for learning. Nonetheless, social aspects or games and related applications often receive relatively less attention. This study is a literature review of research on game accessibility (2016 -2020 inclusive) to investigate social aspects in game accessibility literature, The findings indicate the scarcity of research primarily investigating social themes. Individuals with disabilities differ in their social accessibility needs and challenges based on the type of disability they have. The lack of conscious research on social aspects of game accessibility threatens to further the exclusion of people with disabilities from gaming and related activities and this study provides directions for further research of social themes.

ABSTRACT. This article aims to study the use of digital games as interactive media among difabled; Indonesianized portmanteau of differently abled, gamers in Indonesia, including but not limited to the use of digital games as a platform for socialization, as sociotechnical artefacts to gain collective support and provide better access to community and social interaction, in addition to involvements in digital gaming competitions. This article aims to explain developments of difabled individuals’ discourse and their construction of identities during social interaction with digital games.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the process of the commodification and professionalization of the gaming community around Warhammer 40000 (hereafter 40k) (Games Workshop, 2012; hereafter GW). Participation in the 40k community is increasing rapidly, along with the increase in sales and revenue for its parent company, Games Workshop. The professionalization of the 40k community parallels both the development of esport in general and the mediatization of games such as Magic: The Gathering (Garfield, 1991) more specifically (see Švelch, 2020). The commodification of this culture here and the professionalization of a small group of players and creators is not in principle different from similar processes in other domains of cultural production like analog sports – 40k is an analogue game that is not natively tied to a digital domain.

ABSTRACT. Ensuring effective brand management is particularly important in the video game industry, however, there are important aspects of video game brand management that remain under-explored such as brand authenticity. This research explored how players evaluated the brand authenticity of a long running, successful video game series to begin to address the lack of video game brand authenticity research. This research utilized The Sims 4 as the research context, and 2194 comments were downloaded and analysed using thematic analysis. The analysis revealed that posters felt that The Sims 4 lacked authenticity due to missing features that were standard in previous games, and so it was commonly called ‘unfinished’ by posters. These results underscore the need for video game developers and brand managers to maintain authenticity, even if they are working on a video game brand that had built up brand authenticity over a long time as The Sims brand had done.

ABSTRACT. Often, introductions to alternative game controllers position them in contrast with standard or traditional controllers. A list of input devices are presented as standard and then contrasted with what is “other” to that. “Alternative” acts, then, as a “not” operator. I argue that hegemony-informed models can help to unpack this contouring of alternative and standard in order to engage with the politics of alternative game controller practices. This approach aims to support the ongoing elaboration of an analytical framework for alternative game controllers production and circulation.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents Player Decentered Design as a design approach that actively opposes and subverts Player Centered Design. Arguments against Player Centered Design are that it restricts the possibility space of videogames, through a focus on player needs and desires above all other concerns. These criticisms are explored through an experimental game design documented as autoethnographic text. Player Decentered Design is presented as deriving from a reflective design process in communication with the literature and personal play history of the author. The approach is determined by a set of constraints that can then be utilised in future exploratory game design.

ABSTRACT. In this study, 701 Indian persons responded to a survey asking them about their game-playing habits and perceptions towards learning through games. The survey instrument was used to gauge the participant demographics, awareness towards types of games, experience with various genres of games, playing habits, and perception towards the use of games for learning in schools. Findings show that a majority of respondents were positive about the integration of games for the purpose of learning within the classroom. When presented with a hypothetical opportunity, STEM subjects were overwhelmingly opted for learning through games, followed closely by history, geography, business studies, and programming. An analysis of keywords indicates that the participants connotate games with words like ‘challenge’, ‘competition, ‘fun’, and ‘learning’, indicating a primarily positive association. The findings of the study provide support to the use of game-based applications in the Indian classroom.

ABSTRACT. In this study, we investigate the motivation for gaming and the creativity of students who are majoring in video games development or design. We surveyed second-year college students on a video game-related course at a private university. As a result, (1) “Preference” and “diversion” are weakly associated or uncorrelated with other items and can be considered as independent factors. (2) The mean value for the creativity of the upper groups for “fantasy,” “approval,” “friendship,” “study,” and “achievement” was significantly higher. Therefore, it may be useful to incorporate the use and practice of game materials that raise awareness concerning “fantasy,” “approval,” “achievement,” “friendship,” and “study.” These results suggest that it is also possible to apply the results of prior research to identify factors and items related to creativity and better understand the relationship between game usage and creativity.

ABSTRACT. The interactivity present in games makes them useful vehicles for the exploration of various concepts outside of “finding the fun”. Empathy games – games that are developed to educate and encourage empathetic responses from players about a scenario – are one such example. However, the notion of empathy game design overlaps with other tangential design theories like emotional game design, radical game design, and critical game design. These theories often overlap but are difficult to discover because of their different naming conventions.

To assist designers, this paper discusses design principles from these and other similar game design frameworks. Using these, it presents a consolidated set of design principles and considerations that can be applied to game projects. These principles are presented to inspire future design work to explore lesser-known experiences, in the hopes of being more inclusive of, and more meaningful to, a diverse player base.

ABSTRACT. Players of Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) consume content much faster than game designers can produce it. However, they also generate stories through their interaction, which can contribute to adding novel types of content in the game world. We introduce and demonstrate Play Arcs, a design strategy for structuring emergent stories that players can co-design and contribute as unique game content. We develop an MMO with tools for co-design and `history game mechanics' and test as a technology probe with 54 players. We show that Play Arcs successfully structure coherent stories and support players in shaping new, unique content based on their own histories. We found that these stories can inform and guide players' decisions, and also that, while players often share simpler stories directly, they keep more notable stories to themselves for retelling later. We conclude by discussing design challenges and directions for future work with Play Arcs.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, I make use of philosophical theories on comedy to describe digital games’ capacity for causing laughter. Just like in literature, theatre, and film, the worlds presented in digital games can contain jokes and comic elements. I will argue, however, that the more unique comic potential of digital games lies in the way they make players take on a dual position of fictional proxy in the game world and actual player in the real world. In the end, I will describe a typology of game comedy, based on four different ways in which this dual position can be humorously revealed.

ABSTRACT. As game studies reaches across disciplinary boundaries, scholars in game studies have increasingly drawn their attention to alternative histories of the discipline (e.g., Fickle 2019; Byrd 2019; Anable 2018). This paper points to the role of games at the very foundations of European intellectual life through an examination of the writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Known as an inventor of binary arithmetic, calculus, and a mechanical calculator as well as a philosopher, theologian and political writer, Leibniz is rarely pointed to as a game studies scholar. However, as he makes clear in an essay written for the Prussian Academy of Science as well as many of his correspondences, he gives a central role to games as the means to “perfect the art of invention.” I argue in this paper that Leibniz viewed games as the medium by which humans could imagine, explore, and discover the “best of all possible worlds.”

ABSTRACT. This presentation explores the posthumanist representations of animals in several digital games and establishes what a posthumanist representation of an animal is - a creature possessing either agency, or subjectivity, or ephemerality, or more than one of these features. I also aim at describing how the inclusion of posthumanist animals changes the gameplay and the situation of the player. The presentation is a summary of the research done to prepare psychological experiments on the possible influence of games on attitudes towards animals of the players.

ABSTRACT. We propose the term procedural cultural sign systems generation to help define the emergent practice of procedurally generating games that seek to mimic or in some way signify fictitious culture. We borrow from cybernetics to understand procedural cultural sign systems generation and exemplify this with our VMachine algorithm. We argue the need for procedural content generation algorithms that are readily implementable, and generalizable for multiple use cases. In this paper, we discuss cybernetics in the context of procedural content generation followed by an overview of recent games that generate elements of culture as part of gameplay. We then outline our VMachine algorithm and demonstrate our method before demonstrating its practical applications in two short case studies based on games currently under development.

ABSTRACT. In the past five to ten years, the number of hybrid tabletop games which combine digital tools with physical components has grown, heralding new forms of hybrid play which combine a physical play space with a digital app or other tool. This is a trend that market analysts have noted as one of the drivers for future tabletop game markets (Technavio 2019). In this panel, we will discuss different examples of games in this space as well as the different lenses through which hybridity can be viewed. We will show that these hybrid games represent a significant, although small, segment of the tabletop game market, and demonstrate their relevance not only for understanding the use of hybrid functions in tabletop games but also more broadly for understanding the value of digital tools and components and their relationship to physical objects.

ABSTRACT. In this research, I propose to make a map of aesthetic discourses used to shape the current public image of eSports, with a special focus on the negotiation between the fans’ and commercial actors’ take on production and circulation of visual-based paratexts. The main research question concerns eSports paratexts, especially those produced by the fans’ communities, and their circulation between the various levels of electronic spaces (streaming platforms, social media) as well as non-digital spaces (on-site cosplay, hand-made banners). Building on the corporeal analysis of streaming media aesthetics (Anderson, 2017), I will implement the constructivist variant of the grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006) to analyze eSports-related paratexts in three main digital media platforms: Twitch.tv, YouTube, and Reddit.

ABSTRACT. This panel brings together journalism and game studies scholars to explore the evolving relationship between game journalism, gaming, and the public. Drawing on historical, theoretical, textual, and social examples, they spotlight the perseverance, acceptance, and understanding of the occupation in North America, while also examining inherent cultural tensions that persist between writers, fans, and publishers.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on extensive archive materials, documents, and interviews, we examine multiple forms of productive constraint and affordances operating on Intellivision game production from 1979-1984. Expanding on platform studies’ focus on technical constraints that shape game production, our research examines productive constraints emerging from categories such as time, legacy, licensing, and marketing that also fundamentally influenced the commodities that appeared on the Intellivision system.

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ABSTRACT. This study investigated an increasingly popular functional use of video games within the dating context. Preliminary findings showed game features are linked closely to how players utilize them to maintain their romantic life.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the relationship among glitch and kink through two works of game-based interactive art that playfully administer pain to players via shocks, burns, and whips: PainStation (2001) and Tekken Torture Tournament (2001). In these works, kink operates as a form of aesthetic participation within a material constellation of machines and bodies. In fleshing out the nuanced relationships among different kinds of playing bodies and kinky machines this paper makes connections among glitch and queer mechanics: possibilities for play that counter and subvert the rules and goals established by popular, heteronormative forms of game design.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents a work-in-progress of digital ethnography and reports on data collected from qualitative online surveys and interviews with participants who combine their gaming with elements from BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, and Masochism) roleplay. In this study, the investigation focuses on how rather than why people play. Findings explore intimate play of sexual partners and participants engaged in kink online gaming communities. In this, Dom, Sub and Switch BDSM dynamics in digital games are often played through the appropriation of Tank, Healer, and DPS (Damage Per Second) class roles. To enrich our understanding of people’s sex and play experiences in gaming, this research explores topics of people’s engagement with prosuming pornography, sexual citizenship, consent and safety, creative negotiations of appetites, plasticity of desires, transformative and queering bodies, as well as orientations and attunements towards future playscapes and embodied becomings.

ABSTRACT. While loot boxes are frequently treated as a monolithic feature of games by researchers and policymakers, loot box implementations are not uniform: the features of loot boxes vary widely from game to game in ways that may have important consequences for player spending and behavior. In this work, we attempt to illustrate the nuance present in loot box implementation in a featural model called LoBoF v0.1. Using our lived experience, a qualitative coding exercise of 141 games, and consultation with an industry professional, we identify 32 categorical features of loot box-like mechanics that might be expected to influence player behavior or spending, which we group into 6 domains: point of purchase, pulling procedure, contents, audiovisual presentation, unpaid engagement, and social. We conclude with a discussion of potential implications of this wide variation in loot box design for researchers, regulators, and players.

ABSTRACT. Loot boxes are quasi-gambling virtual products in video games that provide randomised rewards of varying value. Previous studies in Western contexts have identified a positive correlation between loot box purchasing and problem gambling. A preregistered survey of People’s Republic of China (PRC) video game players (N = 879) largely failed to replicate this correlation, possibly due to low levels of gambling participation (n = 87). Statistically significant but very weak positive correlations between loot box expenditure and past-year gambling participation, and between loot box expenditure and impulsiveness, were found. Most loot box purchasers (84.6%) reported seeing loot box probability disclosures which the PRC legally requires, but only 19.3% of this group reported consequently spending less money. Future loot box research should give greater consideration to cultural contexts, methodological choices, and novel consumer protection measures.

ABSTRACT. Microtransactions in video games have drawn the attention of researchers and regulators alike. Broadly, there have been calls for regulation of in-game purchases because of their potentially negative consequences for players. As such, microtransactions are currently being evaluated through a consequentialist perspective, with effects on players being prioritised in decision-making. We argue that consequentialism may not be the optimal framework in this domain, considering the multiple stakeholders in the conversation and their intentions, as well as the way evaluation is carried out in other public health areas. Understanding the many points of view in this issue is essential if we are to create an environment through which good is truly maximised for both those who create games and those who play them.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents an analysis of CryptoKitties (Axiom Zen 2017) as an educational tool for blockchain adoption. The main focus of analysis is placed on the rules and practices of playing the game as defined by its official agenda (“White Pa-Purr”), and the user guide. These statements are then compared to the actual practice of playing the game. I come to the conclusion that, although gamification of blockchain technologies is successful on a broader level of service marketing in this case, it does not make cryptocurrency-based services more accessible to the audience previously unfamiliar with this field. Still, it can launch a longer independent exploration of crypto markets, which can become a transformative experience for the player.