ABSTRACT. In 2023, the Video Game History Foundation and the Software Preservation Network highlighted a pressing videogame preservational concern: 87% of videogames published in the United States before 2010 are critically-endangered and no longer in legal circulation (Salvador, 2023). While many universities have developed rich archives of game hardware and software, it is becoming increasingly clear that purely collection-oriented preservation strategies cannot fully encapsulate the history of games. After all, how can we assemble a material collection of games that are extremely rare, divorced from their original paratexts, and alienated from their histories of everyday use?

In this panel, the presenters will discuss their scholarly practice working with videogame research collections as well as their ongoing efforts to integrate oral histories, fan archives, and game modification into their work. Preservation is not just about collecting the past but also complicating and appending canonical or “great game” histories, which, we argue, is only achievable by bringing the vernacular to the forefront. This panel discusses the tangible methodological outcomes of these approaches, rooted in videogame research collections and ethnographic scholarship.

ABSTRACT. Come join us for a different kind of DiGRA panel. One where we play first and ask questions later. This is game studies scrimmage where we choose one game that no one has played and come together to talk about it. We have two weeks to play it through and then we meet to share our insights in the spirit of fun, comradery and all that is gamey. Anyone is welcome to play along and join in.

The feature game for DiGRA 2024 is Citizen Sleeper by Jump Over Age from 2022. Grab a copy and play it before DiGRA starts. Then join designated scrimmagers, Bart Simon, Ashley Guajardo, Antonia Hargreaves, Juan Francisco Belmonte Avila and Jose Zagel for a fast-paced, edifying, rabble rousing discussion of whatever strikes our fancy.

ABSTRACT. This panel explores a range of ways to study and understand colonialism, colonization, and games. To lay the groundwork, a first presentation overviews past work on colonialism in games, including relevant theory and analysis. It argues for further investigation of the structures of games – the mechanics, rules, and game design loops – as particularly important in understanding the processes that colonization harness, as well as how settler colonialism sets up frameworks for society that are then naturalized in both daily life as well as game /genre structures. As a test case, the next presentation details an analysis of a grand strategy game that allows for colonization, but in a science fiction setting. The paper asks if/how the idea of colonialism can be extended beyond real historical frameworks, and how the rules/mechanics discussed in the first presentation remain as ideologically fraught when displaced onto fictional worlds. Next, two panelists discuss varying ways that colonialism can both impact the design process and also be critiqued via different design methodologies. These elements are made manifest in relation to teaching design as well as making games for health and/or serious games. Finally, the last presentation moves to a player studies approach, asking individuals to play colonization games that feature multiple subject positions and to engage in play from marginalized perspectives. It explores how players react, including whether this produces greater insights, discomforts, and how a player’s own subject position impacts those interpretations.

ABSTRACT. This panel explores an emergent trend in the use of digital platforms as sites for “play” spaces, drawing upon collective labor and audience engagement for the promotion of commercial media enterprises. For instance, game developers use crowdsourced funding campaigns to present visions of fan-tailored titles, while AI creation platforms rely on mass engagement with demonstration models. Through these digital “playgrounds,” producers frame participation and co-creation through the lens of a speculative future of digital media. Drawing from collective labor and audience engagement, these playgrounds become a tool through which to gain funding and attention for their projects. Both new media and game studies scholarship have frequently demonstrated the purposeful elision between notions of play and labor, demonstrating a tendency for media producers to use the rhetorical context of play as a means to encourage either free labor practices or disguise labor as play (Terranova 2000, Kücklich 2005, Sicart 2021). Similarly, game scholars have analyzed how the framing of work as play can lead to compromised labor conditions such as the industrial trend of crunch labor in game design and play-testing (Consalvo 2008, Bulut 2015).With that said, in our presentations we argue that these digital spaces have more frequently used the notion of speculative media as a means to reframe audience participation as a playful production of that media’s imagined and shared future. As media company’s encourage audience participation in media productivity in-progress, they can then align audience investment and productivity as a means to sell audiences on the ideal of a shared vision of media creation. However, despite the lofty rhetoric that frames these projects as crowdsourced productions made by and for the audience, the economic underpinnings of the project more often reveal exploitative marketing practices and the pernicious influence of highly financialized corporate interests.

Jacob Mertens will begin the panel with “Crowdfunding the Hypothetical Game: The Disappearing and Reappearing Chronicles of Elyria Kickstarter Campaign,” which examines a growing trend of independent game developers using the new production logics of crowdsourced media (see: Bannerman 2012; Rouzé 2019; Tyni 2020) to create drawn-out funding campaigns that sell the promised potential of new title over a more tangible end-product experience. He argues that crowdsourced platforms like kickstarter have increasingly become a site of negotiation for speculative media, as producers eagerly promise features and gaming functions for new titles that they have not yet designed and then attempt to manage expectations with their audience-backed funders when they cannot deliver on their proposed designs. His paper focuses on the contentious case study of Soulbound Studios’ Chronicles of Elyria, which has languished for years in development and even inspired Kickstarter backers to attempt a class-action lawsuit against the developer for their failure to finish their campaign. He uses online discursive analysis to study the evolving relationship between the studio and its crowdfunding audience—examining the Soulbound Studios’ kickstarter page and development log, the game’s official discord, and audience backlash on the platform Reddit—creating an ongoing production history for the game project spanning years of Elyria’s turbulent development. This paper ultimately works to reveal the tensions at play between the tantalizing potential of crowdfunded media and their frequently insubstantial and mishandled execution.

Next, Rowena Chodkowski will present “Playing in Vector(al) Space: AI Toys, Huggingface, and Speculation,” analyzing the rapid valuation of AI development hub Huggingface within the context of vectoral capitalism (Wark, 2019). This paper argues that Huggingface fuels capital speculation in the AI sector, including its own valuation, through exploiting two types of uncompensated community engagement: the general public and developers. Huggingface Spaces charms general-audience visitors by providing easy access to “play” with a variety of fine-tuned models, generating novelty outputs on demand. Developers, however, are drawn to Huggingface because it hosts code repositories for pretrained base models and open-source machine learning utilities– all conveniently configured for easy fine-tuning and demo launch via Spaces. These utilities and the convenience they provide allow developers to “play” with fine-tuning at little cost, making Huggingface an indispensable part of the AI/ML development ecosystem. Through a combination of digital methods using the HFCommunity relational database (Ait et. al, 2023) and experiential knowledge from a developer/practitioner, this paper provides a critical perspective on the “AI community building the future,” revealing how Huggingface has become, instead, the AI company built in to the future through the exploitation of play.

Finally, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux follow with “In the Dust of this Ancient: Playing in the Ruins of Artifact’s Speculative Economy.” After Artifact failed and Valve abandoned it in 2018, a digital playground emerged in the ruins of speculation where a small handful of people continue to play productively with no hope of an update, no new cards, and no chance of their collections accruing value. They’re in it for “the long haul,” but not in the way Valve planned when they hired Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias to try and make the next Magic: The Gathering in 2014. As Gabe Newell (2018) explained in a press conference before the game’s launch “in the same way that Half-Life 2 was an attempt to take everything that we saw in the industry and all our own thinking and our own experiences and turn it into a definitive statement on what the first-person action game was, that’s what Artifact is in terms of trading card games.” And like Garfield’s (2000) inaugural collectible card game, Artifact was built on the bedrock of what he terms “metagaming”—or the community, competitions, collecting, and commerce that operate “before, after, during, and between” games. Like Magic, Artifact is designed around the ways in which money already modulates gameplay by making the metagame fungible and signals productivity by putting a price tag on play. But then, when put into practice, the game spectacularly failed—plummeting from 60,000 concurrent players to 60 and crashing from $20.00 cards to $0.20. Working with theorists of digital currency (Lana Swartz, Finn Brunton, and Edward Castronova) and theories of platform economies (Mark Steinberg, Nick Srnicek, Tiziana Terranova, and Yanis Varoufakis), this talk will attempt to summarize the economic strategies Valve proposed in advance of Artifact’s release as well as diagnose how they ultimately misplayed the financial metagame in a moment before people were clothes pinning Artifact cards bicycle spokes, or flipping Artifact cards into an old hat, or burying Artifact cards under playground pea gravel after 52-card pickup. What kind of new games can we play in the dust of this Ancient?

ABSTRACT. On the morning of January 5th, 2022, coinciding with the release of version 2.4 of the Genshin Impact (hereafter referred to as ‘Genshin’), miHoYo announced changes to the visual design of four female characters. These changes, purportedly in response to Chinese governmental censorship, sparked a debate within the Chinese Genshin Community about female representation in the game, subsequently extending to broader video game discourse. This research aims to contribute to the understanding of both the representation and reception of female characters in video games, using Genshin as a case study. Our focus includes the alterations in the design of female characters in Genshin and the community’s reaction, as well as an examination of how the game’s lore and narrative construct these characters. Gender representation has always been a significant topic in video game studies, with existing research presenting both complementary and contradictory perspectives. For instance, a narrative literature review by Lopez-Fernandez et al. (2019), which analyzed 12 articles, suggests that female characters in video games are not only less frequently featured but are also often exaggeratedly and hyper-sexualized in terms of their attributes (p.10). Concurrently, studies on the ‘Lara Phenomenon’ (Jansz and Martis, 2007; Engelbrecht, 2020) highlight the portrayal of powerful and layered female characters in digital games, particularly in narrative structures. Yet, Han and Song (2014) argue, using Lara Croft as an example, that the female heroine embodies a mix of traits typically associated with heroes, asserting that her strength is an amalgamation of various male protagonists’ characteristics (p. 38). These previous studies often fall into a problematic dichotomy, separating physical appearance or character design from narrative roles and gameplay mechanics. This separation creates a dissonance in understanding gender representation by implicitly positioning physical attractiveness and competence as opposing traits in female characters, thus misrepresenting the complexity of gender identity. Our analysis of the design changes in Genshin reveals a reduction in character exposure through added clothing. The community’s response to these changes was polarized. A significant portion of players, across various social media platforms, claimed victory , attributing the changes to their complaints and reports to the Chinese government. They criticized the original character designs in Genshin as overly flirtatious and tailored to appeal sexually to male players. However, another faction argued that this perspective overlooks the fact that Genshin’s narrative and gameplay design already depict all female characters as strong and independent. Our analysis supports both sides of the argument. The female characters in Genshin, both pre- and post-change, exhibit a combination of physical attractiveness and personal strength. While the physical design of Genshin’s female characters is indeed attractive, with some attributes exaggerated, these characters are also imbued with distinct personalities, strengths, and independence. Hence, they maintain their agency and strength regardless of their physical design or redesigns. This research challenges Han and Song’s (2014) assertion that female power in games is merely an imitation of male characteristics. Furthermore, it partially challenges and supports existing studies on gender representation in and around video games. Our study counters the common dichotomy in video game studies that sees physical appearance and character competence as mutually exclusive. We argue that while physical attributes are often exaggerated, they do not necessarily undermine the characters’ strength or independence.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract presentation argues that the Assassin’s Creed franchise has provided an exceptionally limited number of female protagonists throughout its 28 installments. We further argue that inclusivity pushes at Ubisoft have been met with internal resistance which has shaped all post-2017 series titles in ways that map onto the characters and game mechanics, producing incongruities between narrative and ludic elements.

This presentation covers all 28 games broadly but specifically focuses on all titles that feature playable female protagonists, either exclusively or as an option. Concretely, we schematize these results along a franchise-encompassing timeline, and a grid that breaks down broader franchise representational periods, along with qualitative analysis of this data.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract presents a work-in-progress investigation of the intersections of female representation and anti-colonial resistance within the following Asterix video games: ‘Asterix & Obelix XXL’ (2003); ‘Asterix & Obelix XXL 2: Mission Las Vegum’ (2006); ‘Asterix at the Olympic Games (2007); ‘Asterix & Obelix XXL 3: The Crystal Menhir’ (2019); ‘Asterix & Obelix XXXL: The Ram from Hibernia’ (2022). Through a multimodal character analysis which pays heed to the narrative, audiovisual and procedural layers of the titles examined, I try to assess the extent to which these video games may be regarded as digital playgrounds wherein gender stereotypes and colonialist logics and practices are not only represented and reinforced, but also played with and, if not overtly subverted, at least occasionally resisted. Thus, I hope to contribute to the flourishing research on the (under-)representation of female characters in historical video games, while also seeking to encourage further work on Asterix video games.

ABSTRACT. INTRODUCTION Every time a story is retold, its meaning, message and origin can be redefined. This is also true when the narrative is presented in game form. Inspired by Focault’s (1977) insistence on accounting for power in all forms of historicity we offer a critical reading of the ludic genealogy of the myth of El Dorado as it pertains to the tomb raiding trope of board and video games. By following Foucault’s suggestion that the genealogist can recover history as series of interpretations, we attempt to capture significant reversals, substitutions, and displacements in the representation and mediation of the El Dorado myth as it has traveled from the fifteenth century to contemporary games. By applying interaction criticism (Bardzell 2011), our readings delve into the interactive and reciprocal relationship between participants and cultural artifacts focuses on how design and cultural context shape and are shaped by engagement and perceptions.

ORIGINS The El Dorado legend, traceable to the early diaries of Christopher Columbus and further revisited by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, ignited European exploration and colonization in the Americas (Ainsa 1986). Its promise of gold inspired ambitious expeditions, like those of Pizarro and Almagro. These pursuits could spiral into extravagant delusions, as evidenced by Lope de Aguirre's reckless adventures in the Amazon and Pedro de Orsúa's presumptuous claim to governance over El Dorado.

SUBVERSION Cobo Borda (1987) asserts that the El Dorado myth was a collaborative creation by both the Spanish and Indigenous Peoples, designed to enchant and misguide European explorers. Originally portrayed as a tranquil blue lagoon in the Andean highlands, teeming with golden wildlife, this myth captivated numerous adventurers seeking wealth and fame. Embedded into the myth itself, we find mechanics of tdeception and hidden information; a game molded by the pressure applied by the invading oppressors. By utilizing the myth to lure the conquistadors deep into the treacherous jungle, the indigenous communities engaged in something akin to dark play, which is signified by involving participants who are unaware that play is taking place, subversion, and sometimes treacherous outcomes (Linderoth and Mortensen 2015). More generally, there are numerous examples of play being the locus of resistance and subversion by the subordinate classes (eg. Sutton-Smith 2001, Sicart 2014). The theorizing of these instances of play is, however, usually done through a Western lens. Game studies has largely, but not completely (see eg. Mukherjee 2017), ignored subversive play originating among the subaltern, just as this reading of the early evolution of the El Dorado myth has largely been drowned by speculations about what or where El Dorado actually was among Western historians.

TRANSFORMATION The Quest for El Dorado is a board game where players take the roles of expedition leaders racing to reach El Dorado, here depicted as a real city of gold (fig. 1). Judging by the illustrations, the game is set somewhere around the nineteen-forties. Players buy cards that allows their expedition to move quicker and traverse obstacles. These cards represent different experts that join the expedition. The experts are all White people except for the scout and the “Native.”

Figure 1: Three explorers have reached El Dorado.

The game transforms mythical city of El Dorado into an actual city signifying both endless riches and the winning condition for the players. The rulebook makes it clear that these riches belonged to a lost kingdom justifying why the expedition getting there first can claim the gold, jewels, and precious artifacts as theirs. There is no mention of Colombia, the presumed location of the city, having any legal claim to the loot, despite having been an independent nation for over a hundred years when the game takes place. Here, the developers rely on the trope of any previously colonized exotic location serving as the playground for Western adventurers (Smith 2016) to do what they please without any consequences.

ITERATION In Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune (Naughty Dog 2007), players control Nathan Drake, an American adventurer on a quest to find El Dorado. Initially believing it to be a city of gold, he soon discovers that El Dorado is, in fact, a cursed golden idol carrying a dangerous mutagenic virus. Players encounter various characters, primarily greedy Europeans and Americans, who aim to exploit El Dorado for their own gain. In contrast, Nathan and his ancestor, Sir Francis Drake, are portrayed as heroes striving to protect the world from the idol's curse. The main antagonist, one of the few mestizo characters in the game, harbors malevolent intentions for El Dorado and must be stopped. The Drakes recognize its inherent danger and are committed to containing it, demonstrating their respect for its power and their role as guardians against the indigenous curse. Uncharted mixes and matches a number of colonial tropes like imbuing artifacts with magical powers, casting the environment as a dangerous contrast to the Western metropole, and White saviorism. Left unsatiated by the El Dorado myth alone, the game adds tomb raiding tropes seen in everything from comic books to movies creating a colonialist Gesamtkunstwerk of sorts.

CONCLUSIONS Discussing the rhetoric of play as power, Sutton-Smith describes play “as a way to fortify the status of those who control the play or are its heroes” (2001, 10). Our reading shows that Western developers use games to completely transform history into narratives where they become the heroes. By discussing the endless chain of games produced in the tomb raider genre, we highlight the importance of iteration as a way to legitimize. Just as the mythical El Dorado has become reality in the games, so has the Euro-centric myths of White supremacy. Flanagan & Jakobsson (2023) describe board games as instruments of enculturation, instilling cultural values, norms, and practices in players. They emphasize that colonial narratives in games are not without consequence. As an illustration, Gutierrez-Gomez (2017) points out the continuous expansion of the mining industry in Colombia. This growth, spurred by government policies aimed at attracting international investment, has led to substantial environmental and health risks. In this regard, the curse from Uncharted has become reality.

REFERENCES Ainsa, Fernando. "From the Golden Age to El Dorado: (Metamorphosis of a Myth)." Diogenes 34, no. 133 (1986): 20-46. Bardzell, Jeffrey. "Interaction Criticism: An Introduction to the Practice." Interacting with Computers 23, no. 6 (2011): 604-621. Cobo Borda, Juan Gustavo, ed. 1987. Fábulas y Leyendas de El Dorado. Vol. 4. Barcelona, Spain: Tusquets Editores. Flanagan, M., & Jakobsson, M. (2023). Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games. MIT Press. Foucault, M. 1977. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews edited by D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon, 139-164. Ithaca, NY, USA: Cornell University Press. Gutiérrez-Gómez, Laura. "Mining in Colombia: Tracing the harm of neoliberal policies and practices." Environmental crime in Latin America: The theft of nature and the poisoning of the land (2017): 85-113. Linderoth, J. and Mortensen, T. E. 2015. “Dark Play: The Aesthetics of Controversial Playfulness.” In The Dark Side of Game Play: Controversial Issues in Playful Environments edited by T. E. Mortensen, J. Linderoth, A. ML Brown. New York, NY, USA: Routledge. Mukherjee, S. 2017. Videogames and Postcolonialism: Empire Plays Back. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Naughty Dog, and Santa Barbara Studio. 2007. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. PS3, PS4. San Mateo, CA: Sony Computer Entertainment. Sicart, M. 2014. Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Smith, S. P. 2016. The Postcolonial Playground, Colonial narratives in Contemporary Tourism. Master’s Thesis. Cape Town, South Africa: University of Cape Town. Sutton-Smith, B. 2001. The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

ABSTRACT. Radiant Historia is a JRPG focusing on themes of time travel, history and the past, in which players navigate two parallel timelines - a “standard” history and an “alternate” history - and the extradimensional realm of Historia, attempting to configure the “true history” and save the world. In this paper, I explore how ostensibly ‘non-historical’ games like Radiant Historia can play with ideas of history, time and the past more freely than more traditionally historical games. I show how arguments about all three ideas are made through game structure and language, and argue that Radiant Historia is a historiographical game because it reflects particular ways of thinking about history and because to play the game is to undertake the act of writing history, articulated in part through the metaphor of time-travel. This paper will be of interest to researchers concerned with Historical Game Studies, with (historical) time and temporality in games, and with the capacity of games to trouble disciplinary frameworks beyond game studies.

ABSTRACT. The video game arcade’s heydays are over in most countries of the Global North, but its legacy as a school for game literacy lives on. Nosebleed Interactive’s Arcade Paradise (2022) is a sustained effort to recapture the affective essence of what videogaming meant prior to and in the immediate aftermath of the home computer revolution, when the arcade reigned supreme. Its anachronistic mashup of game genres and artistic styles create a panoply of games bearing the ideal type of the arcade on their sleeves. With some cabinets being recognizable recreations of real-life games, while others prove to be imaginative exercises of “what could have been” if modern design principles were applied to arcade cabinets of old, Arcade Paradise is an exercise in reconstruction. The paper investigates the nexus at which the popular imagination and the visual iconography of the arcade meet, generating a particular structure of feeling, that of nostalgia (Tannock 1995). Nostalgia has been an increasingly productive lens through which gaming history comes alive in light of advances in game design and gameplay (Bowman and Wulf 2022). In fact, nowadays, even the video arcade can be considered as a site of digital cultural heritage, where authenticity becomes a site of contestation, with Mochocki even highlighting “affective involvement” (2021) as a key affinity that dovetails nicely with the affective turn in game studies (Anable 2019, Milesi 2023, Waskiewicz and Bakun 2020). Svetlana Boym has distinguished between two distinct, but interlocking strands of nostalgia (2001). Restorative nostalgia seeks to reconstruct the past as it should have been felt, its optimism, sweetness and rounded edges offering a Disney version of what occurred, solid but saccharine. Reflective nostalgia is a much more precarious, even sensitive recollection, one which does everything in its power to expose the rose-tinted glasses of restorative nostalgia as a construct with an ideology of its own: that of eliding the complexities and commercial nature of popular culture; in our case – the arcade. Arcade Paradise negotiates the demilitarized zone between reconstructive and reflective nostalgia; the cabinets featured in the game employ the visual language expected of 1980s-90s arcade games, but the gameplay itself is much more reminiscent of the style of metaprogression inherent in roguelites and more modern casual games. It also features an extensive (but hardly challenging) economic model that exposes arcade cabinets as not just entertainment software stations, but sites of revenue production. Still, the profitability of the games on display are intricately tied to the player’s engagement with them, and their unlockable achievements permanently bump the popularity of the games on display. The paper addresses the progression systems as part of an elaborate design decision to take away the arcade-ness of the arcade game games and to incorporate them into the incremental growth of PC gameplay style. Prima facie, the setting and visual presentation of Arcade Paradise would seem like a love letter to the good old days, but in fact, the whole game is set up to cast restorative nostalgia against reflective nostalgia. Rather than “rebooting the girl/boyhood” of the protagonist Ashley at the arcade (Kocurek 2015), the process of turning the King Wash laundromat into a profitable video arcade is a task of capturing the breadth of the gaming spectrum with the purchase and careful positioning of the arcade machines for maximum profit, not to mention the constant engagement of the player with the machines in pursuit of “levelling up” the cabinets – a concern that would not be of issue in a real-life arcade. The overarching narrative of the game also pits Ashley and their sister Lesley against Gerald, their father, a hard-nosed, no-nonsense self-made man, who takes umbrage at Ashley’s desire to turn the laundromat into a video game parlour, effectively making him the game’s antagonist, replaying US society’s misguided concerns/moral panic with the arcade as a site of delinquency and a place where problematic youth congregate (Ellis 1984, Hodges 2014). Restorative nostalgia would be content with recreating the game feel and visual style of actual games of old, but Arcade Paradise does more than that: it emphasizes the production and commercial context of early video game development and use by forcing the player to become an entrepreneur of sorts. Reflectively nostalgic images of the arcade nudges the players to consider the labour that goes into operating such an establishment. As such, in Ashley’s view, even mundane tasks, such as taking out rubbish or declogging a toilet takes on a ludic overlay, symbolizing their mental outlook on running the business, and propping a mirror up to the player on how soul-sucking adult chores can be gamified, and how hollow they might feel without their ludic incentives. Finally, the paper proceeds to analyse the myriad of references in gameplay and graphics to crucial milestones in video gaming history, from affectionate remakes of games like Pong (Atari 1972) as Shuttlecocks or Qix (Taito 1981) as Line Terror, to the innovative but plausibly arcade-y designs of Blockchain, a number-based, Tetris-style puzzle game, or the Pac-Man (Namco 1980) meets Grand Theft Auto (DMA Design 1997) design of Racer Chaser, which is in itself an hommage to GTA’s original working title, Race’n’Chase. By untangling the web of gaming history woven into the fabric of Arcade Paradise, the paper demonstrates the complexities of the cultural history of the arcade, its position in game design, and the emotions they inspire.

REFERENCES Anable Aubrey. 2019. Playing with Feelings: Video Games and Affect. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Atari. 1972. Pong. Arcade Cabinet. Atari. Bowman, Nicholas David, and Tim Wulf. "Nostalgia in video games." Current Opinion in Psychology (2022): 101544. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. DMA Design. 1997. Grand Theft Auto. PC. BMG Interactive. Hodges, James. 2014. “Antagonism, Incorporated: Video Arcades and the Politics of Commercial Space.” Media Fields Journal 1 (8): 1–9. Kocurek Carly A. 2015. Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Milesi, Laurent. 2022. “Gaming (with) Affect and Trauma: An Introduction.” Parallax 28 (2): 137–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2023.2184946. Mochocki, Michał. "Heritage sites and video games: Questions of authenticity and immersion." Games and Culture 16.8 (2021): 951-977. Namco. 1980. Pac-Man. Arcade Cabinet. Namco. Nosebleed Interactive. 2022. Arcade Paradise. PC/Steam. Wired Productions. Taito. 1981. Quix. Arcade Cabinet. Taito. Tannock, Stuart. 1995. “Nostalgia Critique.” Cultural Studies 9 (3): 453–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502389500490511. Waszkiewicz, Agata and Martyna Bakun. 2020. “Towards the Aesthetics of cozy video games.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 12(3): 225-240.

ABSTRACT. In 2020 a project to study the Polishness of video games received funding from the National Science Center, and a number of commenters decried this as a waste of public money (Majkowski and Hekman 2020). Indeed, it may seem self-explanatory that “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” (CD Projekt RED 2015) is a Polish game, or that “Kingdom Come: Deliverance” (Warhorse Studios 2018) is a Czech game. However, it probably does not seem so obvious that “Baldur’s Gate III” (Larian Studios 2023) is a Belgian game. All this begs the question: on what grounds does one decide on the national status of video games?

Many researchers are now associating video games with nation-states (Kristensen 2023; Navarro-Remesal and Pérez-Latorre 2022; Penix-Tadsen 2019; Swalwell 2021; Švelch 2019; Wolf 2021). Their work highlights underrecognized titles and undermines the view that video games are essentially global. At the same time, it is important to challenge the assumption that national status is inherently built into video games. This has been done with regard to the United Kingdom (Webber, 2020), Japan (Fiadotau 2021), South Africa (van der Merwe 2021), and China (Li & Li 2023). This paper contributes to that scholarship by focusing on the concept of the national video game itself, rather than on the games tied to a particular country. It proposes a way to organize the academic study of the relationship between video games and nation-states, but it also proposes a solution to practical classification problems that appear in preparing national game databases.

The paper presents the results of a team study. My colleagues and I began by consulting a working list of about twenty database categories prepared by another research team (see acknowledgments). That list had itself been based on an overview of existing video game databases and contained such categories as title, release date, developer, director, platform, or engine. After comparing the list with the outcomes of our own review of the available academic literature, we decided to distinguish five general categories. Their tentative names are as follows: 1. developer, 2. game world (including 2.1. location and 2.2. cultural references), 3. language, 4. gameplay, 5. target audience and marketing. (These categories are types rather than classes, so they are not all mutually exclusive.)

In the next step we applied our categories more systematically to the academic literature. We purposively selected ten publications – eight journal articles and two book chapters – representing several different countries, mostly in Central and Eastern Europe. For every publication, we noted whether each category was represented or not, that is, whether the publication discussed game developers, game worlds, etc. Whenever a category was represented, we took notes of how this was done. The procedure allowed us to analyze the representations of our categories across different publications. Basing on that analysis and internal discussions, we compiled a written description of the definitional issues related to each category. Finally, we read several additional publications to supplement our descriptions with further information.

A typical publication in our corpus describes games related to a particular country but does not examine this relation. Instead, the choice of games is based on an implicit understanding of what makes them Polish, Czech, etc. The most frequent marker of national status is that the game’s developer is based in a certain country, but it is rarely clarified what this specifically means: the location of the legal entity (and the country that receives the taxes), the funding sources, the location of the (main) studio, or the ethnic and cultural background of the company’s owners and workforce. These issues may be less problematic in older games, which were often created by individuals, but they come to the fore in many contemporary games produced by transnational companies and international teams, with widespread outsourcing. For instance, when the multinational team of Donkey Crew left Northern Ireland to set up a company in Wrocław, Poland, did Donkey Crew abruptly become a Polish developer?

The second most frequent marker is that the game deals with national history, geography, or culture. This may be salient in “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” or “Kingdom Come: Deliverance”, or in “Crossbow Warrior – The Legend of William Tell” (MobyDick Games 2015), where the player controls the most famous Swiss hero. But the world of “Baldur’s Gate III” does not have any marked relationship with Belgium; it can be connected much more easily to the USA’s culture via “Dungeons & Dragons”. And while “Deus Ex: Mankind Divided” (Eidos Montréal 2016) is set in the alternative Czech Republic, its developer is based in Canada and is part of a company operating from Sweden. Therefore, the two main national markers can sometimes lead us in opposite directions. Another issue is illustrated by “Disco Elysium” (ZA/UM 2019): with all its references to fascism and communism, is it an Estonian game in the game-world sense, or rather an Eastern European one?

The remaining three categories are much less represented in our corpus but they still bear a certain weight. For example, the use of original game engines in Central and Eastern Europe could be considered a sign of local specificity (Vanderhoef 2021), and some titles developed in Poland have been shaped by a tension between dominant heroic gameplay conventions and the local tragic modes of cultural memory (Sterczewska 2016).

Overall, the paper puts an emphasis on examples from Central and Eastern Europe, in line with the recent attempts to increase the visibility of games associated with that region (Mochocki, Schreiber, Majewski, & Kot, forthcoming). It also proposes a more general conceptualization of national video games, drawing from game studies publications that represent various geographical and theoretical standpoints. At the same time, this is not at attempt to provide one binding definition of a national video game – game scholars need different definitions for different purposes, and they need to keep updating their definitions to match the changes in culture if not in games themselves (Arjoranta 2019). Rather, it is an attempt to demonstrate the diversity of what we may include when conducting academic studies or creating game databases. The presented categories focus on the design and production side of games, not on the reception side; the goal here is to propose a list of game elements that can be important to different people, who can imbue the same elements with different interpretations. Finally, the paper assumes that video games should not be studied in exactly the same way as novels or films, but there is likely some overlap in certain areas – this is a matter for further study.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This paper stems from a collaboration between members of three publicly funded grant projects: Stanisław Krawczyk and Agata Waszkiewicz (“The Polish Video Game Heritage (1958–2025): A Catalog and a Bibliography”, NPRH – National Program for the Development of the Humanities, Poland), Tereza Krobová (“Comprehensive Solutions for the Care of Cultural Heritage in the Field of Game Applications”, NAKI III – Programme to Support Applied Research in the Area of the National and Cultural Identity for the Years 2023 to 2030, the Czech Republic), and David Krummenacher and Larissa Wild (“Confederation Ludens: Swiss History of Games, Play and Game Design 1968–2000”, SNSF – National Science Foundation, Switzerland). I am grateful that my colleagues have agreed for the results of our joint study to be presented this way.

I am also grateful that the other members of “The Polish Video Game Heritage…” project have agreed for its working list of database categories to be used as a resource for the present study.

ABSTRACT. Invented during the late 1970s and still in print today, Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) is one of the most successful publishing phenomena of all time; in the early 2000s, it was outranked only by Coca-Cola in a survey of positive brand recognition among 25- to 32-year-olds. Eli Cook (2021) links the ‘meteoric rise’ of the series to increasing emphasis on individual choice in a neoliberal America that prioritised subjectivity, agency and mobility, arguing that the books were a method of cultural ‘responsibilisation’ during the deregulation era (pp.7-8). Lisa Dusenberry (2010) argues that the ludic nature of these texts, or ‘gamebooks’, created the role of the ‘reader-player’, a ‘possible collaborator’ in the creation of content, rather than its passive recipient (p.449). Such a role was, according to one of the series’ co-creators, ‘intended to empower’ (Hendrix n.d.), and proved hugely desirable, particularly among children: as ten-year-old reader Matthew Fiaschetti observed, ‘these books make you feel like you are making the life-risking decisions, not reading about somebody making all the choices as they write the book’ (Montgomery 1980).

However, as I will demonstrate, the flexibility promised by CYOA’s ‘formal privileging of openness’ (Meifert-Menhard 2013, p.2) does not always deliver. The series invites the reader to play in its created world, only to play games with him or her instead. It purports to offer a liberating fictional playground that facilitates oscillation between what Frederic Seraphine (2016) has termed ‘immersion’ and ‘emersion’: empathetic identification with a character whose victories can be momentarily enjoyed as one’s own, but also the exploitation of that same character’s body, safely distanced from one’s own, as an experimental ground for risk-taking. Examining the series through the framework of ludonarratology, I demonstrate that, although CYOA markets itself as paideia – free play, adopting new identities, exploring an environment and indulging in mimetic activities – the reality is much closer to ludus, ‘strictly controlled by pre-existing rules accepted by the participants as part of a basic game contract’ (Ryan 2009, p.46); less an open playground, and more a narrow maze through which participants are guided on fixed routes. CYOA ultimately evinces what game designer Clint Hocking (2007) terms ‘ludonarrative dissonance’: its narrative form – redolent of the quest – creates expectations of free will and meaningful decision-making, but its ludic system violates these possibilities by being both restrictive and fundamentally random.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that these gamebooks tend to prompt ‘countergaming’ among child readers: ‘rebellious play’ that deliberately eschews normative standards of victory (Pugh 2019, p.190). If ‘scholars are increasingly considering the negative emotions that games engender, seeking to understand the appeal of ludic encounters based on frustration and disappointment’ (Pugh 2019, p.26), then CYOA provides an interesting case study, since the ‘wrong’ endings are often sought out deliberately and gleefully. ‘That you don’t know if you are going to die or not’ was appreciated by one reader as the best part of the series (Kraft 1981), and further evidence suggests that child readers find cathartic release in abrupt, often violent, manifestations of their loss of power: ‘Where else, in the squeaky-clean world of 1980s kidlit, did you get the illicit thrill of being slaughtered in such novel, horrific ways?’ (Kraus 2016). Moreover, the books actively encourage the ‘five-fingered bookmark’, ‘reading and rereading until you’ve had not one but many incredibly daring experiences’, ultimately rendering meaningless their own ‘rules’ and exploding relationships between action and consequence, risk and responsibility. We witness the evolution of this in CYOA’s wide-ranging legacy; in bathetic, parodic spin-offs such as the interactive text game ‘You’re a farmer. Can you squeeze the milk out of all the animals?’ (2016) on the satire website ClickHole, or Who Killed John F. Kennedy? (2013), part of a ‘Lose Your Own Adventure’ series that entices potential readers with the ‘not one but many incredibly depressing defeats’ within (Amazon, n.d.). This paper argues that CYOA ultimately engenders an irreverent attitude towards risk, removing meaning from decision-making and cultivating an apathy reminiscent of what we now term ‘decision fatigue’. This is partly responsible for the format’s mixed cultural reception, then and now: I will explore how anxieties related to risk and responsibility surface in discourse surrounding diverse modern manifestations of CYOA, including ‘militainment’ software used to train and prepare soldiers for real-life warfare, controversial children’s gamebooks such as War in Afghanistan: An Interactive Modern Adventure (2014), and interactive ‘reality’ Netflix gameshows such as You vs. Wild (2019).

ABSTRACT. The use of virtual reality (VR) in exhibitions not only allows visitors greater participation, but also offers museums the possibility to convey content in a novel way. Studies indicate that VR in the form of gamified elements, so-called “edutainment” (Moesgard et al., 2015, p. 388), has a positive impact on knowledge gain and return intention in museum exhibitions (Puig et al., 2020). However, the extent to which individual media users have different expectations of virtual edutainment is rarely considered, leaving a particularly relevant context for public playgrounds unexamined. We fill this research gap by using the notion of digital immigrants and natives (Prensky, 2009), which describes media users who familiarized with the use of digital media in earlier or later stages in life. However, research indicates that age shouldn’t be considered as a sole context for media competenceliteracy (Bekebrede, Warmelink & Mayer, 2011) which is why we understood the the notion of digital natives and immigrants can be understood as conceptual combination of age, media socialization and personal (media) experience. Building on this our study aimed to investigate the following research questions.

RQ1: How do museum visitors assess concepts like virtual edutainment in museums?

RQ2: Which categories matter for museum visitors to perceive VR as a playground?

RQ3: To what extent do these expectations and attitudes differ with regard to the generation of media users?

The study took place in cooperation with a local art museum. Visitors were offered the opportunity to explore the ballroom of a former baroque town house as in form of a VR model. At this point, visitors had already gained knowledge about the ballroom as it was part of an ongoing exhibition in the museum. The exploration of the VR model was presented as an opportunity to gain better understanding of the art pieces in the ballroom. We gathered a convenience sample of volunteer participants, which out of the  still reflected the regular audience of the museum well. . This model was developed in advance with the art history department of the university. As a methodological approach, a mixed methods approach was chosen, consisting of a quantitative questionnaire with closed and open questions as well as a participant observation. For the quantitative survey, items from a study by Jung et al. (2016) were used, which had already been tested in the context of VR in exhibitions. In addition, open-ended questions were used to inquire about prior VR experiences, attitudes towards VR, and expectations of VR in museums. The field phase of the project took place on four Sundays in June 2023. For this purpose, a station with two VR glasses was set up in the museum. Visitors were able to explore the virtual ballroom with the help of two VRhe glasses and tothen fill out the questionnaire afterwards. The constant presence of two researchers during the experience enabled participant observation. A total of 49 people (n = 49) completed the questionnaire. Participants were 18 to 29 years old (n = 11), 30 to 49 years old (n = 15), 50 to 69 years old (n = 14), and 70 years old or older (n = 9). Most participants from 18 to 49 years had high level of comfort with digital media and previous experiences with VR. Hence, wWe categorized them as participants from 18 to 49 years as digital natives with a higher level of comfort with digital media. They usually had prior experiences with VR technologies. Participants from 50 to 70 years often expressed confidence in their media competenceliteracy, but old or older encompassed the digital immigrants group, who were largely unexperienced in VR use. We categorized this group as digital immigrants.

Our field observations were analyzed by using the logic of grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 2017), combined with a comparison of mean values in questionnaire results. Through this method we identified four central categories, which are shaping the VR experience of museum visitors: Interaction, immersion, usability and prevalence. Study results indicate that the integration of VR elements is generally met with openness and curiosity among all visitors. However, previous experiences with VR and age contexts definitely play a major role regarding to the expectations of VR in the exhibition. For this reason, in the presentation we will elaborate on the central categories in comparison between digital natives and immigrants.

In particular, young and VR-experienced people approached the VR use with high expectations for interaction, making this category fundamental to their expectation of an immersive experience. Digital immigrants assessed interactive elements more as an additional challenge in VR use, that didn’t automatically contribute to their immersion in a positive way. Meanwhile the group of digital natives perceived interaction as key to an immersive experience, digital immigrants defined immersion more as the level of detail and historical accurateness VR could offer. Regarding usability, digital immigrants, both with and without prior VR experience, often expressed a desire for VR to be as user-friendly as possible. These results pointed out that a  Most of them felt more comfortable if they were personally assisted during their VR experience, which is why a VR experience that would have’ve fulfilled digital natives’ standards of high immersion, might have been perceived as an overwhelming experience for unexperienced visitors. As digital natives were more experienced with VR use, they expressed less concerns about their ability to use and enjoy VR experiences. Digital natives expressed positive feelings about more prevalent VR elements in exhibitions, encouraging museums to integrate VR experiences regularly. Digital immigrants on the other hand were concerned about a more prevalent VR taking up too much space in exhibitions and replacing the actual visit of museums.

As a conclusion, we therefore recommend to deal scientifically more with the question on how different contexts like media literacy and socialization shape our perceptions of VR as a playground and our expectations of it. Additionally, future research on this topic could include the perspective of museum-employees. By doing so, inclusive playground concepts might be developed that are able to connect various audiences in public spaces.

References

Bekebrede, G., Warmelink, H. J. G., & Mayer, I. S. (2011). Reviewing the need for gaming in education to accommodate the net generation. Computers & Education, 57(2), 1521-1529. Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (2017). Discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Routledge. Jung, T., tom Dieck, M. C., Lee, H., Chung, N. (2016). Effects of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality on Visitor Experiences in Museum. In A. Inversini & R. Schegg (Eds.), Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism, (p. 621-635). Springer International Publishing. Moesgaard, T. G., Fiss, J., Warming, C., Klubien, J., & Schoenau-Fog, H. (2015). Implicit and explicit information mediation in a virtual reality museum installation and its effects on retention and learning outcomes. In Proceedings of the 9th ECGBL (387-394). Prensky, M. (2009). H. sapiens digital: From digital immigrants and digital natives to digital wisdom. Innovate: journal of online education, 5(3). Puig, A., Rodríguez, I., Arcos, J. L., Rodríguez-Aguilar, J. A., Cebrián, S., Bogdanovych, A., & Piqué, R. (2020). Lessons learned from supplementing archaeological museum exhibitions with virtual reality. Virtual Reality, 24, 343-358.

ABSTRACT. This study introduces Dou Dizhu For All, also known as “Fighting the Landlord” or “Fighting the Lord”, an adapted version of the traditional Chinese card game Dou Dizhu (no publisher), designed for both BVIPs and sighted players. This study will involve two phases: firstly, the adaptation of the game, focusing on the design of interfaces. This includes implementing accessibility features such as customised Text-to-Speech (TTS), audio cues, a voice command system powered by ChatGPT’s language model, and the design of the user interface (UI). Secondly, semi-structured interviews with end-users, which is based on Immersion Experience Questionnaire (IEQ) (Jennett et al. 2008). The following outlines the design process and the methodological plan for this study.

ABSTRACT. Games are not things played on computers; games are things modeled by computers. While this formulation of the relationship between games and computation has long been present in videogame criticism (e.g., Golumbia 2009; Aarseth 2012), it has more recently become a dominant strain of scholarship, as in Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux’s attention to practices of “metagaming” or Miguel Sicart’s description of videogames as “playable software” (Boluk and LeMieux 2017; Sicart 2023). Games, in this framing, are not fixed containers that determine and regulate play, they are malleable tools that are themselves always in play. The cartridges and IPs of the videogame industry are only the techno-cultural manifestation of one possible vision for play.

In this talk, I will explore the implications of this framing of games and computation for longer histories of games and longer histories of computation. Through a brief survey of writings on games by four of the central figures in the development of the computer – Charles Babbage, John von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Konrad Zuse – I will argue that games served as models of computational systems throughout the early history of computation and were essential to the development of the modern computer. Following the work of scholars like Sebastian Möring, Steven E. Jones, Claus Pias, Colin Milburn, and Patrick Jagoda, who point to the modeling-capacity of games as a site of knowledge production, I will move beyond common narratives limiting games to their metaphorical value or as trivial hobbies, and instead identify specific conceptual developments in the history of computation that owe their existence to the structure of specific games: In his unpublished papers, Babbage penned an essay on the mathematical study of games where he develops a symbolic notation system for the relative position of games in space and over time, that later serves as the foundation of his famed “Mechanical Notation” and the mechanical innovation of the “anticipatory carriage,” which greatly improved the speed of his engines by planning their position in advance. These practical and mechanical innovations help us to re-evaluate the fact that Babbage explicitly credited his idea for the “Analytical Engine” to his earlier mathematical study of chess in his first two published essays on the Engine.

While Babbage’s early use of games to model computation were mostly forgotten in the twentieth century, the independent rediscovery of games as computational models during the wartime development of the first general-purpose computers helps to reinforce the structural relationship between games and computation. John von Neumann’s status as the founder of game theory and author of the designs for the first programmable general-purpose computer attests to an implicit connection between games and computation, but his unpublished remarks and plans for a computer chess program make the relationship explicit. Both von Neumann and Zuse independently developed programmable computers hidden by the “fog of war” during World War II, and both emphasized computer chess programs as a model for what we now call “software.” Alan Turing went further still, telling friends that chess was a model system for the human intellect itself. Turing’s personal study of chess theory and his collaboration with chess masters on the Enigma machine at Bletchley Park influenced his later work on cryptoanalysis algorithms and machine intelligence. Computer chess would grow to become the central model for AI research in the 1960s-70s, but in this earlier moment, it had a tangible impact on the design of the modern programmable computer.

Through this brief survey of Babbage, von Neumann, Zuse, and Turing, I argue that games played computers before computers could ever play games. This inversion of the historical relationship between games and computers not only opens up much longer histories of games, it also helps us to imagine the productive capacity for games in the present. Games can help us to model new ways of computing and new ways of living. Games can serve as computational playgrounds without grounding play in the systems of the present.

REFERENCES Aarseth, Espen. 2012. "A Narrative Theory of Games." Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. Boluk, Stephanie, and Patrick LeMieux. 2017. Metagaming: Playing, Competing, Spectating, Cheating, Trading, Making, and Breaking Videogames. Vol. 53. U of Minnesota Press Golumbia, David. 2009. "Games Without Play." New literary history 40.1. Jagoda, Patrick (2020). Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification. University of Chicago Press. Milburn, Colin. 2015. Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter. Duke University Press. Möring, Sebastian Martin. 2013. “Games and Metaphor–A Critical Analysis of the Metaphor Discourse in Game Studies.” Diss. IT University of Copenhagen. Pias, Claus. 2017. Computer Game Worlds. Pakis, Valentine A., tr. Diaphanes. Sicart, Miguel. 2023. Playing Software: Homo Ludens in Computational Culture. MIT Press.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract offers an account of the rise and fall of TV POWWW! and its technical functions. TV POWWW! was a little-known technology from early videogame history that allowed television viewers to control videogames over the telephone. We explore TV POWWW!’s implications for the history of videogames, online interactivity, media spectatorship, and game design.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract explores the transmedia strategies in the works of the 1980s UK game designer Mel Croucher and his company Automata UK. The abstract is based on multiple interviews with Croucher, his archives held by the Northwest Computer Museum, the contemporary 1980s gaming press, and the analysis of his games and their paratexts.

ABSTRACT. My extended abstract explains research where I am historicising several alternate definitions of virtual worlds, placing them within their politico-institutional contexts. I will show how shifts in the ways we talk about virtual worlds reflected a tendency to quantify and rationalise game worlds — often with the purpose of creating a parallelism between virtual and real worlds — dulling their utopian potential.

ABSTRACT. At the turn of the 2010s, with the precursor works of Schulzke (2009), Sicart (2009), and Zagal (2009), game studies began focusing on a question which could be summarized as follows: how can single-player video games morally engage their audience? Role-playing games with moral systems were especially criticized for neutralizing moral engagement, while now classics such as Paper’s Please (Pope 2013), Spec Ops: The Line (Yäger 2013), and The Walking Dead (Telltale 2012) received much praise for fostering it. However, the concept of moral engagement remains to this day limited in scope. Game scholars have implied that moral engagement is a strategy that falls under a specific type of video game cognivitism, whose premise is that video games “teach players about the world external to […] games” (Declos 2021, 8). This is because moral engagement has been modelled on the characteristics of true moral dilemmas, which prevents the player from adopting an “instrumental perspective” (Staines et al. 2019, 273) that considers morality for something other than itself, such as points on a moral meter or new abilities to unlock. Indeed, since moral dilemmas are thought experiments, which are “ordinarily seen as bona fide sources of propositional knowledge in other contexts (e.g., in science or philosophy), the same ought to hold when they are embedded in artworks” (Declos 2021, 11). To teach about the external world, moral dilemmas in games must remain pure thought experiments that are devoid of ludic biases, neutralizing any instrumental perspective. From a virtue ethics lens, the resulting understanding of moral engagement and value ascribed to true moral dilemmas are misleading.

One problem is that moral dilemmas draw attention to choices taken in isolation. But selecting the better of two bad options does not inherently make it a good choice. Hence one may wonder how a moral agent would benefit cognitively and, more broadly, personally from it. Regarding moral dilemmas, virtue ethicists such as Hursthouse (2001) claim that it is more important to assess how the action is delivered in terms of desires, emotions, and attitudes, rather than focusing misleadingly on what the right decision is. It would be a mistake then to view moral engagement in games as the act of merely engaging with morally complex problems (which might just be irresolvable) since the moral life also consists in learning ways of being that develop virtues of character.

The true moral dilemma model also suggests that there is incompatibility between moral reflection and what Leino (2011) calls the gameplay condition, i.e. the material constraints that limit the player’s freedom, such as a game over screen. This is exemplified by the contrast between how game studies have praised the moral dilemma in the “Oasis” quest from Fallout 3 (Bethesda 2008) and how the field has criticized the Little Sisters “dilemma” in BioShock (2K Games 2007). The first dilemma does not promote instrumentality at all (no reward awaits the player), while the latter contains a “moral temptation” (Ryan et al. 2016, 8), meaning that there is an obvious immoral option which is tempting for the player who seeks to progress in the game. However, from a virtue ethics perspective, the Little Sisters dilemma might be more interesting for moral engagement than the one included in the “Oasis” quest because the player has to make a personal choice regarding their in-game situation. Akin to difficult circumstances in everyday life that call for much virtue, when poverty stands in the way of honesty, when phobia interferes with courage, when grief desensitized compassion, and so on (Hursthouse 2001, 97-98), the player’s character is seriously tested when they are under the threat of failure. It is more difficult for them to respond with the appropriate ways of being (emotions, desires, and attitudes) when they have to anticipate challenges that they could face if they decline the possibility of gaining powers or abilities.

Problematizing further the true moral dilemma model, this paper offers to read the morally engaging games Papers, Please and The Walking Dead (Telltale 2012) under a new light, which embraces false, biased, or irresolvable dilemmas. It provides an understanding of moral engagement that is suited to account for the gameplay condition, hence for the actual thoughts entertained by the player as they play the game, completing goals and surmounting challenges. Thanks to a virtue ethics perspective, it defends that the purpose of implementing any sort of dilemma in games is to put the player in a set of difficult circumstances that test their virtues of character by mobilizing appropriate ways of being.

ABSTRACT. A common practice in the production of digital games is crunching, working long hours to meet project deadlines. Despite its widespread occurence, there is little investigation being done and little evidence being presented in researches on the subject. The aim of this extended abstract is to present preliminary results of a scoping review on the characteristics of crunch in the game industry. From 2922 studies identified, 41 were included for this analysis. Evidence is presented on the subject regarding the characteristics that crunch can take on, associations and correlations pointed out by the literature. In addition, evidence is presented on how crunch can be reduced and suggestions are made to future studies about crunch in the game industry.

ABSTRACT. This presentation provides the first production studies account of Danish game makers, an overlooked but significant regional part of the Western game industries. We focus on three issues: The history of the Danish games industry show that the often-invoked demoscene does not explain the relative success of Nordic game industries; that Danish game makers consider aesthetic independence - creating new kinds of games - more important than being financially independent or making games as cultural statements; and finally, that Danish game developers are ambivalent about growth, often emphasizing merely paying the rent or the importance of a good workplace. The presentation thus provides a key understanding of an under-researched region with emphasis on its history, its cultural status as product and culture, and the self-identification of game makers with broader implications for research on game production studies on ‘indies’, and commercial game makers.

ABSTRACT. INTRODUCTION Videogame companies are made up of capital, resources, and workers. One such group of workers goes to work every day in the largest physical game development studio in the world: Ubisoft Montréal. I interviewed 22 such people who have worked on the Assassin’s Creed franchise (Ubisoft, 2007), who were selected for their role in the decision-making that led to one of the best-selling franchises in the world. Participants included almost all Creative Directors who ever worked on the franchise, most of its ‘Brand Team,’ various designers, writers, programmers, artists, and other roles.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS, LITERATURE AND CONTRIBUTIONS Who decides to put certain worldviews into a game? How do they do so, and why? These research questions pose two main contributions. Firstly, it adds to our understanding of the inner workings at big game development companies. Most studies are:

1. either cultural-sociological studies of small teams or independent developers (e.g., Bulut, 2021; Keogh, 2023; Ozimek, 2021; Pelletier, 2022), meaning they look primarily at individuals—which is helpful because it shows us how and why games are made by people; 2. or are political-economic studies of large-scale ‘AAA’ (i.e., big budget) game production (e.g., Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009; Nieborg, 2011; van Roessel & Švelch, 2021; Švelch, 2022), meaning they look primarily at the larger economic structure of development—which is helpful because it shows us how and why games are made by companies.

WORKERS 3. However, this study combines a cultural-sociological study of workers at Ubisoft, with a political-economic study of the large-scale AAA corporate context in which they work (cf. Kerr, 2017; O’Donnell, 2014), meaning it looks at how and why games are made by people in a company—which is helpful because it shows us how and why game-making involves crushing the individuality of workers under corporate capitalist cultural production.

WORLDVIEWS Secondly, while a lot has been written about which worldviews are represented in videogames and how the “culture industry” more generally produces worldviews, or even “ideology” (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1947); only a combination of cultural-sociological and political-economic study of how workers (re)produce worldviews can contribute to knowing how such ideologically charged cultural products actually come to exist. Assassin’s Creed was chosen as a case study specifically because it is a game about worldviews – specifically about (competing) conspiratorial and religious worldviews; which is odd because most of labour force and most of its audience consists of non-religious demographics (de Wildt, 2023).

METHOD, DATA AND ANALYSIS Based on 22 interviews, five months of ethnography in Montréal, and analysis of internal and external documentation, I argue that the ‘Who’ of Ubisoft was once a person with a very clear (anti-religious, anti-dogmatic) idea (Patrice Désilets); while showing how Assassin's Creed became subsequently standardized into a codified manufacturing process. How? Marketing, editorial and production teams curb creative teams into reproducing a formula: the commodified ‘marketable’ worldview of Assassin’s Creed.

CONCLUSION: Why? So that this 'marketable' (standardized, commodified) worldview can be consumed by everyone; regardless of cultural background or conviction. By providing a genealogy of how one company and its workers successfully accomplished this, this paper adds an empirically grounded perspective on the ‘who,’ ‘why’ and ‘how’ of cultural industries’ and its workers’ successful commodification of worldviews.

REFERENCES Bulut, E. 2021. White masculinity, creative desires, and production ideology in video game development. Games and Culture, 16(3), 329-341. de Wildt, L. 2023. “Franchised Esotericism: Religion as a Marketing Strategy for the Assassin's Creed Franchise.” In Fictional Practices of Spirituality I: Interactive Media edited by L. Marcato and F. Schniz, 301-318. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Dyer-Witheford, N., & de Peuter, G. 2009. Games of empire. Global capitalism and video games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hammar, E.L., de Wildt, L., Mukherjee, S., & Pelletier, C. 2021. Politics of Production: Videogames 10 years after Games of Empire. Games and Culture, 16(3), 287-293. Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T.W. 1947 [1997]. Dialektik der aufklärung (Vol. 3). Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag. IGDA 2014 Game Crediting Guide 9.2. Toronto: IGDA. Keogh, B. 2023. The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist: Why We Should Think Beyond Commercial Game Production. Massachusetts, MA: MIT Press. Kerr, A. 2017. Global games: Production, circulation and policy in the networked era. Taylor & Francis. Nieborg, D.B. 2011. Triple-A: The political economy of the blockbuster video game (Doctoral thesis). Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands. O'Donnell, C. 2014. Developer's dilemma: The secret world of videogame creators. MIT press. Ozimek, A.M. 2021. “Construction and Negotiation of Entrepreneurial Subjectivities in the Polish Video Game Industry.” in Game production studies edited by O. Sotamaa and J. Švelch, 257-274. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Pelletier, C. 2022. Charming work: An ethnography of an indie game studio. Convergence, 28(2), 561-578. Švelch, Jan. 2022. Developer credit: para-industrial hierarchies of in-game credit attribution in the video game industry. Games and Culture, 17(3), 374-398. Ubisoft Montréal. 2007. Assassin’s Creed. Sony PlayStation 3. Saint-Mandé, Île-de-France, France: Ubisoft. van Roessel, L., and Jan Švelch. 2022. "Who Creates Microtransactions: The Production Context of Video Game Monetization." Game production studies edited by O. Sotamaa and J. Švelch, 197-216. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

ABSTRACT. This project is a collaborative autoethnography of playgrounding with Tamagotchis. Tamagotchis, the egg-shaped virtual pet toys, were widely and wildly popular in the mid-1990s in Japan and beyond. Tamagotchis are currently living through a minor revival driven by 1990s nostalgia, their ‘low-tech’ appeal, and the enduring draw of caring for critters.

During Tamagotchi's heyday, the yet-to-fully-emerge field of Game Studies was still firmly grounded in computer and console games, which can explain why this digital plaything has received little scholarly attention despite its huge cultural impact on daily life. Some of the previtous research and writing on the Tamagotchi focused on its mobile aspect (Lawton 2017), the “disposable love” it offers (Bloch and Lemish 1999), the virtual caregiving it requires (Timson 1997) and its "prosthetic" presence (Allison 2006). Acknowledging Tamagotchi's cultural significance, this paper approaches this digital-analogue fusion toy as a shared, mobile play tool for placemaking, - or more accurately playgrounding. Playgrounding is a spatializing and anchoring practice in which players use playful media to create a sense of both place and one's place relative to others (Halegoua and Polson 2021, 573; cf. Hjorth and Lammes 2023 fc.). In this case the authors as players do so through carrying and play-caring for this digital media artefact as a pet or child, thus conflating notions of technology, human, and non-human.

In July 2023, Bandai Toys released the newest edition called Tamagotchi Uni. Unlike the original version, Tamagotchi Uni has a color screen, can be attached to the wrist like a watch, connected to the "TamaVerse" via the internet and can befriend other UniTamas on the same network. In this quadruple auto-ethnography we, “The Tama-Parents”, will be exploring what it means to provide continuous care, commitment, and attention to our Unitamas to come to better understand the grounds of play this critter proposes. We will consider this simultaneous auto-ethnographic play as a particular form of playgrounding, in which notions of fun, attention, commitment and (failure of) care are an intrinsic part of a spatial, connective, and ongoing process. In our exploration of the UniTamas in the TamaVerse, Park, Arcade, or Mall, we will be using two sources of data: autoethnographic vignettes and the group's “The Tama Parent Club” WhatsApp group chat. Each of the four Tama-Parents will be taking care of their Tama's for four consecutive weeks, regularly writing autoethnographic vignettes on their experience as caregivers/players and sharing updates and feelings with each other on the process of raising our UniTamas through WhatsApp.

Through this collaborative process, we want to better understand how playgrounding works as a situated care practice that is (or isn't) compatible with the grounds of daily life. We will analyze how this month with a companion species (cf. Haraway 2003) changes our ways of understanding homemaking, travel and work and our networked and collaborative understanding of those spatio-temporal practices. With a focus on the affordances of the Tamagotchi, we are interested in how, during this playgrounding, certain care-work actions of the player are praised or even demanded, and others are discouraged as part of our daily activities (Gibson 1986). Also, how do we as players deal with the care-work this critter seems to ask for while being in different places and how does this resonate or collide with the care demands and invitations of others at home, work or while being on the move (like students, dogs, children, plants or other loved ones)? And how constrained are we in how and where we engage with the Tama? E.g. can we take it to all places or are some off-limits to (visible) playgrounding? But also: how does the Tama (fail to) ground us and where do we fail the Tama in this spatio-temporal process? When does taking care of it turn into a boring chore and what does this tell us about the relation between play (grounding), labor and care?

In this collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al. 2012; Lammes and de Smale 2018), we use playgrounding and care as sensitizing concepts –that is as our starting point to understand our experiences (Blumer 1954)– and to develop a (play)grounded theory through what emerges from our data. The collaborative aspect of this autoethnography also puts forward the group interactions and group meaning-making processes (Chang et al. 2012, 24) and therefore draws attention to what we will call "collaborative playgrounding", instead of focusing on the Tamagotchi caring as a solitary play practice. This allows us to compare and connect the ways in which we deal with the Tamagotchi, but also to have an ongoing dialogue about where we are and what it does to our sense of place and care. Our collaborative auto-ethnography also allows us to analyze – and have a dialogue about – the cultural and personal similarities and differences we have in how we understand playgrounding and caring. We will analyze how the process of playgrounding that we embarked upon together with our Tamagotchis, invited us to engage with ideologically imbued daily routines and care behaviors in certain places and moments, or made us resist such affordances as part of the politics of everyday life.

ABSTRACT. Becoming a Game Studies lecturer. What is the point? We work in a field that is interdisciplinary (Deterding 2017). Yet, the ways in which our field is imagined can be relatively narrow – as in the recent UK Video Games Research Framework (UK Department for Culture, Media & Sport 2023). Here, we focus on the relationships between teaching Game Studies and the field. Ongoing questions about the field are one reason why it is important to continue to reflect on what we are doing, and why. In this paper, three games lecturers collectively explore the roles we play in constituting and cultivating the future of Game Studies. During the last two decades, there has been considerable expansion to Higher Education (HE) provision related to videogames (Keogh and Hardwick 2023). We have seen writings and reflections on the act of teaching games in HE, including: how game-related courses can be shaped by multiple epistemological affiliations and pedagogical models (Barba 2022; Rouse and Malazita 2023) the relationship between students and the subject matter (Zagal and Bruckman 2008; Ashton 2009; 2010) pedagogical approaches and challenges (Waern, 2013; Geyser, 2018; Bettochi, Klimick and Perani, 2020; Phelps and Consalvo, 2020; Prax, 2020; Bergstrom, 2021; Weiller, 2021; Author and Author, 2022) and, more recently, the interconnections – especially in Anglophone Global North HE – between games education at universities and discourses on employability and labour conditions (Harvey 2019; 2021; 2023; Keogh and Hardwick 2023). The work presented here proposes a contribution to Game Studies by looking at a particular element that is often implied, but rarely addressed in this body of research: how does one become a games lecturer? What kind of epistemological affiliations, pedagogical practices and traditions, and aspirations towards our own teacherly work do we have? And how do we, lecturers, respond to emerging interests shaping the evolution – understood here not as ‘bettering’, but as ‘moving onto different phases’ – of Game Studies as a field? In this small-scale, reflexive study we examine our own experiences teaching videogames at different HE institutions in the UK. Beyond our commonalities – e.g., we all found ourselves working in the UK as Game Studies lecturers after having experienced transnational migration; we all are committed to socially-situated, critical readings of games as elements of cultures –, we are academics with different backgrounds, trajectories, and at different career stages – e.g., one is a professor; one is transitioning between early and mid-career academic; one is an early career academic. In this paper, then, through a collective biography approach (Gonick 2015; Clift and Clift 2017), we leverage our own experiences, including our relationships with games and games research, the challenges found in different stages and iterations of our different teaching practices (including encounters with diverse students), and our own aspirations regarding games in HE in a productive way to understand how our different experiences and perspectives can both help challenge limited understandings of our field (Phillips 2020; Bergstrom 2022) and inform discussions on the possible futures for games in academic contexts. With this work, our goal is not to produce a ‘how to’ manual on teaching games as this would be inappropriate, considering the interdisciplinary nature of game-related education in HE. On the contrary, we argue that, in the same way that the teaching of games in HE should to aim prepare students into becoming cultural workers (Harvey 2019; Keogh 2023), we must recognise ourselves—games lecturers—as cultural workers in the Freirean (Freire 2005) sense: as cultural mediators helping to shape the field.

ABSTRACT. This paper advances the player-leader heuristic, a theoretical framework that provides a foundation for analyzing the values, ideologies, and worldviews that are embedded in videogame representations of leadership. The utility of this framework is illustrated by applying it to several examples.

ABSTRACT. Gameplay spectating expands the playground by breaking the boundaries set within a game to structure the user experience. Watching game streams is a manifestation of this phenomenon, and it has already garnered attention (Taylor, 2018; Egliston, 2020; Johnson & Jackson, 2022). Players can gain knowledge that will in turn influence their gaming by watching these streams. Seen this way, watching game streams is a form of metagaming, which is described as “the practices within, around, outside, and about videogames” (Boluk & Lemieux, 2017, p. 15). This paper aims to explore how game stream watching as metagaming shapes players affective experiences by revealing its different roles in the game Inscryption (2021). In doing so, I will argue that spectating is not solely an external means to provide information to players but is engaged in the process of gameplay and impacts players affective responses to their own play.

ABSTRACT. By understanding the philosophical anxieties that define existential dread, we can manipulate agency mechanics to produce self-reflexive horror experiences unique to interactive metanarrative. This existential dread of choice — confinement and claustrophobia on the one hand and the dreadful liberty of agoraphobia on the other — are exemplified through close readings of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and The Stanley Parable.

ABSTRACT. The gaming industry always has been “relentlessly forward-marching” as Newman put it (2012, 52). Returning to cherished game titles nonetheless allows for a celebration but also commodification of nostalgia (cf. Whalen & Taylor 2008). The gaming industry, then, relies on a “balancing act that simultaneously invokes the revolution of innovation and reassuring familiarly of continuity of form and function” (Newman 2012, 52). A prime example can be found in remakes and remasters. In this paper I will engage with such games by employing the concept of paratextuality, originally coined by Genette to understand and analyze textual material which surrounds a main text to influence or steer its perception and consumption (1997b, 1). Paratextuality has become a key perspective to understand the gaming experience and gaming histories (cf. Beil et al. 2021; Seiwald and Vollans 2023). Here, I question in what ways we can consider remakes and remasters as paratextual in relation to their original games; how this perspective allows us to reflect on the industry’s dealing with past and present, and what it means for our understanding of the player experience of such games.

ABSTRACT. Hogwarts Legacy (2023) is an open-world action roleplaying game set in the 1800s. The game expands the Wizarding World franchise, which originated in J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. In this game, one plays a fifth-year student in nineteenth-century Hogwarts whose affinity to learning ancient magic becomes key to suppressing a rebellion led by insurgent goblins. Prior to and during its release, the game attracted controversy because of J.K Rowling’s controversial positions regarding trans women with a number of players calling for a boycott of the game.

Existing scholarship have examined how games have contributed to expanding transmedia franchises (Parker 2013). Scholarship has also pointed out transmedia franchises’ complex associations with late capitalism and empire (Hassler-Forest 2016). Scholars have also noted how transmedia franchises utilize racelifting (Rish 2015) and filter bubbles (Kusrtiz 2021). Within game studies, scholars note similar representational practices in the use of private gameworlds especially in relation to representing queerness (Ostby 2017), or blockbuster resonance, especially in how franchises tackle racist discourses (Zanescu 2023). Game scholars have also demonstrated how games reproduce colonial mapping practices and understandings of space (Mukherjee 2016; Patterson 2016), racial constructions (Leonard 2003), intersectional construction (Murray 2017), and postracial tropes (Marks 2022).

This paper seeks to add to these discussions to demonstrate how games such as Hogwarts Legacy utilize games to try to play into diversity discourses and the politics of representation while masking the franchise’s problematic histories. By examining how discourses of race, gender and sexuality are linked in the game, I examine how these intersections of oppression are linked, and how games play into masking these oppressions.

Methodologically, this study deploys a combined narrative interaction (Laure-Ryan 2009) and systems analysis (Bogost 2006) to provide a structured approach to analyze the game’s representational practices. Game data is then analyzed alongside previous media objects in the franchise to interrogate how the gameworld expands existing spatial knowledge of the Wizarding World in prior media objects.

Initial data collection and analysis show a highly broad range of customization options for the player character and a seemingly diverse public gameworld. However, the ability to play a trans character or the game’s default use of “they” pronouns for the player character does not offset the game’s very narrow gender binaries. While the world makes it a point to provide companions and several non-player characters of color, in addition to a few queer and trans quest givers, these are not enough to distract one from the main quest, which double down on the franchise’s anti-semitic tropes. Moreover, progressing through the space of the game involve activities where one is encouraged to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate–game mechanics that scholars have previously pointed out that reinforce imperialism and western conceptions of space (Ford 2016).

Examining contradictions in the game narrative and system demonstrate the importance of an intersectional analysis to demonstrate how the game’s performative approach to diversity attempts to patch over the franchise’s problematic history. This performativity via digital space becomes necessary to maintain a nostalgia for a postfeminist and post-racial past as a way of making the franchise acceptable amidst calls from players to boycott the game.

Ultimately, the ability to play trans and non-binary characters in the game and its presentation of a post-racial and postfeminist Wizarding World masks how the franchises’ harm to trans communities, problematic histories of the British Empire during which the game has been set, and its anti-semetic tropes. This simultaneous performance of diversity and erasure reifies a nostalgic neo-imperialist reorganizing of space and memory to make games and other transmedia titles re-acceptable for neo-liberal consumption.

ABSTRACT. The paper combines ludic and memetic perspectives to understand the tension between variation and repetition in playful practices. Using the ‘NPC trend’ on TikTok as a case study, the analysis shows how non-game spaces and technologies are used in playful ways, and how repetition and "re-presentation" (mimesis) are necessary components in the ludification of creator-audience relationships.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract presents preliminary findings from a study on TikTok fan communities for Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3) and romantic fantasy novels on Booktok. Booktok, a portmanteau of the words ‘book’ and the social media application ‘TikTok’, is a community of authors and readers of all genres who use the platform to analyze, recommend, and make memes about books using videos shorter than 3 minutes. This study uses content analysis to examine 100 TikToks using #baldursgate3 and #booktok to study the overlap of fan communities. Emergent themes resulting from the study indicate an ongoing dialogue among the Booktok and BG3 communities, providing novel insight into motivations to play and engage in gaming beyond discussions of typical motivations like challenge and competition. The extended abstract is of interest for DiGRA audiences as it discusses a previously unstudied phenomena as it relates to player studies and fan culture, as well as provides better understanding of player motivations to seek out gaming. The impact of this paper is in its discussion of social media fandoms as a potential pipeline to introduce underserved populations to games.

ABSTRACT. In this study, we focused on the image of digital games held by learners and attempted to verify the relationship between this image and computational thinking in order to obtain basic findings for enhancing education using digital games. The results indicated that learners' images of games may be related to their creativity and critical thinking.

ABSTRACT. INTRODUCTION Playfulness fosters healthy and sustainable professional lives (Petelczyc et al. 2018). It is positively associated with work satisfaction (Karl and Peluchette 2006) and facilitates creativity (West 2015), innovative behavior, and job performance (Yu et al. 2007). Playfulness can also serve as a coping mechanism to alleviate feelings of boredom or stress caused by job demands, helping workers to sustain productivity and work engagement (Dishon-Berkovits et al. 2023). In this study, we explore preferences for playfulness in the context of virtual meetings (VMs). We aim to understand the potential role of playful features in fostering positive VM experiences by investigating their relationship to well-being, VM fatigue, social interaction anxiety (SIA), and workaholism. In doing so, we expand the theoretical understanding of how playfulness can support workers who struggle with VM interactions.

VIRTUAL MEETING FATIGUE AND PLAYFULNESS Many workers and organizations continue to embrace remote work, leading to the prevalence of meetings mediated by VM platforms (e.g., Zoom) as a key form of interaction. However, Zoom (VM) fatigue—mental, social, and physical exhaustion induced by lack of nonverbal cues or constrained body movement during VMs—has become a common issue workers must confront (Fauville et al. 2021). Individuals with SIA, which elevates fear in social situations (Zellars 2007), especially experience heightened levels of VM fatigue. Workaholics—individuals who experience psychological distress and/or impairment in daily functioning from overworking—may also experience more VM fatigue, leading to lower levels of well-being (Taris and Jan 2023). VMs’ lack of nonverbal cues and spontaneous, playful, and humorous conversations, which assist in social interactions (Lim 2023), can also contribute to increased fatigue for such workers. Consequently, we expect that playfulness in VM can improve VM experiences while not hindering productivity (West et al. 2016), which is linked to enhanced psychological safety (Murugavel and Reiter-Palmon 2023) and meeting effectiveness (Pham & Bartels, 2021). There is evidence that playfulness potentially remedies negative feelings such as anxiety and depression (Proyer et al. 2021) and helps build positive workplace culture (Gallacher et al. 2015). Unfortunately, people with higher anxiety show limited playfulness (Versluys 2017). Similarly, workaholics tend to be uncomfortable with being playful (Kofodimos 1993) perhaps because the stress of excessive working displaces feelings of levity (Burke 2006). Taken together, we question whether integrating playfulness into VMs can ameliorate VM fatigue experienced by people with higher SIA and/or workaholism tendencies. Little is known about the potential benefits of playfulness in VM, especially for those vulnerable to social workplace interactions. Specifically, we seek to explore preferences for playful features for expression (e.g., emojis avatars, filters) depending on VM fatigue levels experienced by individuals with a greater degree of SIA and workaholism. Hence, we pose these hypotheses and research questions. H1. (a) SIA and (b) workaholism are positively associated with VM fatigue. RQ1. How is VM fatigue related to preferences for playful features for expression in VM? RQ2. Does SIA moderate the relationship between VM Fatigue and preferences for playful features for expression in VM? RQ3. Does workaholism moderate the relationship between VM Fatigue and preferences for playful features for expression in VM?

METHODS We conducted an IRB-approved, large-scale survey (N = 2448) with a Qualtrics research panel of US-based participants who identified as remote workers and regularly participated in VMs. We measured VM fatigue by using the Zoom exhaustion and fatigue scale (Fauville et al. 2021), work addiction by using the Bergen Work Addiction Scale (Andreassen et al. 2012), and social interaction anxiety by adapting the SIAS-6 scale (Peters et al. 2012).

PRELIMINARY RESULTS A bivariate correlation analysis revealed that SIA and workaholism were positively associated with each other (r = 0.51***). We then conducted a regression analysis, revealing that VM fatigue was positively associated with SIA (β = 0.40***) and workaholism (β = 0.55***) when controlling for depression, indicating that people with higher SIA and workaholism were more likely to suffer from VM fatigue. We next found an interaction effect of SIA and VM fatigue (β = 0.14***, adj R2 = .12) and an interaction effect of workaholism and VM fatigue (β = 0.24***, adj R2 = .12) on playful VM feature preference, suggesting that for individuals with higher SIA or workaholism, VM fatigue was positively associated with playful feature preference (see Figure 1 and 2). When we combined SIA and workaholism into one regression model, only the interaction effect of workaholism and VM fatigue was significant (β = 0.21*, adj R2 = .13).

DISCUSSION Preliminary findings clearly show how playful features can intervene when it comes to VM fatigue. Those with higher tendencies for SIA and workaholism also tend to report higher levels of VM fatigue, illustrating the stress caused by long periods on videoconferencing platforms. At the same time, people with higher SIA and workaholism tendencies also prefer playful features for personal expression and representation, including using humorous emojis, avatars, and filters. This indicates that they may want to address their VM fatigue by integrating playfulness into their workplace interactions. Those not suffering from VM fatigue may not seek out these extra features because they do not use VM platforms frequently. Interestingly, for users with low SIA or workaholism, we did not find a relationship between VM fatigue and playfulness preference. We can speculate that this occurs because low-frequency users may be less motivated to address VM fatigue because they are less vulnerable to stress caused by workplace interactions. Still, future research should examine this explanation more directly. Ultimately, this research suggests that playfulness is a valuable addition to the virtual workplace, at least for some users. To sustain an enthusiastic and active workforce, VM should resemble playgrounds more than boardrooms.

ABSTRACT. This paper discusses the use of discursive game design exercises in the higher education classroom to materialize, question, and renegotiate the hidden curriculum.

ABSTRACT. 'Shapeless' is a personal reflection on gender identity and sense of belonging. The digital interactive piece explores the discomfort caused by the strict binary that is enforced from birth through societal expectations established under a patriarchal and capitalist society. 'Shapeless' specifically negotiates the line between rejecting feminine gender-roles and rejecting gender outright. The design of the piece is largely influenced by the restrictive binary that is shared amongst character customizers in video games and clothing brand categories; games and shops which have rejected limiting choices by gender has personally been a major space for exploring self-identity.

ABSTRACT. Language has the power to shape our reality. What if it could also mould the virtual worlds we inhabit? 1001 Nights is a narrative game inspired by Wittgenstein's assertion: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.". In this game, Shahrzad, the protagonist, can transform spoken stories from other people into tangible in-game elements. When keywords like 'sword', ‘knife', or `shield' are spoken, they materialize in the game world. Powered by generative AI, "1001 Nights" is divided into storytelling and battle phases. During storytelling, players control Shahrzad, strategically guiding an AI King to narrate tales with keywords, which in turn generate weapons. As these weapons are collected, the world in the story begins to invade the game's reality, a transformation visualized using large language model (LLM) GPT-4 and the text-to-image model Stable Diffusion. Once four weapons are collected, players transition to the battle phase, where they use their collected arsenal to confront the King. The end goal is to rewrite Shahrzad's fate, diverging from the traditional folklore. This game blurs the lines between reality and fiction. Shahrzad seeks to reshape her destiny, challenging patriarchal norms. Players, in tandem with AI, redefine the game's boundaries, crafting stories that surpass authorial constraints. Here, language doesn't just describe the world; it creates it, a phenomenon amplified by generative AI.

ABSTRACT. PROPOSAL For the Experimental Submission section of DiGRA 2024, I propose a hybrid talk/exhibition of my ongoing project Unsweet Tea, a series of short experimental games that center around questions of the body, experimental game design, personal games, and controller eroticism. My work lies in the in-between space of art and scholarship and demands that academia takes seriously how games can be more integrated into scholarly output.

My current project Unsweet Tea is a collection of video game sculptures, or gamebodies that ask the player to manipulate, deform, and/or put back together my body. Unsweet Tea is a collection of my digital bodies. It is more representative of how I want the world to see me than the bag of bones and blood that types this proposal. I have released one of these gamebodies already, Poke. Stroke. Grasp.. In Poke. Stroke. Grasp. players manipulate footage of me poking myself in the eye, grabbing at my mouth and cheeks and stroking my face by mimicking these movements on a video game controller. The game is an exploration of body dysphoria and how to translate meaning through controller input. In total, I plan to have three small games available to play for this exhibition.

Figure 1: Images from Poke. Stroke. Grasp

Video games have the opportunity to be posthuman trans-euphoric bodies if we allow ourselves as game creators and scholars to push past the hegemonic design norms and indulge in the eroticism and intimacy of video games and play. They are not worlds but are instead bodies to be engaged with. The squeeze of the triggers, the press of buttons, the warmth of the air coming out of the PC, are all moments of intimacy with technology we rarely engage with meaningfully.

For this presentation, I propose a session where I speak for the first half of the time allowed on the importance of games as scholarly work, bodies, and discuss my current project(s). For the second half I would like to have multiple stations set up throughout the room where players can play with my gamebodies. It would be helpful if the conference could supply a handful of laptops for this experience. If this is not feasible, I am sure I can beg and plead with my University to provide the technology required. An alternative option would be to set up the video games in an expo hall, but I believe it is important for experimental formats to be taking up the same space that more traditional scholarly research does. I am happy to discuss with the decision committee how best to present my games if neither of my submissions work.

ABSTRACT. This zine contains images, descriptions, and outcomes from Renewable Artgames Residency (RAR). Held during the summer of 2023, RAR was a prototype initiative focused on low-carbon digital design methods and new modes for sustainability-focused creation practices. It aimed to reorient game creators towards the impacts of digital game creation as part of an expanded ecology that includes hardware and material resources, the energy cost of computing and its intersection with common development and creative practices, the impact of creative outputs (including distribution and game play), and, in the context of these challenges, the physical and emotional impact of the creative process. RAR sought to look beyond “greenwashing” approaches to offer real, efficacious solutions and models, developed with and through practice, that could both inspire and support game makers who hope to engage in more sustainable creative practices.

Within the zine are details on the solar generators we used, images from the games we worked on, outlines of our virtual co-working set up, and ideas of what we would do different for next sustainably powered game residencies or long-form jams. We would like to distribute the zine and share our intentions, experiences, and suggestions with the DiGRA community.

ABSTRACT. I will build a dog playground for humans that can be used by DiGRA participants to critically deconstruct the design of pet toys, spatial constraints, naming stereotypes, and training facilities for dogs (ladders, hurdles, rubber bones, chill zones, etc). There will also be the possibility of a guided tour.

There is a famous paper by philosopher Thomas Nagel titled "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" The paper was first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974. The project I propose to be staged and discussed at DiGRA2024 in Mexico/ Guadalajara is an investigation into animal playgrounds and about the assumptions, prejudices, and observations humans have when designing such playgrounds. Particularly I want to focus on dog playgrounds that can be found in my hometown Berlin as well as in many other cities.

ABSTRACT. City Residuals is an interactive web development project based on my contemplation about individualized experience in the city. The project hypothesizes the city as an interface that invokes people’s perception and helps them process the information behind. Using the interactivity and flexibility the web offers, City Residuals provides a highly-customizable experience that invite the visitors to rethink about city’s functionality and potential and experiments with possible gamified interaction mechanism and space representation within digital media. City Residuals is inspired by many of the urban and space related theory, including The Situationist’s creative approach in exploring urban space and Juhani Pallasmaa’s writings about phenomenology of space. City Residuals uses 3d tiles from Google Map and customized 3d assets to create a virtual landscape that is highly representational while keeping some realistic info from the selected urban landscapes. As the users are browsing the space, they are allowed to interact with the 3d objects which will open up new windows in the browser with various kinds of curated info or change the visual effect of the whole environment. The interactions add layers to the virtual landscape and proposes an interaction style that combines spatial elements and browser-based elements, metaphorically echoes with the concept of dérive by the situationist. The landscape of cyberspace is the new urban landscape we need to explore as interfaces, and the various digital info and windows that channelize new connections are the sensational encountering we have in our everyday life with objects and people. While the dérive focuses on revolting against the mundane and uncreative everyday experience, the cyber dérive want to arouse curiosity and refreshment with digital simulations and info that we are getting accustomed to more and more every day. The project proposes a kind of reality that exists in the online space, between the 3d space and 2d browser window, between hyperlinks and digitized info, and arouses our recognition of the city experience in a gamified way. I hope this experimental project could bring insights to the creation of online games, web-based experiences or gamified experiences that involves spatial interaction.

ABSTRACT. Playscape is an artist book and work on paper made in the format of a folding Chinese scroll. It began when Nelson and Ng were talking about their mutual enjoyment of public playgrounds as a form of sculpture. Both artists see playgrounds as places of fun, risk, exploration, danger, excitement, and learning. Following the design philosophy of Aldo Van Eyck, playgrounds are abstract modular landscapes that seek to maximise the expressive potential of young bodies and minds. Public playgrounds are a critical part of childhood experience in Hong Kong, where open spaces unstructured by traffic or commerce are rare. In 2021, Nelson helped Ng develop a motion capture pipeline for visualising the improvised and ephemeral movement of children in Hong Kong clambering and climbing over these colourful structures. Ng developed this into an expanded technique for making large-scale steel sculptures, which visualised how this movement unfolded in time and space. In 2022, when Hong Kong playgrounds remained wrapped in ‘DANGER’ tape due to prolonged pandemic measures, Nelson and Ng responded to the shared melancholy of these empty playgrounds and created a joyful, sprawling fantasy playscape with the motion data Ng had recorded the previous year. Drawing on his love of isometric computer games and their relationship to scroll painting, Nelson created a ludic landscape to house Ng’s motion data, composed of equipment from her original studies and some he improvised, along with a gridded landscape inspired by utopian architects such as Constant Nieuwenhuys and Superstudio, who also saw play as a path to envisioning a brighter future. Into these landscapes Nelson also embedded fossils and procedurally generated flowers, highlighting the beauty and sadness of Hong Kong’s empty playgrounds, as well as the fun and revelry of an imaginary world defined by thrilling monkey bars that span across terrifying chasms. Returning to her childhood, Ng introduced rainbow pens that change colour as you write, which the pair used to execute a unique physical version of the work, and which they replicated in the digital version contained in this book. Nelson and Ng hope you enjoy their scroll, and hope you find the same mixture of fun, melancholy, and wonder they see when they imagine a playground world.

ABSTRACT. This extensive game design document/bible outlines the world, characters, narrative, mechanics, items, maps, and concept art of an original game idea called Elapse. Elapse is a response to popular temporal mechanic trends in game design, such as time loops, in order to encourage thoughtful reflection on how time rhetoric influences human perception of ourselves and others. By outlining the way a game might empower its players to reconsider their relationship with time, Elapse hopes to promote ingenuity in future time-focused games. The design process for Elapse takes inspiration from Jonathan Blow’s term “dynamical meaning,” focusing on the intentional and unintentional messages a system sends to its users. Thus, this design takes special care to avoid ludonarrative dissonance and create a close connection between player and character to further its thematic conversation about time’s influence on interpersonal relationships.

ABSTRACT. Frame 352 is a solo photo journaling RPG where players craft a folk story about a cryptid using photographic evidence. Play involves physical activity like walking, taking photos, and note-taking, guided by a coin pull divination system. The game, presented as a printable 1-page zine, can be carried in a pocket. Proposed for DiGRA, the game will be available in kits including zines, writing tools, an online play guide, and, in limited quantities, optional disposable cameras. Play records, for those who are interested, will be collected and compiled into a zine.

ABSTRACT. This experimental submission is an exploration of fantasy consoles, exotic game engines/tools and the communities around them. It is a journey of the space of game tools that embody the “unconventional mixed with practical” (Natalie Lawhead, 2019)

As someone who is outside of academia, I see this as a way of doing a hands-on showcase that may offer new perspectives on the craft of game creation and consumption, especially since these playful tools usually live in the “space of cultural and economic activity that includes hobbyists, artists, gamemakers with day jobs, (…) modders, and students” (Brendan Keogh, 2023).

It will be presented as an interactive web journal, with embedded playable versions of the works that I create with each tool, and a contextualisation with thoughts / a micro dev log of the development experience. The source code for each micro-game will be also accessible.

ABSTRACT. “MA Pitch (Draft)” is a Master’s project rejected before it even started. In October 2023, near the beginning of my second year in my PhD program, I was told that an MA exam that did not fit the norms of traditional scholarship would not be passed, and that the current project I had pitched would need to be reworked into a traditional paper. The project in question was critiquing how the standards of traditional scholarship (writing and presentations) flattens 3D objects and limits them to single orientations, ignoring their unique, virtual physicality. It would not be possible to continue this work as a paper, and a non-paper project would not be recommended to advance, therefore I began the immediate, and somewhat terrifying, process of applying to other programs.

Using Blender, photography, journal entries, illustration, and glitch work, this .blend file is a record of the overlapping personal, professional, and political actions that non-traditional and creative scholarly work requires. This 3D model, a copy of my bedroom-studio-study-space in graduate housing at the University of California, Irvine, is a site where many of my administrative woes have been contemplated, and a place that is now embedded and representative of this process. Through manipulating this Blender project, I invite users to see what would have been lost from this 3D space if it had been locked into a screenshot, and what would have vanished from both my work and my scholarly practice if I had abandoned this project altogether.

ABSTRACT. We are proposing this work as an experimental submission as it can be presented in many forms. We can offer it as a playable experience, as a video screening or installation, or in (or along with) a traditional written format. What follows is a summary of the project in an extended abstract.

A virtual walkthrough of Moloch’s Gauntlet, an escape room in Minecraft (Mojang Studios 2009) designed as a playable class experience, reveals a lived experiment in modded Minecraft as a pedagogical tool. As undergraduate students turned research assistants, our project explores three ideas: 1) that modded Minecraft functions as an open platform that makes the iterative game design process accessible, teaching design through play without the barrier of complex computer science foundations; 2) how selectively concealing and revealing the game’s mechanisms leads to procedural elaboration (Watson 83), inviting participation in the creative process; and 3) how dismantling the game’s representational aesthetics links it to the wider body of knowledge that functions as an alternate academic space.

With COVID-19 restrictions fully in place at our Montreal-based university in January 2021, the authors enrolled in a class that they would soon discover would be taught entirely within the second most popular video game of all time. (Callaghan). Our journey within Minecraft formed an exploration of what our professors call the allegorical build (Wershler and Simon). The inverted classroom structure, upon which the course relied, asks students to engage with the course material on their own time, and then bring that knowledge to their time in class. Our attempt to create a collaborative learning experience for the students in the class that followed us, through a continuation of the allegorical build, led to further consideration of Minecraft’s wider potential as a pedagogical tool.

The construction of this project continued the kind of allegorical thinking that we’d been doing in the original class; our initial participation in the inverted class structure brought us to the point where we flipped the classroom again as we took on the role of researchers and then cast ourselves as educators. Our role flipped a third time, as we looked at ourselves and our experiences building the escape room as an object of research. How does reframing a teaching tool as a thinking tool broaden the allegorical build? Could we create an in-game experience that would harness the class material and lore while also promoting relationship-building and cross-team collaboration?

We built an escape room to take advantage of problem based learning: by providing an “ill-structured problem”, where there may only be one solution, but the path to the solution requires group experimentation. This encourages students to take initiative as a group and to learn how to communicate and work collaboratively (Pearcy 307). Having gone through the course ourselves, we felt deeply engaged with the idea of extending the course’s materials and message into our building project. Continuing the central narrative of the class, we focused our escape room around Moloch, a popular allegorical figure in modern literature and culture. Our focus on conveying the experience of modernity through the medium of a Minecraft escape room led to building an awareness of pedagogy which we look forward to illustrating with a demonstration, video presentation or playable experience. Given that the experimental submission category is new, we are interested in discussing what options might be available for a project like ours, which encompasses a designed in-game experience and critical reflection on the role of games in education.

ABSTRACT. Culturalization in video games has been inspected under academic principles as the gaming industry grows more aware to the possible impact of cultural distinctiveness on market reception and thus on the production pipeline. Issues with culturalization in video games could range from personal level, meaning how individual player relates himself/herself to the game play, to political or religious level, meaning whether the in-game content is appropriate under a certain regime. However, the concept of culture, when discussed under this current interest of culturalizing video games, is commonly pointed towards races, nationalities, or religions, which all originate from a structural-functional view. In this paper, we provide a literature review on the definition of culture, and how fandom under the new definition of culture could shed insight on the current state of culturalization of video games. After performing a case study of Super Smash Bros franchise using fandom as the key cultural element, we suggest that instead of treating culture as a fixed structural-functional concept, developers should view culture as a constant changing flow of intra-group/inter-group interaction when approaching culturalization during their game production cycle.

ABSTRACT. The aim of the presentation is to analyse Polish popular and academic discourses regarding games about Polish history. The goal of this meta-study is to map which aspects of the historical discourse implemented into discussed games, are unproblematically accepted, considered historically truthful and correct, and which elements are regarded as controversial, false and inaccurate. This, in turn, will allow us to analyse how historical myths and ideological perspectives are either strengthened or weakened by the discourses on digital games.

ABSTRACT. This paper turns a critical semiological lens on the gaming and larger cultural phenomenon of raiding. On video game live streaming platforms such as Twitch.tv and YouTube Gaming, the prevalence of a violent practice known as hate raids has surged in the wake of Gamergate. Confoundingly, raiding is coded into the platform infrastructure of Twitch, as a function which allows live streamers to send their audience en masse to another streamer’s channel. The practice of raiding was adapted from a community practice, wherein streamers had taken to linking one another’s URL in their live chat before signing off, in an effort to share their audience power. Perhaps seeing an opportunity to increase viewer retention, Twitch co-opted the practice and named it raiding. The introduction of the raid feature gave many in the community pause, as the term raiding has many connotations–some of which are unique to fantasy role playing games–many of which are negative. The practice of raiding has existed on the internet much longer than Twitch and carries a longer history of hateful attacks conducted by message board members. These attacks include infamous raids conducted by 4chan against gaming communities such as World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment 2004) and Habbo Hotel (Sulake 2000). Hate raids, both on Twitch and in other online practices more widely, involve the coordinated disruption of a community by swarming their space with hostile users or bots, and spamming hateful, degrading, or harassing messages and symbols. This begs the question: why would Twitch use this term to describe a function intended for community building? And furthermore, what does the history of raiding in video games tell us about the meaning of raiding in contemporary gaming culture? Game scholar Aaron Trammell has provoked others in this field to share in the task of repairing play; correcting a Western canonical understanding of play as civilized and pleasurable, by acknowledging that play is objectifying and–for many in racialized communities–painful (2023a). Additionally, he traces the networks of privilege that shape the history of hobby gaming communities and perpetuate what contemporary scholars and players alike refer to as ‘toxic gamer culture’ (Trammell 2023b). Engaging with French literary theorist Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957), this semiological and historically informed critical analysis argues that raiding is a colonial, white supremist, and microfascist cultural myth. It begins to answer the questions: why is raiding such a pervasive cultural phenomenon? What are the historical limits of raids? What are the conditions of their use? How are raids conveyed in gaming discourse and practices? This study finds that raids are a historic and ongoing form of play. Mirroring Trammell’s (2023a) use of Black phenomenology to describe the playful torture of policing, an intersectional lens of play is used to describe raiding. The history of raiding, in its varying connotations, reveals the structural, political, and representational objectification of those categorized or ‘othered’, as outside of the white-heteropatriarchy (Gray 2020). Furthermore, it illustrates raiding as a microfascist process of slow elimination rooted in racial patriarchy (Bratich 2022). In the context of gender, eliminationism operates on a longer temporality as a process rather than the result of taking the other to the limit by “reducing, de-animating, de-vivifying, annulling or taking the life away” (Bratich 2022, 10). The age old cultural practice of raiding objectifies marginalized bodies, pushing them away in defense of the networks of privilege which shape much of Western society¬–including video game culture. As a cultural and semiological myth, raiding–in both sign and practice–has long acted as a dog whistle . Barthes (1957) notes that myths are read innocently as inductive and factual, when they are in fact semiological and function to make concepts appear natural. It is important that game scholars, players, and developers, as well as platform owners, give critical thought to the meaning of the term and consider what social and power relations are naturalized through its use. In many communities raids are signifiers of violent military/police practices with a troubling history rooted in colonialism, white supremacy, and class violence. As feminist scholar and philosopher Judith Butler has argued, language is citational (1997). The continued use of raiding, either as platform function or end-game content mechanic, carries a burdensome bibliography of the connotations that precede it. The function of raiding as a myth is to push, to the margins, all persons and players not reflected in the networks of privilege that bind the default and the normative.

1.Microfascism is defined by Brattich (2022) as patriarchal forms of everyday sexism and misogyny which act as a slow elimination; policing women’s actions through threats, chasing women from public places, and reducing their capacities through attrition (10-11). 2.Raiding is similar to a dog whistle in that the term signifies a different meaning to those who understand the practice as a form of violent objectification, as opposed to a game mechanic or method for sharing audience power. 3.Butler uses the term citational to refer to the manner in which hate speech cannot be tied to a certain context. In its utterance, hate speech breaks with the prior context but in no absolute manner. The newly acquired context is only legible in terms of the past from which it breaks. Therefore, hate speech can only be made sense of in relation to its past use-cases. The mythologist sees raiding in the same manner, by which the sign and its practice is only legible in terms of its linguistic system of signifiers and its many orders of connotations.

ABSTRACT. This abstract draws on modifications to Gibsonian affordance theory (Vozaru, 2022), existing debate within game studies on player-character boundaries, and conceptual grounding from theater and performance studies (Begley, 2012; Fernandez-Vara, 2009). It argues that a semiotically relational view of in-game objects and gaming interfaces as theater props can generate insights into how affordances are translated and mechanized across the gaming apparatus during moments of “perceptual discrepancy” (Van de Mosselaer, 2023), and subsequently aid in player experience analysis.

ABSTRACT. IN-GAME PHOTOGRAPHY PERSPECTIVES The connection between games and photography has been explored by a few scholars through different perspectives prior to the popularization and insertion of photo modes in digital games. Poremba (2007) proposes a seminal reflection on the cultural and technical aspects of the photographic practices in-game - “content” or “practice-based” - and from the gameplay experience – as a form of validation or a trophy. Giddings (2013) points out another theoretical path to understanding the nature of photography when transposed to digital games. Relying on the etymological meaning of photography, positions that in-game photography cannot be explained through the lenses of remediation, as suggested by Poremba (2007). Instead, material mutations of the medium should be considered since, in games, it is only possible to “draw without light” because the gameworld and the apparatus - the virtual photographic camera - share the same composition: code (Giddings 2013). Anchored on Poremba’s perspective, Bittanti (2015) implements an ethnographic analysis in an online forum dedicated to posting pictures from Forza Horizon 2. The result is the idea of taking pictures to validate an experience, stating in-game photography as “iconographic collecting” and photography as an imperative to which the game is subordinated. Gerling (2018) traces a kind of genealogy of digital photography through screen images, distinguishing “screen photography” (using a real camera) from “screenshot” (an image of an interface captured by a system command). A third kind emerges as an expansion of the latter, “computer game photography”. According to the scholar, this third type emerged initially to finally get to the virtual camera that enables producing images from different perspectives beyond the player’s gaze. Möring and Mutiis (2019, 74) establish a typology of the remediations of photography in digital according to the level of the centrality of photographic action to the gameplay, encompassing four possibilities: “a) simulated photography central to the gameplay condition; b) an additional photo mode; c) artistic screenshotting; and d) creative photographic interventions made possible by photo modifications). Rizov (2021) presents an alternative approach to the scholars, stating that photography in games must be understood as a discourse. He appropriates the “gamic action model” of Galloway (2006) and proposes a “photographic gamic action model”, describing, qualifying, and electing some games as “emblematic examples”. PLAYING TO PHOTOGRAPH: FRAMEPLAYING IN GRAN TURISMO SERIES This study builds another approach, inspired not just by the previous scholars already presented but by others, which complements and helps to trace an alternative comprehension of in-game photography applied – but not restricted – to a specific game corpus – the Gran Turismo (GT) game series. As part of more extensive research, the following proposition results from a methodological path inspired by Grounded Theory (Goulding 1999; Glaser and Holton 2004; Charmaz 2009; Fragoso et al. 2011; Hook 2015). The first step of the research was building a large exploration identifying games with photo mode from 2004 to 2020 and gathering data about their virtual photographic cameras as well as the access to the mode in relation to the main gameplay. The open coding resulted in a large number of terms used as the virtual photographic camera parameters. The established criteria were to choose titles with more parameters on each category that emerged on previous codification. Based on it, and due to relevance, the Gran Turismo series is the representative sample. According to the period settled previously (2004 to 2020), this study encompasses just GT 4, 5, 6 and Sport. Gran Turismo (GT, Polyphony Digital) is a driving simulator game franchise developed by Polyphony Digital and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment and turned consoles into the main platform for Racing games (Ryu 2012, 517). Gran Turismo 4 (Polyphony Digital 2004) was the first title of the series to present the feature that originated what is called photo mode (Gerling, 2018; Möring; Mutiis, 2019). It offers two possibilities to capture images: “Photo Travel” with 15 different locations and “Replay Photo Mode”, which allows taking pictures from a recorded race. Since then, both possibilities have been available to all later franchise titles. Gran Turismo 5 (Polyphony Digital 2010) and Gran Turismo 6 (Polyphony Digital 2013) were released for PS3, presenting enhanced graphics and changes on the game interface, number of virtual camera parameters, and locations available to shoot on Photo Travel. In Gran Turismo Sport (Polyphony Digital 2017), “Photo Travel” was replaced by “Scapes”, which blends two universes: photographs of real places as scenes and 3D-modeled cars. According to Polyphony Digital, the game uses a different rendering technique. Each place “contains all the light energy information of that scene as data” that allows “to ‘place’ cars into real-world photographs” . The investigation focuses on how the presence of the virtual camera and the photographic act integrated into the gameplay dynamics between operator and machine (Galloway 2006) within the action spaces of the game world (Jørgensen 2014; Nitsche 2008) through the Gran Turismo game series (4, 5, 6 and Sport, Polyphony Digital). Results lead to the notion of "frameplay": an appropriation of the idea of gameplay. “Frameplay” represents the act of playing to photograph, or the photography, through photo mode and configuration of virtual photographic camera parameters, as a photographic configurative act, which expands the notion of gameworld into spatialities. In other words, it is possible to access the game software to photograph directly or access the main gameplay (races) to produce material for replay, to be further converted into static images, thus emerging another gameplay dynamic.

ABSTRACT. This paper describes a set of spatialized narrative designs that elicit certain practices of intersubjective interpretation; I term these spaces playgrounds of interpretation in reference to the playful and ongoing negotiation of a shared reality that takes place within them. Drawing on Ricouerian hermeneutic theory, performance theory, fan studies, and the history of visual media, I develop a framework of analysis that examines how these intentionally designed spaces attempt to resist the closure of meaning associated with hermeneutic action by distributing signifiers across space such that they are unable to be thought in sequence. I then examine the communal interpretive play that emerges within and around the playground of interpretation and the ability of these communities to engage meaningfully beyond the fictional boundaries of the playground. I conclude by arguing for the importance of critical engagement with these understudied spaces and the potential within.

ABSTRACT. This paper discusses the possibility of a narrowed argument inspired by the ludology versus narratology debate, which reconceptualizes ludonarrative dissonance as an impossible hurdle for game designers to overcome. Alongside other academics, Marie-Laure Ryan concludes that interactivity is not suited for narratives. Newer discourse forces us to reconsider this conception of "narrative" and instead look toward intentional game design to harmonize interactivity and narrative. My paper takes the form of a game design document/bible that exemplifies this challenge and how to achieve congruence throughout seemingly competing aspects of game design.

ABSTRACT. Video games act as engines that communicate aspects of experience through player interaction. We argue that this communication of first-person experience (qualia) is unique in its ability to interact with a player’s mind-body in a potent and observable way. Unfortunately for designers and researchers, many of the desirable traits of video games are not inherently measurable via traditional, quantitative means - they are emergent properties dependent on the perspectives with which they are observed.

This paper investigates the work of video game designers as it relates to phenomenology and embodied cognition and lays out a path for future researchers and designers to leverage phenomenology as a foundation for video game creation. We offer that the intersection between embodied cognition, game design, and phenomenology suggests a path from descriptions of conscious experiences (qualia) to real, distributable design recommendations in video game design and study.

ABSTRACT. Meta games about game development are equivalent to Computer Assisted Software Engineering for software development. Video games such as Game Dev Tycoon (Greenheart Games 2012) or Game Builder Garage (Nitendo 2021) allow gamers to play around this topic despite having quite diverse limitations. In most ocasions students interested in game development lack from real life experiences in development projects, which include a lack of knowledge about specific activities for several professional profiles and their intricate relationships technical, creative and business related. Serious games are a relevant way to offer those students this kind of experience. This is an advance about an in progress Table Role Playing Game for Game Development named “Game Dev Studio RPG”, intended as a learning tool for game development project management courses or activities applied to mid-school grades and above.

ABSTRACT. Virtual worlds are not ideal spaces where gender equality is consistently upheld, and video games specifically expose disparities between genders (Yee, 2014; Song et al., 2017) in a variety of manners. Scholars have examined the culture of gamers as being male-dominated (Condis, 2018; Yoon & Kim, 2023). The online gaming community is permeated with 'geek masculinity' (Condis, 2018), implying that the community is imbued with "subcultural guidelines for exhibiting masculinity" (Ibid., pp.15). They regularly express their masculinity by disliking anything that may be seen as feminine or homosexual (Ibid., pp.21), taunting each other by using the term "gay" and insulting female players with derogatory terms (Ibid., pp.22). This is a common occurrence within the Korean gaming community, which is characterized by a hyper-masculine culture that consistently promotes men as the norm and women as the exception (Yoon & Kim, 2023). In this paper, we aim to investigate the masculine identity of the Korean gaming community through the lens of ‘memefied’ costume play. 'Memes' provide significant insights into the specific traits of certain groups (Blackmore, 1999) as they are exchanged and propagated among the members of a distinct society (Nagle, 2017). The Korean gaming community has also embraced the culture of memes, and we intend to examine the community's attributes through a trendy meme known as "Goinmul look". "Goinmul" is a Korean term which literally means stagnant water. In gaming culture, it refers to someone who consistently spends a lot of time playing a specific game. To gamers, a "Goinmul" is an expert player with an advanced level, numerous items, and exceptional skills. Therefore, "Goinmul Look" pertains to the attire style of a skilled and capable "Goinmul" player. However, within the community, the "Goinmul Look" is considered abnormal attire, which can include wearing a provocative costume or featuring non-human characteristics, such as purple skin or additional limbs. The "Goinmul Look" typically perpetuates a stereotype of a muscular male character donning a revealing, fluorescent outfit with animal ears or tails. It is paradoxical that the "Goinmul" players, who hold significant influence in the gaming community, intentionally present themselves in unconventional and peculiar look. In reality, dressing up in costumes can serve as a crucial avenue for self-expression in the world of gaming. This form of play enables individuals to experiment with virtual identities and showcase their skills (Fron et al., 2007). Although costume play in gaming is often viewed as an identity free trial in a digital world (Turkle, 1997), it is also significantly impacted by power dynamics in the real world, particularly in competitive multiplayer games where dressing up is a means of exhibiting prowess (Fron et al., 2007). In this environment, players are anticipated to showcase their abilities, projecting a more authentic form of power. The "Goinmul Look" is a common occurrence in Massive Multiplayer Online (MMOs) and Multiplayer Online (MO) games, where users exhibit their costumes as an exhibition of status. It is important to note that the meme interacts with power dynamics, particularly regarding gender norms and masculinity. To investigate how masculinity is linked with the "Goinmul Look" as perceived by Korean gamers, our study will analyze online posts and associated comments containing the keyword "Goinmul Look" sourced from the 'DC Inside' one of the most popular internet communities in the nation 'DC Inside' is akin to the Western website '4chan' which is characterized by its abundance of images and high user liquidity, and the male-dominated culture (Lee, 2012). Furthermore, 'DC Inside' accompanied by various message boards covering a wide range of gaming categories, with a considerable volume of active gamers, making it a valuable foundation for this research. More specifically, we intend to gather and analyze data utilizing online scraping methods between January 1st, 2020 and December 31st, 2023. This approach is expected to enable us to objectively examine the definition and usage of " Goinmul look." While numerous studies have investigated masculinity in communities through memes (Nagle, 2017), only a small number have examined it specifically in the context of gaming communities (Condis, 2018). Our investigation of how "costume play" functions as an expression of masculinity, as well as the use of polarized tropes by being a meme, not only allows us to examine masculinity in gaming communities, but also demonstrates how the playful aspects of gaming can be exploited.

ABSTRACT. Queer games have always been here. From the thrilling drag queen detective mystery Caper in the Castro (Ralph 1989) to the coming-of-age zen puzzle game Unpacking (Witch Beam 2021), queer games have since found their target audience. Everyone wants to see themselves represented in games ‘wholly, honestly, and responsibly’ (Smith and Decker 2016), but authentic representation is rare to come by.

Our previous research found that queer games (games tagged ‘LGBT’ and relevant tags) make up around 0.5% of the market both for Steam and itch.io (Anonymous et al. 2022). This figure seems even smaller as the International Games Developer Association global developer survey reported that 32% (Westar et al. 2022, up from 14% in 2014) of the global games workforce did not identify as heterosexual, a figure significantly higher than average in the UK (10.6%, 2021) and in the US (11.7%, 2021).

As more queer folks create queer games, the market for them is also growing. We point to the 2023 Queer Games Bundle, with ‘over 450 amazing, heartfelt, fun, and radical games and artworks’ (2023) raising $161,628 in sales, and to another highly successful tabletop game Artisans of Splendent Vale (Valens 2022) starring queer people of colour as its main cast raised $208,849 on Kickstarter as further evidence. Queer games are seeing a healthy audience growth and community support.

However, queer game designers regularly face discrimination, sexism, and harassment in games (IGDA 2022). It takes a significant amount of personal time and resources to make one game. According to Ruberg (2019), rarely do game revenues cover the living expenses of their indie creators. Even smaller indie games, made by people in the margins, must find income elsewhere to fund game development. In some parts of the Asia-Pacific regions, LGBTQIA+ folks continue to face rejection, prosecution, and harm (Sanders 2020).

Pride at Play was founded in response to the need for a space where authentic and purposeful queer games can be seen, celebrated, and enjoyed by everyone. Coinciding with the Sydney WorldPride 2023 Festival and later programmed as part of the St Kilda Film Festival in Australia in the same year, Pride at Play featured 22 thoughtful LGBTQIA+ games from Oceania and the Asia-Pacific region, running from 21 February to 4 March in Sydney, and 3 to 24 June in Melbourne. The exhibition program invited visitors to read, experience, and reflect on the games through play at no cost.

We curated Pride at Play to advocate and amplify voices coming from the margins, especially for anyone who plays and makes games from LGBTQIA+ backgrounds. Formulating the following questions played a major role in achieve our curatorial aim:

● Would this game ‘move the conversation forward’ about LGBTQIA+ topics? ● Is this game being held back because of local cultural sensitivity and where it comes from? ● How does this game demonstrate accurate, original, and considerate queer content? ● If the game has explicit queer (character, sexuality, etc.) content, what narrative does it provide or frame around that content? ● What queerness does the game allow the player to interpret? ● Would a conversation with the game designer be interesting to pursue?

At the completion of curation the program, we launched with an illustrated print catalogue containing 20 interviews with the game designers. In one interview for Pride at Play, gay game developer Luke Miller told us:

> Growing up, I didn’t have many representations of queer people, especially in any of the media I consumed. … for years I was like oh, gee, I really would love to make a gay game.

In another interview with Vee Hendro and Hayley Gordon, we heard that the indie role-playing games audience are ‘queerer than ever’, and younger people are ‘more open about their weirdness’ going into the indie space. Pride at Play is a clear validation for young people that there is a need to grow the queer games market, and strong evidence for industry of the significant role queer games are playing in the galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.

As a team of researchers, designers, curators, and educators, together we will reflect on the making of Pride at Play and share our learnings with the DiGRA community. Queer games are story-rich experiences centring character gender and sexuality in the narrative made by queer folks for queer players. We will share the pure queer joy of encountering authentic queer content, designing for safe and inclusive exhibition play, responses from the industry, funding bodies, institutions, and impressions from the players who visited and interacted with queer games exhibited at Pride at Play.

REFERENCES Anderson, L., File, T., Marshall, J., McElrath, K., and Scherer, Z. 2021. New Household Pulse Survey Data Reveals Differences between LGBT and Non-LGBT Respondents During COVID-19 Pandemic. United States Census Bureau. Anonymous Authors. 2022. Queer Indie Games on itch.io, 2013-2022. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555858.3555881 Kumar, S., Kwan, E., Weststar, J., and Coppins, T. 2022. Developer Satisfaction Survey 2021 LGBTQA2+ Diversity Report. International Game Developers Association. Queer Games Bundle 2023. https://itch.io/b/1812/queer-games-bundle-2023-with-10-option Ralph, C. M. 1989. Caper in the Castro. Mac OS. Roskams, M. 2023. Sexual orientation, England and Wales: Census 2021. Office for National Statistics, United Kingdom. Ruberg, B. 2019. “The Precarious Labor of Queer Indie Game-making: Who Benefits from Making Video Games ‘Better’?” Television and New Media. 20 (8), 778–788. https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476419851090 Sanders, D. 2020. “Sex and Gender Diversity in Southeast Asia”. Journal of Southeast Asian Human Rights. 4 (2), 357–405. Smith, R., and Decker, A. 2016. Understanding the Impact of QPOC Representation in Video Games. 2016 Research on Equity and Sustained Participation in Engineering, Computing, and Technology (RESPECT). Valens, N. 2022. Artisans of Splendent Vale. Renegade Game Studios. Witch Beam. 2021. Unpacking. Humble Bundle. Weststar, J., Kumar, S., Coppins, T., Kwan, E., and Inceefe, E. 2021. Developer Satisfaction Survey 2021 Summary Report. International Game Developers Association.

ABSTRACT. This article presents the strategies that queer players use for queering character interactions in digital games, based on a reflexive thematic analysis of survey responses from international and Ukrainian gender-diverse players. The research questions addressed are: What are queer players’ strategies for queering in-game interactions; What video game mechanics are used to employ these strategies; What are the differences between queering strategies utilized by Ukrainians and international participants? The article reveals three themes with several sub-themes around playable character-focused interactions at the stage of character creation and in the process of playing. The results of the international survey give insights into the main mechanics and interactions that are queered by players to accommodate themselves in game worlds. Most mechanics are focused on playable characters that are particularly important for many queer players. The analysis of Ukrainian players’ responses shows environment-determined differences in their approach to queering. Notably, Ukrainian players seek for more explicit queerness and do not apply queer readings to video games, detaching themselves from the game characters.

ABSTRACT. Laika: Aged Through Blood's (Brainwash Gang 2023) released recently in the context of wars and armed conflicts affecting people across the world, directly and through digital feeds. Laika demonstrates how video games, as playgrounds for both developers and players, can serve as playful spaces for civic imagination on war through immersive engagement with “real” and fictitious lived experiences. We argue that Laika supplies subversive potentials for political meaning-makings to international communities continually exposed to wars within and beyond their borders.

ABSTRACT. The abstract presents the spectrum of games on poverty and attempts to link the games that use it as their main theme to the activities promoted by the minimalist movement: strict budgeting, organizing, getting rid of clutter, normalizing imperfection, and lowering one's material standards. It also argues that such games have bigger potential than currently realized and that while gamifying poverty might be controversial, it can also offer, if done right, both a pleasurable pastime and a powerful anti-capitalist tool.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract outlines a textual (Mäyrä, 2008) and audio-visual-haptic (Keogh, 2018) analysis of speculative body horror in trans-authored twine games, using the award-winning but under-researched corpus of Porpentine Charity Heartscape as a case study to contribute to the emerging field of Trans Game Studies (Ruberg, 2022) and study of Twine as a significant 'Minor Platform' troubling gaming's margins (Nicoll, 2021). Games such as With those we Love Alive (2014) and Vesp: A History of Sapphic Scaphism (2016) confront players with experimental weird interactive fiction where choice is as much about perspective as the redirection of plot; text dissolves into abstract eroticised punctuation; and narratives loop around quotidian rituals in strange dystopias. I argue that uniting Porpentine's formal experiments is an interest in darkly problematising the division of a body from the world around it through the trans re-appropriation of body horror: “There is a dist....ance between my skin and my skull […] I perform this skin drag” (Orifice Clique, 2015); “…under the onslaught of this almost billowing, vividly suffused skin […] Putting the mask on feels like attaching a healthy and proper face to a gaping hole.” (Vesp: A History of Sapphic Scaphism, 2016). From surreal neon-lined quests under hormone withdrawal, to genre-blending narratives of selling memories for care or crafting reality-bending weaponry for love, her games evoke transition’s powerful strangeness (Lavery, 2022); even viscerally exploiting the player-body's extension before and behind the screen (Keogh, 2018) with instructions to draw on our own flesh in rituals marking time and transformation.

ABSTRACT. The perspective of digital labor provides a critical political economy perspective for the study of games. In his study of modders, Kücklich (2005) proposed the concept of "playbour", pointing out that the production carried out by players in their leisure time not only lose their corresponding intellectual property rights, but is also used by game manufacturers to proliferate. Game researchers have carried out much empirical research on whether the gaming behavior of professional gamers (such as game streamers, e-sports players, power levelings, paid companions, etc.) and non-professional gamers (which can also be regarded as ordinary players) are exploited by game manufacturers and digital capital. According to the conclusions of previous studies, game walkthroughs are digital labor products created by players in their leisure time and can be used by game manufacturers and digital capital for multiplication. There are huge differences between walkthroughs on English-speaking and Chinese-speaking Internet.On the English-speaking internet, mature walkthroughs are often distributed through centralized platforms, such as collaboratively written wikis and fandom websites. In contrast, on the Chinese internet, walkthroughs are predominantly created by individual players who explicitly claim copyright attribution. Chinese creators share their creations across various social platforms, resulting in scattered player interactions, hindering the formation of a unified identity and collective influence. Notably, Chinese walkthroughs are primarily produced ordinary players who do not and cannot rely on walkthroughs as a consistent source of income, which makes it rare for them to transition into professional players. Based on this, this paper aims to explore the following questions by focusing on the digital labor products of the game walkthroughs. First, how do the creators themselves perceive the behavioral attributes and content attributes of walkthrough creation? Will they show corresponding obedience or resistance to their status as playbour? Second, do creators rely on interaction and emotional connections among other players regarding walkthroughs? Do these interactions and emotional feedback further enhance their creative enthusiasm, thereby promoting the activity of the player group? Third, have creators maintained their personal rights in the process of creating and publishing walkthroughs, and have they consciously accumulated social capital for their own benefit?

ABSTRACT. Video games act as digital playgrounds in which players can build social networks, interact with technological systems, and develop both hobbies and professional skills. This exploratory study inspects the reflections of eight video game content creators to understand how engagement with video game spaces and communities develops an understanding of the social, technical, and professional elements of content creation. Data was collected via semi-structured interviews from a broad range of creation roles (game journalism, modding, audio creation, physical merchandise production, etc.) with thematic analysis used to identify shared topics of significance from social risks to competitive industry. Findings reflect the unique social and technical skills developed as video game content creators face platform dominance, game developers, audiences, competitors, and their own aptitude when approaching audience-focused, platform-dependent labour. Work precarity, platform moderation, copyright, and online abuse are noted as areas that are lacking in exposure and awareness.

ABSTRACT. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) education have become popular, and several AI and ML education games have been developed. However, most games focus on coding rather than AI/ML concepts and have not been widely used or evaluated (Alam. 2022). Therefore, we propose a "Roguelike Game for AI and ML Education" (RGAME) to overcome these problems. RGAME is being developed on the basis of motivational and educational design frameworks. Users can learn ML workflow (data collection, preprocessing, training, and evaluation) through RGAME. We then introduce a method for measuring motivational and learning effects. This study focuses on K–12 education in Japan.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the potential of computer games as a new form of explainable interface to AI. Most existing eXplainable AI (XAI) provide explanations in static or limited interactive forms. This paper analyzes simulation games as an exploratory case study based on an established taxonomy in human-centered XAI. Our analysis indicates that the existing mechanics of simulation games, to various extents, can support most XAI explanation types. We offer further reflections on the design space of leveraging insights from games to rethink the explainable interfaces for XAI.

ABSTRACT. Can Large Language Models provide new ways of playing? This paper examines ChatGPT as an avenue to explore new playgrounds for queer play — player behavior which subverts game systems and objectives to meet queer desires. Categorizing queer play into two distinct natures — invasive and non-invasive, the study delves into how queer gamers have ingeniously reacted to heteronormative game systems. In response to this tension, the paper investigates: Are Large Language Models able to solve the conflict between restrictive game structures and queer player desires?

To assess the performance of ChatGPT as a facilitator of queer play, I developed a game prototype where players engaged in open dialogues with NPCs linked to ChatGPT. Players completed a short questionnaire. The findings show that ChatGPT can indeed facilitate queer play. Moreover, players engaging in queer play experienced a greater sense of autonomy. Queer play, however, did not heavily affect the overall player experience. Finally, the paper calls for an embrace of Large Language Models as a promising tool to queer games and encourage queer play.

ABSTRACT. Despite increased attention towards the negative environmental impact of computing, digital game creation continues to maintain a veneer of environmental neutrality. Artists working within this perceived “virtual” space can easily do so without engaging the environmental and/or climate impacts of game making, and creators who do wish to be more mindful of environmental and climate concerns have limited models or resources from which to draw from. The Renewable Artgames Residency (RAR) was a prototype initiative focused on low-carbon digital design methods and new modes for sustainability-focused creation practices, with a particular focus on smaller-scale (art, experimental and indie game) creation practices. It aimed to reorient game creators towards the impacts of digital game creation as part of an expanded ecology that includes hardware and material resources, the energy cost of computing and its intersection with common development and creative practices, the impact of creative outputs (including distribution and game play), and, in the context of these challenges, the physical and emotional impact of the creative process. Through the creation of this residency we sought to establish a base from which to re-evaluate sustainable practices of making, with a strong focus on reducing carbon consumption in creative digital works. This short paper shares its practical and experiential outcomes, including a zine offering early insights.

ABSTRACT. Throughout the past century, human activities have instigated substantial changes in the climate system, resulting in biodiversity loss and increasingly frequent extreme events. Although people’s daily lives are closely related to natural environment, most people seldom engage with these issues in embodied and reflective ways. This results in the lack of awareness and hence impede the possibility of more responsible actions towards natural environment. Nowadays, popular culture is increasingly providing opportunities to promote ecological awareness. Specifically, some researchers have explored climate-themed games, enabling more playful interactions and allowing players to explore ecological issues in engaging and immersive manner. As a contribution to facilitating awareness, this paper presents our work that is in progress, a lightweight HTML 5 game, “El Niño’s Finger”, metaphorically portraying the dynamic relationship between animals and climate through playful interactions. We take turtle as a particular example, aiming to present the impact of El Niño1 on those species relying on temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD). This metaphorical interaction design approach does not possess an overt environmentalist rhetoric in the game, but rather aims to convey an ecological thought — “everything is interconnected”. In other words, we foreground the nature of relationships between players and the world, players and objects, and players and other elements through deliberate design choices.

ABSTRACT. This project makes the case for virtual video game worlds as ecocritical spaces of collaborative preservation in line with Deleuze’s reformulation of the Bergsonian conception of the virtual (Bergson 1991 [1908]; Deleuze 1997; Deleuze and Guattari 1987) as merely non-corporeal and not opposed to tangible reality. Scholarship pertaining to Deleuze and Guattari as theoretical frameworks in the field of game studies focuses on rhizomatic features (Martin Jones and Sutton 2007), spatial constructs (Galloway 2006; Taylor 2007; Wood 2012), affect and player / avatar alignment (Cremin 2015; 2016), machinic assemblages (Dyer-Whitheford and De Peuter 2009) and narrative (Mukherjee 2015). However, the field of games studies is yet to relate the application of Deleuze and Guattari’s work to the ecocritical importance of virtual worlds in discussions of video game studies. The contribution of this paper to the field of video game studies comes from its application of Deleuzoguattarian formulations of rhizomatic space to video game virtual worlds with an ecocritical focus. In rethinking the relationship between spatial hierarchies in virtual worlds, cultural values can be aligned with preservative interests through the representation of play.

Chang (2019), Abraham and Jaymanne (2018) and Mukherjee (2015) are critical of exploitative actions that have become an expectation in game design. These range from colonialist narratives (Mukherjee 2015) to the virtual recreation of infinite resource fallacies (Abraham and Jayemanne 2018) and are not misplaced concerns. While many open-world video games, including Horizon: Forbidden West (Guerilla Games, 2022), represent some exploitative gameplay loops, exploring the importance of rhizomatic ecologies and the spaces they occupy can provide balance and alternate routes to finding environmental value in virtual worlds.

The rhizome can be understood as a multidirectional non-linear structure that “synthesizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearranging (to the contrary)” (Massumi 1987: XIII). By allowing for multiple connections between elements within a game world, the case is made for ‘rhizomatic play’ as a means of connecting spaces, players, items, enemies, characters, puzzles, bosses, and more (Cremin 2015). Rhizomatic play in Horizon: Forbidden West therefore allows us to connect spaces and enemies to explore complex virtual ecologies and environmental elements. These include but are not limited to the introduction of Bristlebacks to the Daunt and the closure of its quarries, the disappearance of Plowhorns the ruination of crops in Plainsong and the abundance of Snapmaws and the flooding of Bleeding Mark. Because of this, the case can be made for the play-based suggestion of a mode of seeing the environment that is enhanced by an understanding of how elements of it connect to other spaces and ecosystems. All these connections come with the caveat that they are also part of a play process that contains exploitative action (Chang 2019; Abraham and Jayemanne 2018; Mukherjee 2015). It is the intention of this paper is to understand the coexistence of exploitative and preservative gameplay loops as part of an ongoing balance, a playground of concentric balancing-acts, that echoes that of climate change in a non-virtual sense, whose balance is evidently skewed. The relationship between these elements is encapsulated in the machines of Horizon: Forbidden West and, as such, this paper will focus particularly on in-game machine ecosystems and how the player interacts with them virtually in multiple different ways.

Horizon’s retrospective positioning between a man-made extinction event and the Zero Dawn project’s restoration of the Earth back to the realms of inhabitability, despite later returning to the cusp of an impending disaster as the result of malfunctioning terraforming machines, has two main effects. Firstly, it sets up a structure of recursive disaster states; (Meeker 1980), which supports the notion of rhizomatic play as co-creative preservation because the prospect of having a world to save perpetuates the necessity for gameplay (notably, as is the case with actual climate change, this perpetuation continues beyond the base-game’s completion through expansion Horizon: Forbidden West: Burning Shores (Guerrilla Games, 2023). Playing the game serves to both alleviate environmental disasters in the surrounding landscapes (such as floods), and narratively repel the dire threat of the New Zeniths (humans from a divergent technologically advanced culture whose goal is to repurpose the earth through mass extinction). Secondly, the virtual world has already been both decimated by Ted Faro and recultivated by Elisabet Sobeck, the visionary scientist behind Zero Dawn. Because of this, Aloy, who is both the player-character and a clone of Sobeck (engendering a genetic, narrative rhizome), embodies the need for preservative action even after the world has been saved by her “original”. This allows Aloy to traverse the game’s open world and reconfigure authorities across a spatial environment by means only accessible to her by way of her genetic material; Aloy is a saviour who can interact with machines in ways that only a select few others can (fighting, overriding, mounting, crafting) implicating her in an expansive virtual ecology of machines and the environment they terraformed into existence. The narrative alignment of Sobeck and Aloy positions resultant gameplay as preservative co-creation because everything that Aloy intends to save has already been recreated by Sobeck’s Zero Dawn programme. The player’s investment in the narrative of the gameplay and their actions to save the world foregrounds complex ecologies, sprawling vistas and terraforming machines that are complex because the “natural” environment is actually machinically made, and therefore resists reductive anthropocentric categorisations (Moore 2015) that may have led to the need for environmental preservation in the first place. The significance of this study comes from its capacity to examine the balance of exploitative and preservative action in virtual worlds. By remapping ecological relationships as a challenge to anthropocentric hierarchies in Horizon: Forbidden West, this article champions ludic co-creation as eco-preservation.

Works Cited

Abraham, B., Jayemanne, D. 2017. Where are all the climate change games? Locating digital games’ response to climate change, Transformations, 30, 74-89. Bergson, H. 1991. Matter and memory. New York, NY: Zone Books. (Original work published 1908) Chang, A. 2018. Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games. University of Minnesota Press. Cremin, C. 2015. Exploring Video Games with Deleuze and Guattari. London, UK: Routledge. Cremin, C. 2016. “Molecular Mario: The Becoming-Animal of Video Game Compositions.” Games and Culture, 11(4), 441-458. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412015569247 Deleuze, G. Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Massumi, B. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. 1997. “Immanence: A Life...” Theory, Culture & Society, 14(2), 3-7. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327697014002002 Dyer-Witheford, N., de Peuter G. 2009. Games of empire: Global capitalism and video games. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Galloway, A. 2006. Gaming: Essays on algorithmic culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press Guerilla Games 2022. Horizon: Forbidden West, Single player game, Guerilla Games. Guerilla Games 2023. Horizon: Forbidden West: Burning Shores, DLC, Guerilla Games. Massumi, B. 1987 “Foreword.” In A Thousand Plateaus by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, IX-XV. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Meeker, J. 1980. The Comedy of Survival: In Search of an environmental Ethic. Guild of Tutors Press. Moore, J. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London, UK: Verso. Mukherjee, S. 2015. Video Games and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Sutton, D., Martin-Jones, D. 2008. Deleuze reframed: A guide for the arts student. London, UK: I.B. Tauris. Taylor, T. L. 2007. Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture. Cambridge: MIT Press. Wood, A. 2012. “Recursive space: Play and creating space.” Games and Culture, 7, 87–105.