ABSTRACT. "Game Studies from the Southern Cone: Interdisciplinary Insights and Innovations" is a panel dedicated to exploring the rich and varied landscape of game studies within the Southern Cone of Latin America. This panel transcends traditional Western-centric narratives, offering a critical examination of the unique social, cultural, and historical contexts that shape gaming in this region. It delves into the interplay between regional gaming experiences and global norms, highlighting distinctive perspectives on video game creation, development, and usage.

Featuring diverse topics, the panel includes discussions on the development of a documentary game and ludic activism from Argentina, the complexities of gender dynamics in digital media, the transformative role of AI in game design for the Latin American context, innovative auditory experiences in ludomusicology, and player reception within cultural communication contexts in Chile. Each presentation offers insightful contributions to the understanding of 'playgrounds' in game studies, emphasizing the importance of regional perspectives in enriching the global discourse on digital play and ludic phenomena.

ABSTRACT. English provides a common ground for game scholars from various countries and regions. It serves as a lingua franca: a language people can use to communicate effectively without being, or imitating, native speakers. However, some game scholars need to put in extra effort to become proficient in English, and some national academic traditions are difficult to translate. The centrality of English favors certain countries and cultures over others.

We acknowledge the beneficial uses of a common language. Here, however, we focus on the challenges that often go unnoticed. We thus hope to contribute to the discussions concerning diversity in the DiGRA community – on gender, post-/decoloniality, and regional game studies. Each of these discussions contains valuable remarks on the role of English in game studies. However, this role has not yet become a center of its own debate in the work published in our field.

ABSTRACT. This panel explores approaches to game design that work through, with, and about marginalized experience. All of the panelists approach this work as diasporic Latine/x scholar-creators with roots in Mexico and Colombia working in the United States who play with concepts of Latinidad, indigeneity, democracy, gender, class, and design within the confines of predominantly white US academic institutions. This panel offers valuable perspectives on how game design can be a form of play for marginalized creators (and their collaborators) that helps them access freedom from within the more rigid structures of respectability, settler colonialism, whiteness, and academia.

Michael DeAnda opens by articulating rasquache as a design philosophy emerging from Chicanx practice that invites creative thinking with material affordances of found objects that, when applied to games, underscores the intimacies between play and design thinking. A rasquache is an approach to problem solving from leftover or found materials, such as using an empty butter tub to store leftovers, duct taping a bumper to a car, and using a wrench as a crank to open and close a car window. Rather than landing on optimization and aesthetically pleasing products, rasquache revels in the “quick and dirty” fix. It does not need to look beautiful (often times it does not), but it gets the job done. 

Using examples from faer experiences teaching rasquache as a learning methodology in the introductory game design classroom, DeAnda underscores how it reframes the design process from a product and refocuses game design through a playful encounter with design materials, including analog and digital games. By privileging the process over the product, rasquache becomes an opportunity to fail and invite students to embrace failure as learning practice. This paper celebrates the cultural experiences intersecting class, ethnicity, and quotidian encounters with common-place objects, seeking to validate, rather than extract, the value of rasquache to design thinking.

Next, Alex Agloro will present her collaborative project Mana, a video game about Latinx migration to Hawaiʻi, made through participatory research with oral history participants and their communities. Mana tells the stories of how and why people of mixed Indigenous and Latinx heritage have left their homes to cross what Isaiah Helekunihi Walker calls “aquatic boarder-lands” throughout history. This project offers a framework for how to blend game design and community-based research from Indigenous-informed and anticolonial standpoints, anchoring game design in alignment with Indigenous world views and using foundational games like Doom, created by John Romero (Cherokee and Yaqui), as evidence. The presentation will further discuss the designers’ commitments to research as sacred, and how research protocols are forms of ceremony. Mana is a practice-based example of how we can enact sacredness as a reciprocal relationship between researcher, participant, and community, and how values of relationality and gifting can create methodological possibilities across academic, industry, and community-based contexts.

Santiago Posada-Jaramillo will then present their project Athalea: Fear and Hate (working title), an anti-fascist video game that explores the post-war reality of the fictional country of Athalea. After a shameful defeat, the country’s democracy crumbles under the pressure from different political groups. The player explores this time of turmoil through the eyes and thoughts of Apolonia, a veteran from the war with the power of flow magic, a love for her country, and a strong sense of justice. Not long after returning to the capital city, she starts to see how the people, desperate for a solution to Athalea’s economic, political and social problems, start to support more radical solutions and to look for someone to blame. Can Apolonia and her friends find a way to keep their community together to resist the rising authoritarianism and bigotry in their beloved neighborhood?

Athalea: Fear and Hate hopes to help the player become better equipped to notice the red flags of fascism rising in their country’s politics or in the general discourse of their society. The stereotypes that exist around fascism today make it especially hard to spot as, in general, our societies expect it to surface using the same names and symbols as in the past (e.g. Nazi Germany). This game strives to make our alarm bells more sensitive to the real core of fascist ideas and actions.

Amanda Phillips will serve as moderator and respondent, closing the panel with commentary that draws out the importance of these three projects in game design practice and game studies generally, but also with respect to the specific location of DiGRA 2024 in Guadalajara: a transnational city with a complex history of indigeneity and colonization, racial conflict and hybridization, gender and sexual revolution, and artistic strategies of freedom and resistance. Phillips brings to this conversation their experiences teaching game design for social justice in US classrooms, their established expertise writing about games and culture, and their familial and ancestral ties to the city of Guadalajara.

This panel hopes to spur vibrant conversation with DiGRA participants about the value of thinking outside the bounds of received wisdom about design, collaboration, and political strategy, and to further the international mission of the association by highlighting game design work that moves across national, cultural, and disciplinary borders. The panel also enacts an ethic of interdisciplinarity and mentorship in game studies, as the panelists occupy a range of positions with respect to the hierarchical structure of academia and the theory-practice divide.

ABSTRACT. Immersion, as a concept, has been well-studied in the context of various game elements such as narratives, game worlds, and audio-visual fidelity. However, there is little research on immersion within the context of rule-based game elements, i.e., non-narrative elements. This paper aims to empirically investigate the experiences generated by abstract strategy tabletop games in order to understand the association between rule-based game elements and immersion. To achieve this objective, participants were recruited to play three abstract strategy games following which post-gameplay interviews were conducted. Thematic analysis was then utilized to discover the conditions that may influence immersion. The results of the study indicate that various game characteristics, such as strategies, feedback, objectives, and action, or ‘ludic elements’, influence the experience of immersion. Furthermore, certain gameplay events, such as newness in the game state and dramatic changes in the game, or ‘ludic events’, were used by players to describe their gameplay experience. Additionally, differences in players’ attitudes, preferences, and motivations, or ‘player attributes’, were found to play a significant role in eliciting immersive experiences.

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on the relations of rules with player experiences. We begin the paper by asking “how does game’s design create fun for players?” only to reframe it to “how do players use games to create fun?” This reframing has three benefits. First it considers players as active creators as opposed to passive consumers of experience (Players as Designers). Second, it views gameplay as a crafted and intentional property apart from being an emergent property. In order to approach this question, gameplays of six abstract strategy games are subjected to event analysis. The analysis results in identifying events across five layers. Through events, we are able to give ontological attention to gameplay and how players experience fun while creating the gameplay. We found that player’s create gameplay with intent. Based on our findings, we propose Intent Obfuscation Theory in Board Games.

ABSTRACT. Compared to the knowledge that is now available on video game production thanks to the recent growth of game production studies (Sotamaa & Svelch 2021), what we know about modern boardgames production dynamics remains very limited. By examining the processes and spaces involved in the making of both boardgames and their authors, our proposal aims to contribute to the general questions raised by game production studies on the various contexts and logic of game creation and production. In so doing, it follows recent works, which have uncovered some of the characteristics of this sector of game practice and product and how it interacts with digital games (Rogerson, Gibbs & Smith 2015; Kankainen & Paavilainen 2019; Tyni 2020).

A previous work on the sector drove our attention from the “digitalization” of boardgames to their own logic of production. We noticed the centrality of professional events and festivals not only in the configuration of the sector, but also in the trajectory of authors. Moreover, these events participate in the definition of the games themselves: boardgame prototypes boxes, thanks to their high mobility, accompany and equip the authors on these occasions in almost any circumstances. As arenas where heterogeneous actors meet and exchange (Moeran & Pederson 2012), events provide relevant opportunities to test the concepts and materials that make up their games. While boardgames conception has been documented, including by game scholars (Calleja 2022), it remains mostly considered and thought in its individual and isolated dimension. Yet, interviews we made with boardgame authors unveil the itinerant, mobile and social character of their activity, highlighted by the time and money they are willing to spend in attending this annual succession of gatherings. Their expectations toward those events do not only rely on opportunities of contracting with an editor, but also on the prospect of participating in their “protozones,” which reveal to be essential steps for the development of their games. Also, event organizers put more and more emphasis on prototype demonstrations and contests: at the Cannes boardgames festival, for instance, the “off” time, which occupies the 4 nights of the festival-goers, is entirely dedicated to the playtest of prototypes and welcome about 200 authors demonstrating their creations to a open audience.

Grounding on a large empirical qualitative research that we conducted in 2023 on the trajectories of authors and their prototypes, we build on the playground concept through sociological, anthropological and economical perspectives to propose here an analysis of the collective, material and spatial dimensions of creating boardgames in France. For Arjun Appadurai, trade shows and contests can be considered as non-ordinary occasions, special spaces and times where values are argued during tournaments, that are consequential “for the more mundane realities of power and value in ordinary life” (1986, 21). If boardgames trade fairs can then be described per se as competitive playgrounds, we would like here to focus more precisely on the particular kind of activity that author’s conduct in boardgames events when they give a demonstration of their prototypes. Inspired as much by Tim Ingold’s work on the perception and representation of the environment (2000) as by material approaches of games (Germaine & Wake 2023 ; Beil & al. 2022), we will show here that boardgames prototypes can themselves be analyzed as mobile “playgrounds” co-constructed by deploying an unstable material device from space to space and audiences to audiences.

We rely here on data collected through these mixed methods to show how events provide collective and collaborative playgrounds that contribute to games in the making as well as a professional community in the making. We attended 6 professional events and trade shows of distinct size and purpose (Festival International des Jeux, Alchimie du jeu, Paris est ludique, Les Ludendrômes, Clans, Creagames), we observed protozones activities and collected a vast visual material (n=1357 photos). We also conducted in-depth interviews with 30 authors, some within and some out of the context of trade fairs. We will here specifically demonstrate that authors learn to use distinctively the material and flexible conceptual qualities of board games prototypes and adjust it to various audiences, from playing test situations feedback. Repeated observations lead them to reconsider the concept of their prototype and different options they have to express it through materiality in action. Firstly, basing on the concept of “dwelling perspective” (Ingold 2000), we will demonstrate that the authors observe the lambda testers as these testers apprehend the material elements to experience the concept of their game as a whole environment. Secondly, basing on the “building perspective” (Ingold 2000), we will explain how these observations enable the authors to learn to distance themselves from their own vision, and gradually become designers more and more capable of anticipating the evolution of players within their playgrounds. In this case, we will explain the role played by peers, the other builders, and testing situations with them or the editors, when enhancing their own building skills.

A game prototype in this sector appears much more as a “crystal box” than as a black box (Pinch 1992), and as a peculiar kind of game creation process that deserves research attention. Considering boardgame prototypes as “playgrounds”, as developed by Huizinga (1980 [1938]), requires examining their construction. How do authors become authors, and how, through a progressive and collective process of building and dwelling, do they stabilize a material and mobile environment capable of conveying an experience? Bringing the focus on what is happening at the demonstration table, the analysis of these discursive, descriptive and rich visual materials allow us to observe and document this process of both authors and prototypes in the making, during their pathway throughout events. It highlights the importance of author’s experimentations with audiences as means of engaging in the action of learning how to build playgrounds. We contribute here to the empirical understanding of how “making” creates knowledge (Ingold 2013) by confronting the reality of things, considering players perception and not just “theorizing” these playgrounds.

ABSTRACT. Effective communication and social interaction hinge upon social-emotional skills, particularly empathy. However, traditional methods of assessing empathy in children, such as self-report questionnaires and behavioral observation, often lack engagement and fail to capture the multifaceted nature of empathy. To address this gap, we conducted a pilot study utilizing a role-play game activity with Indian children aged 12-16. This study aimed to transform the current self-report-based empathy assessment tool into an engaging and multidimensional game-based format. We believe that this approach can significantly enhance the assessment of empathy in educational and counseling settings. This paper contributes to the DiGRA community by exploring the potential of games as empathy assessment tools and highlighting the opportunities and challenges associated with their design. Drawing insights from our pilot study, we are currently conducting a larger-scale study with children in rural Odisha, India.

ABSTRACT. A dating simulator is a story-based video game genre where the central goal is to develop, partake in, or sustain a romantic relationship with another character. The genre originated in Japan and, although there is a growing collection of well-received English-language romantic games, dating sims remains relatively less prominent in English-language media coverage and scholarly works. The presence of romance (and romantic choice) as a gameplay and narrative device in major English-language video game franchises, however, such as Assassin’s Creed and Mass Effect, and prominent independent games, including Hades (Supergiant Games 2019) and Baldur’s Gate 3 (Larian Studios 2023) suggests that this romantic genre of play has substantial influence in the works of English-language developers.

In this presentation we discuss qualities of design and experience common across a selection of English-language dating simulators and romance games: primarily the Monster Prom series (Beautiful Glitch 2018; 2020), Boyfriend Dungeon (Kitfox Games 2021), Florence (Mountains 2020), Doki Doki Literature Club! (Team Salvato 2017) and Dream Daddy (Game Grumps 2017). While far from a conclusive overview of the genre, these games represent a cross-section of design techniques and themes that showcase the complexity and playfulness of English-language dating sims. We consider how gameplay and narrative work in these romantic games to inscribe and play with experiences of intimacy. While acknowledging intimacy is a complex subject, in this presentation we build from McGlotten’s definition of intimacy; an immanent experience that is a precondition to various forms of affect, has a relation to proximity and distance, and is “composed largely of feelings, feeling more or less connected, as if one belongs or doesn’t” (McGlotten 2013, 9). Acknowledging the relationship intimacy has with fantasy, longing, and aspiration, McGlotten’s definition encapsulates realised intimacy as well as the vital relationship intimacy has to failure and vulnerability (2013, 18).

In our presentation we focus on three primary affects we notice emergent from intimacy in the English-language romantic genre—feelings of adoration, vulnerability, and uncanniness. First, intimacy and adoration seem to emerge at the intersection of three qualities; the choices the player is given to express themselves in the game; the recognition of a familiar, or somewhat familiar character archetype; and, crucially, the disruption or subversion of that archetype. Second, emotional vulnerability is a frequent theme in the romantic games that we discuss, which often explore the more challenging aspects of romantic entanglements, such as awkward communication, unwanted advances, break-ups, and lack of emotional availability or transparency. Emotional vulnerability in these games is often represented by altering the player’s relationship to agency and action in the game world, through gameplay mechanics that interrupt or invert narrative and play. Third, many popular English-language romantic games have featured dark or uncanny themes; such as the uncertain presence of a monstrous figure, restricting or challenging the player’s sense of control during gameplay, or a general unresolved sense that something is not quite ‘right’ in the games’ environment. Our discussion considers and builds upon earlier studies of the uncanny in English-speaking romance games (Pan 2020); transitions between the adorable and the eerie (Lamerichs 2015) and dating simulations that inscribe agency to communicate an experience of vulnerability (Armitage 2020; Özdal and Çatak 2022; van den Oudenalder 2020; Nguyen 2020). We conclude with some wider conjectures on the significance of romance and dating elements to the experiences that video games can facilitate; considering their increasing prominence and acceptance in “mainstream” cultures and an increasing body of scholarship on the kinds of intimacy virtual experiences can facilitate.

ABSTRACT. This work offers a philosophical reflection on the nature of boundary-drawing in software and video games, specifically, how boundary-drawing within software can embeds perspectives, assumptions and rhetoric. The concept of corporeal capture is offered to understand boundaries as capable of localizing relational qualities. We study two video games: Crusader Kings III and Civilization VI, to demonstrate how boundary-drawing can open up opportunities to inject assumptions and biases about the human bodies, genetics and state bodies. For example, coding negative qualities such as Ugly as genetic traits highlight a certain view about the causal relationship between genetics and the quality of ugliness, where ugliness is no longer co-produced in a distributed, inherently social environment, but is conceived as mainly produced by the boundaried entity. This is also applicable to ownership of the state, which is often justified by highlighting the state as the main causal source of its internal productions.

ABSTRACT. This research aims to explore abjection in World of Horror (WoH) by Ysbryd Games (2023). Grounded in Julia Kristeva's 'Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection' (1980), it investigates how the game's rogue-like 1-bit format generates discomfort and unpredictability, eliciting feelings of abjection. Analyzing WoH as a virtual archive of abject cultural references, the research also delves into the symbolic significance of skin, employing an interdisciplinary approach to unravel the materialization of abjection in the gaming landscape.

ABSTRACT. Studies conducted on the structure of trauma in the human psyche have located the manifestation of two recurrent patterns in the mindscapes of victims– fragmentation and repetition (Caruth 1996; Granofsky 2012). The fragmented psyche [mis]represents the initial experience as the victim is entrapped in a cycle of reliving said experience. The temporality of trauma is characterized by what Robert D. Stolorow (2007) envisions as an “eternal present” in which one remains forever trapped. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, the Mariner can be read to be embedded in such a mentioned cycle of reliving his trauma, and trying to attain a sense of catharsis through utterance and unification of his fragmented psyche. In this paper, I attempt to conduct a transmedial study of the narrative of the poem with that of the critically acclaimed video game Dark Souls (2011) by FromSoftware to posit the game world as an emulation or “virtual mimesis” of a fragmented psyche suffering from trauma. The aporia of trauma that fails to be uttered in the mariner’s story, is enacted through “ludic” engagement of the player with the medium leading to the creation of a “playground of trauma” where the “excess” of trauma that escapes utterance is sublimated.

ABSTRACT. Games have been used as devices for simulation or procedural rhetoric for a long time, exemplar was the release of September 12 in 2003 (Espel, 2015). Bogost defines procedural rhetoric as “the art of persuasion by rule-based representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word” (Bogost, 2007). Rhetoric, understood as the craft of informing, persuading or motivating a particular audience, is a key aspect of learning games. As Gee states (Gee 2003, 2007), players must learn the rules of the game and plan their actions to solve challenges and master the game. Learning the rules is the baseline of the procedural rhetoric theory. The widespread adoption of new communication and media technologies coincided with a new form of knowledge creation, transmission and validation referred to as “post-truth” (Cosentino, 2020; Kalpokas, 2018) where audiences no longer respect truth (e.g., climate science deniers) but simply accept as true what they believe or feel (Harsin, 2018). Facts are considered irrelevant compared to appeals to emotion and personal beliefs, traditional information channels are questioned and “all authoritative information sources are called into question and challenged” (Fukuyama, 2017). This new paradigm questions traditional approaches to knowledge generation and transmission that are based on rational appraisal. The approach until now in countering this shift it has been to find strategies to confute untrue statements and filtering truths. In this context, we need different approaches for procedural rhetoric. In this paper we start drafting possible strategies for deploying a more visceral, personal and emotional rhetoric, able to challenge the emotionally charged post-truth arguments with emotionally charged experiences. We therefore showcase a simulation game designed to teach basic concepts of circular food economy. To experiment with systems that can engage users in a more personal and emotional way we designed a game that simulates a self-contained ecosystem where users can interact with energy production, waste management and food production stations to affect the wellbeing of a city. The systems are modeled around the report “Cities and circular economy for food” (Ellen MacArthur, 2019). The game was designed with the aid of experts in economy, ecology, animal science, public administration and innovation studies. The game has been created in four variations, experimenting both with controls as well as with visual feedback systems ranging from rational, objective and fact-based to more personal, emotional and visceral. The two variations of the visual feedback system are inspired by the work of Edelman (Edelman 1964): a referential visualization, where symbols are economical ways of referring to objective elements that help with logic and are widely understood—such as numbers and statistics (figure 1a) and a condensation visualization, where symbols have an emotional appeal and are used to evoke sentiments of solidarity (figure 1b). In the referential visualization, resources (money, energy, food and waste) are represented as packets of different sizes moving along pipes connecting the different stations. In the condensation visualization, the effects of how resources are produced, consumed and managed are visualized with abstract metaphors (water levels raising and changing color, forest growing or catching fire, algae tanks proliferating, cattle growing or dying, etc.). The two variations of the input systems are inspired by work on embodied interaction and cognition stating that cognitive processes are largely shaped by the body’s states, and the mind is grounded in the body and bodily interactions with the world (Lee-Cultura et al. 2020, Tan et al. 2018). We deployed a traditional control setup with mouse and keyboard (figure 2a) and an embodied control setup that requires users to touch a banana, a battery and an empty tin can (figure 2b) to access respectively the food production, energy production and waste management stations. Interacting with the different subsystems of the stations is also achieved by touching sensitive buttons. The 4 versions of the game were showcased between March and May 2022 as a part of the Visualizing Sustainability exhibition at the [blinded for review]. To assess the impact of the variations on the player experience, we asked visitors to fill the Player Experience Inventory (PXI) (Abeele et al. 2020). We collected 40 valid survey responses for each of the four conditions for a total amount of 160 responses. We found significant main effects. Results (table 1) show that condensation visualization and embodied controls are better to quickly engage and appeal as well as provide feedback on progress, while referential visualization and traditional controls are providing better controls, more fair difficulty perception and clarity of goals. It seems that, to maximize the impact of visceral rhetoric, a game must, to some degree, sacrifice clarity of information in terms of goals and controls and also sacrifice perceived fairness of challenge, contradicting current best practices and heuristics for usability and playability (Desurvire 2009). Future work will have to verify this initial insight on different games, but this exploratory study seems to point at the fact that there are possible alternative strategies to leverage the shift in how knowledge is generated and transmitted since the advent of the so-called post-factual society. Educators and game designers will benefit from updating the arsenal of design tools at their disposal by being able to reach audiences that might be otherwise indifferent to traditional rhetoric.

ABSTRACT. Videogame music engages players, summoning us into the magical, virtual world it soundscapes, encouraging us to adhere to the ludic parameters at play. In this paper, I outline a new gestural analytical framework better suited to the playful audiovisual individualities of videogame design in order to reveal how players might become immersed in games.

I will present a new analytical theory, graphically mapping gestures so as to determine the ways in which videogame music can successfully engage players to feel part of the ludo-narrative journey through a concept I term the ‘gestural potential’ of music. This paper presents a remapped recontextulisation of musical gesture theories presented by Robert Hatten (2004; 2018) in combination with a further fusion of scholarship, synthesising concepts from film and media studies, dance pedagogy and art research that have, so far, been marked by their limited contact. By exploring ideas of design (Isbister, 2017), culture (Kassabian, 2013), and analysis (Summers, 2016; Middleton, 1993), we can identify how best to examine videogame music to reveal how players engage with games.

By analysing the juxtapositional ludomusical content of the videogames Super Mario World (1990) and Super Metroid (1994) side by side, this paper reveals how musical gestures can immerse players in disparate game worlds, leading to an audiovisual phenomenon I term ‘ludomusical cocooning.’ In a rapidly altering world, in which primarily audiovisual technologies of virtual entertainment and escape are competing for our attention, this paper’s analysis of how that very attention can be grasped is a timely one.

ABSTRACT. Videogames offer an ideal space for exploring and expressing gender. However, within this space, players' actions and self-expression are still limited. To understand what influence players' gender expression through avatar customzation systems, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 gender-diverse and cisgender players. Applying the grounded theory approach, we identified six factors influencing players' gender expression in avatar customization. This research contributes to a more nuanced understanding of gender expressionusing avatar customization as a vehicle into game studies literature and will serve as valuable reference points in shaping the design of more inclusive avatar customization systems in the future.

ABSTRACT. Do analog role-players have specific tendencies in terms of psychological traits? Analog role-playing games (RPGs) require a remarkable amount of spontaneous co-creative play compared to many other types of games, where the vast majority of the game occurs in the playground of the mind. Even in live action role-playing games (larps) that feature a 360 degree illusion (Koljonen 2008) or indexical realism (Pettersson 2018), in which the environment is almost exactly like reality, play itself occurs within each player’s imagination, called subjective diegesis (Montola 2003, 2012). Such play requires a certain degree of mental flexibility.

This ability to shift into a different character and project fantasy onto reality has historically been considered suspect. In the nineteenth century, because they enact alternate roles, actors were assumed to be untrustworthy, dangerous, and even criminal (Bates 1988; Bowman 2015). Similar labels are sometimes placed on role-players. Since the advent of Dungeons & Dragons (1974), role-players have been accused of escapist behavior. These accusations have been attributed to personality characteristics, such as neuroticism, inability to reality test, or other “symptoms” that are considered pathological. Such accusations have led to moral panics, e.g., the Satanic Panic (Stark 2012; Laycock 2015), exemplified in the film Mazes and Monsters (1982) as well as academic research claiming that RPGs have negative psychological impacts on players (Ascherman 1993). Such concerns are also echoed in larger discourses on the supposedly negative psychological impacts of video games on players, including addiction, increased violent tendencies (e.g., Anderson et al. 2010, Gentile et al., 2004), and other forms of antisocial behavior (Happ et al. 2013).

Meanwhile, role-playing game studies has worked to rehabilitate the image of RPGs in the public and scholarly discourse. Academic studies emphasizing the positive psychological and social benefits of analog role-playing games have become relatively pervasive in recent years (see e.g., Bowman 2010; Daniau 2016). The educational potential of role-playing games in non-formal, formal, and informal applications is also being widely explored (Garcia 2016; Geneuss 2021; Baird 2022; Cullinan & Genova 2023; Westborg 2023). Mental health professionals increasingly are using tabletop role-playing games in therapeutic practice to improve social skills (Abbott et al. 2021; Varrette et al. 2023) and psychological wellbeing (Gutierrez 2017; Atanasio 2020). Three literature reviews on the academic discourse have been conducted in recent years with positive findings about the therapeutic value of these games (Arenas et al. 2022; Henrich et al. 2021; Baker et al. 2022) and two books on therapeutic game-mastering were released by academic publishers (Connell 2023; Kilmer et al. 2023). This potential for prosocial behavior fostered by games is also found in the wider field of game studies in which researchers have shown that playing games and identifying as a gamer lead to new friendships in school (Eklund et al. 2018) and how gaming supports friendship formation (Kowert et al. 2014; Molyneux et al. 2015).

To begin to explore the psychological dimensions related to the complexity of the phenomenological experience of role-playing, more research is needed, especially with important topics such as the willingness of role-players to explore new experiences, adopt the perspectives of others, empathize with them, and become absorbed in fictional narratives. While analog role-playing gamers have been studied along personality dimensions such as the Big 5 (Douse and McManus 1993; Wilson 2007; Carter and Lester 1998; and Lorenz et al. 2022), the results are inconclusive. Also of interest is the degree to which role-players tend to also experience mysticism, greater creativity, and/or beliefs in the paranormal. Do certain psychological tendencies exist in people drawn to engage in spontaneous adult pretend play, or pretensive shared imagination (Kapitany et al. 2022) with regard to personality, fantasy, and spiritual experience? Are tendencies toward neuroticism and/or psychoticism correlated with role-playing experience?

This research will address these questions by conducting online quantitative surveys of gamers and members of related subcultures in a two-stage process. The first stage will involve participants taking surveys on the Big 5 Personality with the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI) (Costa and McCrae 1992), perspective taking, and empathy with the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) (Davis 1980). The second stage will measure absorption and other characteristics through the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire Short Form (MPS) (Patrick et al. 2002) and transliminality (Lange et al. 2000). Participants will identify their degree of participation in a number of different types of play activities, as well as related subcultural activities. For the purposes of this study, the scores of players with a significant amount of experience in analog RPGs will be compared with data on general populations, video gamers, casual role-players, and members of other subcultures to uncover any trends present with regard to these traits.

ABSTRACT. The extended abstract describes a multi-site digital ethnography of Chinese World of Warcraft players' dealing with the massive server shutdown of January 2023. We think it is one of the first studies of (permanent) server shutdown, and believe the main theoretical contribution to be that it analyzes loss, disconnection and detachment in light of a body of literature (almost 20 years of it) that mainly studies WoW and other MMOs in light of connection and attachment (i.e., the sense of belonging, the friendships, etc.). See extended abstact for details.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents Road to Acceptance, a gamified virtual reality (VR) experience that brings awareness about the five stages of grief through a fantasy narrative. Grief, a universal human experience, manifests in five stages outlined by Kübler-Ross and Kessler (2005): Denial, Anger, Bargain, Depression, and Acceptance. These stages characterize the emotional journey faced by those grappling with loss, whether it be the passing of a close friend, family member, or loved one.

Virtual Reality (VR) holds promise as a unique medium for fostering narrative innovation in socio-emotional learning applications (Bailenson 2018, Mado et al. 2020, Rueda and Lara 2020). It can enable users to actively step into someone else's perspective, contemplating their emotions, beliefs, and experiences, often referred to as “Virtual Reality Perspective Taking” (VRPT) (Mado et al. 2020, Rueda and Lara 2020). In this context, VRPT serves as a powerful pedagogical tool to shed light on the complexities of grief, offering valuable insights into the diverse emotional paths individuals may traverse. The use of VRPT enables players to embody and respond to other person's actions and words while considering their character’s values and desires, making it primarily a cognitive form of empathy (Rueda and Lara 2020).

While grief is an inevitable reality for all, understanding its depth and impact is often hindered by societal taboos. Gamified environments can effectively promote additional, informal resources for learning and destigmatizing grief. For instance, Roth et al. (2019) developed a VR experience titled 5Days to convey the intricacies of grief to medical students and personnel. Commercial non-VR games like Medagon by Blind Sky Studios (McGuire 2020) and GRIS by Nomada Studio (Sandra and Mutiaz 2021) use environmental and level design to deconstruct grief and its surrounding taboos. However, little research has been done on promoting an empathetic understanding of grief through immersive storytelling and VR gameplay.

Leveraging VR’s interactivity, immersion, and presence to reinforce the theme of grief and the socio-emotional learning objectives of the experience, we propose a gamified VRPT environment, Road to Acceptance. In the game, the user plays a bereaved husband who has destroyed the world in his grief. Through this roleplay, we aim to utilize VRPT in a fantasy narrative to foster connection and understanding between the user and the story.

The game experience starts with a cutscene animation that introduces the gameworld lore, the user's objective, and the main character, Eldevu. The animation is narrated as Eldevu’s memories before the death of his wife and the subsequent events that led him to destroy the world as a reaction to his mourning. The player’s mission is to help Eldevu seek redemption by restoring the world. This is achieved through the act of “letting go”, symbolized by returning the magical gems that the main character previously used to destroy the world.

By using animation as an introductory narrative vehicle, we allow the player to understand the context of the character and bring the player inside Eldevu’s head as he processes his bereavement. This is complemented by communicating gameplay instructions through voiceover in the form of the characters' musings about what they are experiencing in each stage of grieving. This mechanic reinforces VRPT by deepening the player's understanding of the character's emotional journey and shifting the player-avatar relationship by making “us”, the user, become the avatar for Eldevu as they can go through these stages with the assistance of our actions.

Mirroring how coping with grief is experienced non-linearly in real life, we apply this modality in our traversal of stages in the game. The player chooses between the teleportation gems and game artifacts used in the application to transport to a specific mini-game, symbolizing a respective stage of grief. Each mini-game presents a task and offers the user words of encouragement through voiceover narrations and embodied interactions, such as shattering glass containers in the stage of anger or exchanging items with a non-playable character in the bargaining stage. With each task to complete, the game's goal is to bring Eldevu closer to their closure and acceptance of their loss.

The user demonstration of the experience was presented to approximately 20 attending participants at the Interactive Media Showcase at New York University, Abu Dhabi. The Showcase’s participants highlighted ease of story understanding and plot immersion through the introductory animation, the worldbuilding, and the level design for the stages of grief. Recommendations were given on reducing the length of the experience and reducing the distances between the stages. Future works on probing users' changes in knowledge, attitudes, and awareness of grief stages before and after the experience can be conducted through further qualitative studies.

We acknowledge that coping with grief is not a fantasy story. Grief is a complex emotion—a single narrative representation can not capture the complete spectrum of natural responses to grief. With this project, we hope to make mental health tools and applications accessible to a greater audience, and with VR and storytelling technology, this becomes possible. Stories help us feel seen and heard, and grief is there to be just that: felt.

ABSTRACT. This study investigates the prospect of integrating sustainability issues into game development education by reporting experiences from two game jam events. The paper highlights the importance of offering a social, creative environment in which the process of jamming is emphasized over results. We unpack the potential of game jams to be used for teaching subjects other than game development itself, particularly in relation to complex, anxiety provoking topics such as sustainability. Based on data consisting of participant reflections on their own moods and gained insights throughout the course of the jam, the research reveals a clear change in attitudes among the participants as they move on in their creative process. The study concludes that game jams, as activities defined by high levels of creativity and social engagement, is a powerful educational tool for approaching heavy topics while still letting participants cope with, and even empower them to address such complex issues.

ABSTRACT. The presence of coworking spaces has grown exponentially in recent years (Gandini 2015). They have been described as both solutions to the modern knowledge economy (Bueno et al. 2018) and contributors to more exploitative working practices (Moriset 2013). Despite these bold theoretical claims and widespread use, how these spaces affect user wellbeing, and engender positive or negative emotions is still underexplored (Howell 2022). While users believe that the design of coworking spaces influence their wellbeing, there are no systematic investigations on how to facilitate this consideration into the design of coworking spaces (Bucci 2023). Coworking spaces used by students have furthermore been expanding into universities around the world (Bouncken 2018). This expansion makes the question of coworking space effects on wellbeing even more pertinent. Student psychological wellbeing is a critical topic, as the time spent in university education is one typified by heightened stress and reduced mental health (Bewick et al. 2010). The criticality of the issue of student wellbeing has only grown as COVID-19 has further increased risks of social isolation among other health issues (Liu et al. 2021). This presents an important gap in modern research: How can the design of coworking spaces in university-settings support the psychological wellbeing of students? Playfulness is a critically growing concept for the study of wellbeing. Playfulness has been associated with reductions in psychopathology (Gray 2012), improving physical health (Proyer et al. 2018), relationship satisfaction (Brauer et al. 2021), and mental health (Masek 2023). Additionally, playfulness is a useful concept in a variety of design disciplines such as gamification (Deterding et al. 2011), social media website design (Sledgianowski & Kulviwat 2009), and spatial design in museums (Razack 2017). It is long established that individuals’ behaviors, social communities and psychological experiences are affected by the environmental design of spaces (Gifford & Reser 2011). By integrating these three pools of research an intentionally designed playful space has a promising potential to increase play behaviors in the space and improve users’ wellbeing. In this way, a more refined research question deserves attention: How does intentionally playful design in coworking spaces in university-settings affect student behaviors, experiences, and wellbeing? This paper addresses this question with empirical data comparing two co-working spaces in a mid-sized university in Finland. One co-working space was designed by a game studies team to intentionally invite a variety of playful activities including game playing, playing with toys, expressive and artistic communication, socializing, and even resting. This playful coworking space even attempted to mimic workspaces that appeared similar to adult playgrounds in their design. (Kultima 2014) The other coworking space is less than 2 minutes away, and was designed by a university-business collaboration, with more traditional design and goals. In comparing the two, both spaces are approximately the same size, in central, public locations and used the same amount by university students. This abstract presents a work in progress of a two-week comparison between the spaces. Researchers conducted interval-coded behavioral observations (Bakeman & Quera 2012) and collected surveys from the users in each space asking about general behavior, perceived playfulness, and a 23-item PERMA workplace wellbeing profiler (Butler & Kern 2016). This represents an exploratory type of data that triangulates (Thurmond 2001) between design intent, user self-perception, and external behavioral observation. Ten periods of data collection occurred at pre-established observation times, with surveys gathered for the playful (N=46) and traditional (N=46) coworking spaces with no respondents answering multiple times. Observed behaviors and self-described behaviors were coded using a bottom-up qualitative thematic analytic technique (Yin 2015) resulting in five general categories of behavior: Work and study, games and active play, rest and relaxation, socializing and friendship, and ancillary supporting behaviors. These behaviors occurred at similar rates both in self-perception and in observer-reports. By setting up the categories of behaviors as binary variables, a proportion test was conducted showing statistically significant differences in the proportion of work, play, relaxation, and social activities between the two spaces. Individuals in the playful coworking space were statistically more likely to view themselves as engaged in active play/games, rest/relaxation, and socializing, and less likely in work. However, work was still the most reported behavior in both spaces. (Figure 1)

Figure 1: Behavior Category Proportion Tests The data showed a statistically significant higher perceived playfulness in the playful coworking space. Furthermore, the playful coworking space had higher levels of self-reported positive experiences and evaluative happiness. The non-playful coworking space had higher self-reported scores of meaningfulness and accomplishment (Figure 2). Using Spearman rank correlation on the combined observations from both spaces, there was a statistically significant positive correlation between perceived playfulness, and three of the wellbeing measures: evaluative happiness, positive emotions, and engagement. (Figure 3)

Figure 2: T-Scores Comparing Playful and Traditional Coworking Space

Figure 3: Spearman Rho correlation between playfulness and PERMA Wellbeing Profiler Altogether, the intentional playful design of this coworking space should be seen as having a significant effect on its users. This work supports a conclusion that Playful design affects play behavior, sense of playfulness and resulting wellbeing. In this way, designing for playfulness in future coworking spaces in universities has a promising potential to better facilitate wellbeing of students. These coworking spaces can, in some way, become playgrounds at the university: supporting playful, restful, and social behavior resulting in more positive experiences, engagement, beneficial relationships and overall happiness in students. At the same time, students perceived the playful design as reducing their desire to engage in work and reduced their perceptions of accomplishing work goals in the space. While this is still a work in progress these findings are highly significant for a game studies audience. This work empirically supports a connection between playfulness, play, and games with certain forms of wellbeing. These findings spark greater questions on what types of wellbeing are supported by playfulness. Future works should investigate this new territory of how happiness, positive experience, and engagement may be facilitated by the design of university spaces through playfulness.

ABSTRACT. Game studies have often been treated as a relatively insular or niche academic field that caters almost exclusively to higher education. While it has engaged with themes and questions exploring how players perceive and utilize games, there has often been a disconnect from the people who play and interact with its object of study. Lost in abstraction, Game Studies has often busied itself with identifying the many forms a game may take on, enamored by the mysterious essence of play pointed out by Huizinga in 1938 and built upon by many others. But play is not just something to be theorized or philosophized, and games are not just activities for play. As scholars such as Gray (2020), Blackmon & Russworm (2020), and Trammell (2023) have pointed out, games can work as sites of discrimination, as history, or even torture, with play being the vehicle but not its end goal. Thus, it is imperative that game studies take seriously what games and play might mean to some of its most vulnerable participants and what other possibilities it might offer them.

But how do we bridge the gap between play as an abstraction and play as a lived reality? How can game studies become more meaningful, practical, and valuable to the communities it has often ignored or excluded? How can game studies break down the barriers and boundaries of its playgrounds to positively impact those it has studied? In this panel, discussants Akil Fletcher, Cody Mejeur, Kishonna Gray, Reginald Gardner, and Dave Nemer will grapple with these questions and discuss how Game Studies can create more holistic and engaged arenas of play that impact those outside the academy utilizing each of their various backgrounds in community organization and creating collaborative play spaces.

ABSTRACT. This presentation discusses a developing project that looks at remediation of video games in Chinese television dramas, and will be of interest to Game Studies scholars interested in the social and cultural place of games and gaming, in China and more generally.

ABSTRACT. I conceptualize Twitch as a live streaming playground between social media entertainment (Cunningham & Craig, 2021), advertisers, and the corporate field of game development known as the AAA industry. Specifically, I analyze how bodies that perform as Dude Bro Streamers have access to opportunities that advance their career. The Dude Bro Streamer persona is a self-branding strategy that leverages masculine bravado and perceived gaming expertise as cultural capital to appeal to Twitch’s core viewers of 18-34 year-old men, which reinforces androcentric hegemony in Twitch’s creator economy. In this extended abstract I examine how streamer TimtheTatMan used the Dude Bro Persona to make his spectacle with Fall Guys game a success for his career.

ABSTRACT. This thinkpiece suggests that Fantasy Premier League, one of the most popular fantasy sports games in the world, can be used as a lens to look back to the contemporary field of game studies. Fantasy sports games have transformed the ways in which sports are consumed these days, and we believe that Fantasy Premier League offers several points of reference for thinking about games and play in new ways. Following in the lead of Constance Steinkuehler’s notion that games are “well defined problems enveloped in ill-defined problems that make their solutions meaningful,” we believe that fantasy sports are an exceptional example of a game to study. Based on the incredibly well-defined objective of scoring more points, the ill-defined strategies players use to accrue those points is worthy of study (Steinkuehler 2006). By analysing the game and the enveloping cultural, technological and economic formations we highlight how diverse stakeholders participate in shaping the fantasies provided by Fantasy Premier League.

ABSTRACT. In the traditional view, the origins of game studies are linked to two key figures: Johan Huizinga ([1938] 2007) and Roger Caillois ([1961] 2001). These scholars are widely regarded as the pioneers of game research, especially in English-speaking countries and those influenced by the Scandinavian ludological approach (Dovey and Kennedy 2006; Juul 2003; Salen and Zimmerman 2004). Meanwhile, the elevation of Huizinga and Caillois in the field of game studies has overshadowed other potentially more intriguing play theorists, particularly those from France (Brougère and Perron 2013). The speech consists of the close-reading analyses of selected pre-1997 French scholars: Jean Château (1954), Jacques Henriot ([1969] 2020), and Jean-Michel Lefèvre (1984). Château and Henriot have been rediscovered by French game scholars, beginning with the special issue of Science et jeu (Brougère and Perron 2013; Meunier 2017; Perron 2013; Triclot 2013); the addition of Lefèvre is our own proposal.

Before the analyses, it is necessary to stress that the meaning of ludic activities is fundamentally different in the English-speaking game studies and in France. For example, jeu does not merely mean a ‘game’, as Juul (2003) misunderstoods to suggest during the examination of Caillois’s work. In France, jeu is both equal to a ‘game’ and a ‘play’; jeu is not meant as an object but as an activity (Triclot 2017, 29). Château, who should be regarded as the first French game theorist overall, treated jeu as an activity. Contrary to Caillois’s judgement that play is unproductive and distinct from everyday life, Château considered play as crucial to children’s social development and as involving as real labour, regardless of the results (Château 1954, 27–32).

Likewise, Henriot was unconvinced of the largely heralded Huizinga’s idea of homo ludens, which stated that the fundamental elements of human’s play are inherent in animal behavior (Huizinga [1938] 2007, 47). According to Henriot, it is humans who label animal behaviors as play, and play itself is inseparable from culture (Henriot [1969] 2020, loc. 8/153). For Henriot, jeu should be treated as a reflexive concept rather than an object of play; he sees jeu not a game object but as a culturally defined idea of play (Henriot 1989, 24). The final part of the speech concerns Lefèvre’s awareness of what is nowadays called ‘procedural rhetoric’ (Bogost 2007). Back in 1984, Lefèvre invented the learning method called computer-assisted teaching (enseignement assisté par l’ordinateur) which aimed to integrate various educational methods—including gaming, simulation, pedagogical case studies, and training management—without relying on any single technique. Lefèvre’s approach was also innovative at the time as he emphasized the importance of integrating games in a way that fosters critical thinking about their content and purpose (Lefèvre 1984, 11).

The research by Château, Henriot, and Lefèvre highlights notable differences in how play is perceived across various cultural contexts. In English-language game studies, particularly within the Scandinavian ludological approach, there is a strong focus on games as objects and human-computer interactions. In contrast, French play studies have traditionally emphasized human-human interactions, exploring the social dimensions of play and its role in fostering healthy social skills. This is reflected in the French term for multiplayer unplugged games, ‘jeux de société,’ which translates to ‘society games.’ This speech suggests integrating the often-overlooked contributions of Château, Henriot, and Lefèvre into the mainstream of English-language game studies, alongside Huizinga and Caillois. It also demonstrates that French play studies are not limited to, nor do they begin and end with, the works of Caillois.

REFERENCES Bogost, Ian. 2007. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge: MIT Press. Brougère, Gilles, and Bernard Perron. 2013. “Éditorial: Pour une « French Touch » des études sur le jeu.” Sciences du jeu 1 (October). https://doi.org/10.4000/sdj.197. Caillois, Roger. (1961) 2001. Man, Play, and Games. Translated by Meyer Barash. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Château, Jean. 1954. L’Enfant et le jeu. Paris: Éditions du Scarabée. Dovey, Jon, and Helen W. Kennedy. 2006. Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media. Maidenhead – New York: Open University Press. Henriot, Jacques. 1989. Sous couleur de jouer : la métaphore ludique. Paris: José Corti. ———. (1969) 2020. Le Jeu. E-Book. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Huizinga, Johan. (1938) 2007. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge. Juul, Jesper. 2003. “The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness.” In DiGRA Conference Proceedings 2003, 30–45. Utrecht: Utrecht University and Digital Games Research Association. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/05163.50560.pdf. Lefèvre, Jean-Michel. 1984. Guide pratique de l’en­sei­gne­ment assisté par ordinateur. Paris: CEDIC Nathan. Meunier, Sarah. 2017. “Les recherches sur le jeu vidéo en France. Émergence et enjeux.” Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances 11 (3): 379–96. https://doi.org/10.3917/rac.036.0379. Perron, Bernard. 2013. “L’attitude ludique de Jacques Henriot.” Sciences du jeu, no. 1 (October). https://doi.org/10.4000/sdj.216. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. 2004. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Triclot, Mathieu. 2013. “Game studies ou études du play ?” Sciences du jeu, no. 1 (October). https://doi.org/10.4000/sdj.223. ———. 2017. Philosophie des jeux vidéo. Paris: La Découverte.

ABSTRACT. This paper introduces a theoretical framework inspired in equal parts by posthumanism and by the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō for understanding videogames. The article challenges the Cartesian dualism typical in humanist thinking that separates subject and object by referring to Nishida's concepts of "pure experience" (Nishida, [1911]1992), basho (place) (Nishida, [1926]2012), and "action-intuition" ([1933]1970), advocating against viewing videogames as isolated, definable objects and highlighting instead an interconnected fabric of existence that integrates human and machine elements. In this view, videogames are understood as events originating from a foundational ground of Nothingness. This approach proposes a significant shift from traditional game studies, which often rely on frameworks that emphasize the autonomy and rationality of a human subject distinct from the object of the game, while earnestly heeding the posthumanist call for a deeper engagement with non-Western ontologies and epistemologies (Sundberg, 2014).

ABSTRACT. In recent years, it has been observed that the internet and the shift of much of our life to the digital world are driving a "gamblification" of various sectors. Although this term has been used to refer to the increased prominence of gambling in sectors traditionally associated with it, such as sports and sports betting, it can also be said that in cyberspace this process has resulted in the introduction of gambling in new areas. Perhaps the main example of this second dimension of the process is the popularization of loot boxes in video games, especially in online ones. But this process has not only occurred within video games themselves but seems to have permeated the entire gaming community, with practices such as skin betting and other forms of gambling related to video games and their broadcasting becoming popular. The convergence of gambling and betting with new sectors, as well as the reinforcement and magnification of these relationships, allows us to speak of a gamblification process that, although not exclusive to the world of video games, seems to have strongly penetrated it.

The gamblification of video games and their communities is a particularly noteworthy phenomenon not only because it involves the spread of activities that can lead to problematic and even pathological behaviors, but also because the introduction of gambling elements in contexts where they have not traditionally been associated can lead individuals to immerse themselves in these activities without perceiving them as gambling, thus exposing themselves to a wide range of harms that go beyond potential addiction. Gambling is not merely an activity in which the participant's reward is subject to chance and requires a payment, but "gambling" also has certain persuasive design elements that "encourage" participation and commitment from the player, such as offering short-term rewards or using strategies that favor certain biases. Along with the rise of these sectors, new criminal opportunities have emerged linked to the creation of a "parallel industry" based on the "exchange" of certain digital assets.

This research aims to approach this gamblification of video games and specifically seeks to understand the involvement of players in these new forms of gambling, their relationship with traditional gambling, and measure the prevalence of certain forms of victimization linked to the new criminal opportunities that have arisen in this area. To achieve these objectives, a survey was conducted among a representative sample of Spanish society (n=1460), which revealed that the new forms of gambling related to video games have a very small extension compared to other traditional forms of gambling, both at the general population level and among young people. However, these forms of gambling have already gained some popularity among Spanish players, although no evidence has been found linking participation in video game-related gambling with a greater tendency to participate in other forms of gambling. Finally, a small but significant percentage of the population has experienced scam attempts linked to the ecosystem of betting and gambling related to video games.

ABSTRACT. Loot boxes are products inside video games that can be purchased with real-world money to obtain random rewards (Drummond and Sauer 2018). They are psychologically gambling-like and spending on them has been linked to problem gambling (Zendle and Cairns 2018; Spicer et al. 2022; Garea et al. 2021). However, most loot boxes are not regulable under the gambling laws of nearly all countries (Leahy 2022; Moshirnia 2018). Various regions have therefore attempted other ways to regulate them. In China, companies are required to disclose the likelihood of obtaining various rewards. In 2020, it was found that although nearly all companies did comply, many chose to disclose using methods that were difficult for consumers to access (Xiao et al. 2021). By 2024, four years would have passed since then. It would be interesting to reassess the situation to see whether companies’ compliance has improved through a replication of the original study. Newer games, which are presumably more likely to comply better, may also have replaced some of the older games. South Korea and Taiwan have also adopted similar measures concerning probability disclosures, although with unique additional requirements (such as the need in Taiwan to attach an additional statement saying: ‘This is a product with a chance to win prizes. Consumers’ purchase or participation in the event does not mean that they will obtain specific products.’) (Xiao 2023). South Korea is expected to also set out more specific rules about how disclosures should be made in due course. Whether companies would be aware of and comply with such localised requirements remains to be seen. In the UK, the government has asked the industry trade body to better self-regulate (Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (UK) 2022). These self-regulations include probability disclosure requirements, presence warning labels and preventing under-18s from purchasing loot boxes without parental consent (Ukie (UK Interactive Entertainment) 2023). That last industry commitment may be complied with by different companies through varying technical means. In the Netherlands, the consumer protection regulator, the Autoriteit Consument & Markt (ACM), has actively enforced EU consumer protection law by demanding probability disclosures and that all in-game purchases be priced in terms of euros, rather than an invented in-game currency (Autoriteit Consument & Markt [Authority for Consumers & Markets] (The Netherlands) 2023). The ACM is the only regulator to require video games to disclose the pricing of all in-game purchases using euros, rather than, for example, ‘100 magical purple gems,’ which is most games do. Indeed, this regulatory advice is contrary to that of the UK advertising regulator, for example (Committee of Advertising Practice and Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice 2021). It would be interesting to see whether the most popular games in the Netherlands are complying with this measure by playing them and examining them. The main insight that can be derived is whether companies have taken specific action to comply with Dutch rules by making a dedicated national version of the game. Few studies have been conducted on companies' compliance with these requirements, and a considerable length of time (in the context of the rapidly developing video game industry) has passed since those few studies were conducted (e.g. Xiao, Henderson, and Newall 2023). The results of companies' compliance with the aforementioned requirements will be assessed through fieldwork in five regions (China, South Korea, Taiwan, the UK, and the Netherlands) examining the 100 highest-grossing games in each of those regions. We would be able to learn how prevalent loot boxes are across different regions, which helps our international understanding of the issue. Importantly, the results can inform the policymakers of those regions whether their rules are being effectively complied with and enforced. In addition, the lawmakers of other countries considering similar regulations could also benefit from these insights on implementation, compliance, and enforcement.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the question of whether gambling spaces can be regarded as metaphorical playgrounds for adults. To address this, I aim to initiate a discussion on the general similarities between analog and digital games, as well as games of chance ("gambling"). Certain researchers propose that the origins of gaming can be traced back to pre-religious practices, specifically the use of knuckle bones for fortune-telling (Parlett 2018). Over the course of time, this engagement evolved into more structured religious rituals, diverse forms of gameplay (Huizinga 1949, Callois 1961), and a wide array of gambling activities or “adult play” (Giddens 1964), including dice games, card games, horse race betting, lotteries, and the establishment of casinos.

ABSTRACT. Researching the design process of games can help researchers understand how and why designers act and how their actions influence the media they produce. This paper discusses an approach employed by the authors that combined elements of game jam practice with timelines to form an understanding of the design and development process. The approach facilitates the development of a rapid understanding of the design process and can help to identify key insights for further study. In our experience, the approach can help to quickly map the territory of the game design process and form the basis of more detailed investigations.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the use of the Acculturative Game Design (AGD) Framework to address acculturative stress and promote understanding within the Latine community in the United States. The Latine population faces unique challenges related to acculturation, intergenerational communication, and mental health, particularly concerning issues related to gender identity and sexuality. The study aims to explore the application of the AGD Framework, a framework aimed at mitigating acculturative stress and improving intergenerational communication among Latine participants, through a pilot workshop. Participants designed games reflecting Latine cultural values, illustrating mechanics and preferences relevant to their experiences. This inaugural application of AGD with Latine participants provides insights into serious games' potential in this context.

ABSTRACT. INTRODUCTION 

There is increasing recognition that digital technologies and online services should be designed to accommodate the needs and rights of child users. First codified in the UK, age-appropriate design is a regulatory framework that seeks to embed the best interests of the child in digital environments. As games, and in particular, online games, become increasingly popular with young children, it is important to consider how to conserve their best interests in digital play spaces. In Canada and the UK, the age-appropriateness of games is determined by industry-managed rating systems according to the suitability of a game’s content for children. ‘Unrated’ components of games, such as third-party pop-up advertisements and online interactions with other players are largely ignored by existing regulatory frameworks. Our project aims to further understanding of age-appropriate game design through an in-depth exploration of children’s and children’s game developers’ attitudes to current game rating systems and age-appropriateness. The project is an international longitudinal mixed methods study that will span over three years and includes annual focus groups with children and interviews with children’s game developers. In this paper, we will discuss our research design and present our year 1 findings.

METHODOLOGY 

The methodology of the project rests on a participatory and child-centric approach that emphasizes the importance of involving children directly in decisions that will affect them. The research design includes multiple methods, including policy analysis, content and design analysis, focus groups, and interviews, which together will allow us to gain a deeper insight into children’s experiences of age-appropriate design in games, game ratings, and regulations. In this paper, we limit the discussion to our focus groups with children, which employ an innovative play-based design that will engage the same 36 children aged 6 to 12 years every year for three years in group discussions about a range of issues and experiences related to “age-appropriateness” in games. The longitudinal structure of this study will allow us to track how these children's experiences, ideas, and beliefs might change over time, as they age and develop, and as they learn from each other and the research team. Each focus group includes 5-6 racially and gender diverse children in a similar age range.

During the Year 1 focus groups, we began our sessions with a live demonstration of a Minecraft (Mojang Studios et. al, 2011) world built by our team. This world consists of four mini-games designed to illicit the children’s reactions to four concepts identified as relevant in our literature review and policy analysis: fairness, age appropriateness (as expressed in ratings, descriptions, and designs), gambling mechanics, and “inappropriate” content (through the example of mild comedic horror). The children then took turns playing the mini-games. Across each one-hour session, the research team asked participants a series of questions about how they determined the appropriateness of a game, how they choose which games to play, what (if any) the rules are at home when it comes to which games they are allowed to play or buy, and what they think grownups should consider as they make and regulate children’s games. Importantly, our line of questioning focused on hopeful imaginings as much as current criticisms.

At the time of writing, we have completed the first year of children’s focus groups and are analyzing the data collected. In the coming months, we will have completed the first round of interviews with game developers, as well as the second round of children’s focus groups. Together, this constitutes just over half of the anticipated Canadian longitudinal data. The international component of our methodology is the duplication of these focus groups and interviews within a UK context and will not be reported on in this paper.

As we progress through rounds of focus groups, we are altering our questions and focus to reflect the insights and experiences of our child participants. For example, participants reported a preference for more concurrent gameplay during the focus groups, which we plan to incorporate into future focus groups.

PRELIMINARY FINDINGS 

The preliminary findings of our study confirm that children have meaningful and complex insights into their gaming experiences that are deeply valuable for current and future applications of age-appropriate design guidelines in games. Notable themes that have emerged thus far include a shared desire for increased flexibility and customization options, a demand for decreased advertising, and a belief that many grownups misunderstand the value of games for children.

To elaborate, we heard that children have different ways of deciding which games are appropriate for them and that the appropriateness of a game for an individual child cannot be known through an age rating alone. Children described their different tastes, preferences, and goals related to gaming, and they are calling for design options and customization settings that allow for more access to individually appropriate experiences. The key example discussed was “scary games” and “being scared,” which many of the children see as complex and deeply subjective categories that are largely misunderstood and vilified by adults. There is a widespread attitude that advertisements are misleading, irrelevant, and detract from the fun of games. Similarly, we received feedback that grownups do not necessarily understand the importance of digital games for children’s peer and social relationships, skill development and learning, and experiences of fun.

CONCLUSION 

Children are teaching us more about their experiences of gameplay than we could have imagined, and they are taking the conversation in directions that both corroborate existing literature revealing children’s advanced capacities to participate in design and policy development (Grimes & Merriman, 2021; Galman, 2019; Yoon & Templeton, 2019), and our assertion that future responses to the many questions raised by “age appropriate design” frameworks must consider children’s own attitudes, opinions, and experiences. This also speaks to a need for industry, academia and policymakers to collaborate effectively in ways that support children’s rights (Third et al., 2021) and facilitate their participation in digital society. 

WORKS CITED

Galman, S. C. (2019). Naptime at the OK Corral: Shane's beginner's guide to childhood ethnography. Routledge.

Grimes, S.M. & Merriman, V. (2021). “Technically they’re your creations, but...: Children making playing, and negotiating UGC games.” In L. Green, D. Holloway, L. Haddon, K. Stevenson, & T. Leave (Eds.) Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children (pp.275-284). Routledge.

Mojang Studios, Xbox Game Studios, Sony interactive Entertainment. 2011. Minecraft. Windows, macOS, Linux. Las Vegas, Nevada, USA: Mojang Studios. 

Third, A., Moody, L., Abbas, A., Adib Dino, L., Engel, E., Fenner, L., Grimes, S., Jagielski, F., Jones, N., Khan, V., Kidron, B., Lansdown, G., Lee, Y., Livingstone, S., Malachowska, A., Melhuish, N., Odame, J., Oyadomari, W., Park, J., Ponte, C., Nejm, R., Redgrove, E., Shade, L., Twes, D., Theakstone, G., & Youssef, S. (2021). Our Rights in the Digital World: A Report on the Children’s Consultations to Inform UNCRC General Comment 25. 5Rights Foundation and Western Sydney University.

Yoon, H. S., & Templeton, T. N. (2019). The practice of listening to children: The challenges of hearing children out in an adult-regulated world. Harvard Educational Review, 89(1), 55-173.

ABSTRACT. In this text, I explore the concept of "spatial agency" and "cheating" by looking at the integration of real-world spatial data through digital mapping interfaces (e.g., Google Maps, OpenStreetMap) in video games with a particular focus on location-based games such as Pokémon-GO. I define spatial agency as the level of ownership a player can assert over the gamespace as soon as the video game becomes publicly available. The objective of this project is to examine how players negotiate such spatial agency with game developers. Additionally, this research aims to explore the ethical implications of players' transgressive behavior while playing with real-world maps.

ABSTRACT. The application of Deleuzoguattarian frameworks (1987) can be seen in the scholarly contributions to theories of videogame play (Martin-Jones and Sutton 2007; Cremin 2015; Cremin 2016), authority (Dyer-Whitheford and De Peuter 2009; Galloway 2006; Mukherjee 2015), and spatial composition (Taylor 2007; Wood 2012). Martin-Jones and Sutton (2007) note that videogame space is multidirectional, labyrinthine and non-linear, containing multiple interconnected elements. As such, these elements resemble the Deleuzean (1987) concept of the rhizome in their organisation. Cremin (2015) foregrounds the importance of player agency in the exploration, completion, and therefore necessarily co-creation of games. Spatial compositions can be explored in tandem with player agency in order to understand the meaning of the distribution of authority and agency through virtual space (see, for example, Bódi 2022). Drawing on Deleuzean concepts of space, Wood (2012) argues that the interaction between player action and their surroundings is generative of recursive space. This can be understood as the space generated through initial interactions between the player and their surroundings, a process that recurs in the progression of play (Wood 2012). 

However, to date, the aforementioned Deleuzoguattarian contributions to the field have not addressed the problematic anthropocentrism of characterising agency exclusively from the position of the player. We argue that authority and agency exist as part of a virtual game-space as fluctuations between items, mobs, buildings landscapes, methods of traversal, non-player characters (NPCs) and more. This paper will therefore advance studies in this area by drawing on multiple Deleuzoguattarian concepts, relating them to Dying Light (Techland 2015), and drawing this back to questions of videogame agency, spatiality, and authority.

Dying Light is an open-world zombie survival game, where, as Kyle Crane, the player enters a quarantine zone in the fictional city of Harran. The game is known for its parkour free-running gameplay, where you can climb, run, and jump from buildings, and utilise, for example, trash piles to soften the fall from large heights. Different mutations of zombies appear throughout the game, and tasks are unlocked across a spectrum of survivors. Weapons are found and modified with extra items, yet have a diminishing durability, which can render them useless mid-fight.

By drawing on the concept of the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), we will explore how authority is distributed and reconfigured across Dying Light’s open world. As Honan (2007, 533 and 538) explains, “[r]hizomes do not have clearly identifiable beginnings and ends […] There is no one, correct way through a rhizome”. Moreover, “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 7). In Dying Light, the progression through the game and the levelling of the player, the different zombie mobs you encounter, as well as the difficulty setting that you choose, and the durability of weapons, all put the zombie and the human in an intricate dance which is not a singular hierarchy but depends on multiple factors.

The fluctuation of agency distributed across the world of Dying Light can also be mapped along a continuum showing different degrees of smooth and striated space. Striated space, confines movement “as by gravity to a horizontal plane, […] limited by the order of that plane to preset paths between fixed and identifiable points” (Massumi 1987, xiii). Whereas smooth space is open-ended; “[o]ne can rise up at any point and move to any other” (Massumi 1987, xiii). In Dying Light, spaces are sometimes more defined – more accessible – dependent on the zombies that occupy them. For example, in the day, when the zombies have less power, the streets of Harran might be considered striated – they are generally quite fixed, with fixed behaviours from the biter zombies shambling through them that can leave the places fairly sedentary, and rule-driven. The biters do not necessarily pose a huge threat – they have some agency in that they shape how the player must react, but they can be easily avoided. Yet, other zombies can disrupt the sense of space and the normative rules that the biters convey. For example, the biters cannot climb and do not run, so spaces that were formerly safe – rooftops – become smoothed out – made more open to potentials –  by the presence of the “Virals”, a different classification of zombie that is fast, and can climb. We therefore argue that gameplay in Dying Light constitutes the activation of smooth space, traversing and altering both restrictions and pathways in what can be described as rhizomatic play (Cremin 2015).

This further links to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of de- and re-territorialization (1987), which can loosely be understood as the reconfiguration of authorities over spaces or networks. In Harran, zombies have rewritten the cityscape with their own re-inscription of spaces. Places that were once safe are now surrounded or overrun with infected, and areas of actual safety are only made so through various traps, guards, and fortifications. The original purpose and classification of places has changed, in line with the threat the zombies in their various forms offer. Ultimately, the zombies are more in control than the player. However, the player can clear certain spaces from infected, and often does so to restore areas as “safe houses”. This serves to reinforce the de- and re-territorialization of the spaces as they are in flux through the game. Thus, in videogame worlds authority and territory are mapped and reconfigured in the process of play.

Drawing on Bódi’s (2022) work on spatial and explorative agency, we therefore explore how space, the traversal of it, and the occupation of it, by both zombie mobs and human-players is integral to the agencies at play within Dying Light. This paper will therefore contribute to studies within videogame space and place, power and authority, and the flux around agency, advancing the application of Deleuze and Guattari in game studies by bringing them into closer contact with game texts and literature. 

REFERENCES: Bódi, B. 2022. Videogames and Agency. London, UK: Routledge.  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. and Guattari, F. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Massumi, B., Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.  Dyer-Witheford, N. and 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. Honan, E. 2007. “Writing a rhizome: an (im)plausible methodology.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20 (5), 531-546. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518390600923735 Massumi, B. (1987) “Foreword.” In A Thousand Plateaus by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, IX-XV. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.  Mukherjee, S. 2015. Video Games and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.  Sutton, D. and 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, MA: MIT Press. Techland. 2015. Dying Light. Online Game. Techland. Wood, A. 2012. “Recursive space: Play and creating space.” Games and Culture, 7 (1), 87–105.

ABSTRACT. Building on the concept of the implied player (Aarseth 2003) as an element of a game’s structure of meaning, the theory of ludic subjectivity (Vella 2015; 2016) highlights how, through its formal structures, a game establishes a ludic subject-position which the player is invited to inhabit and engage with the game from. Drawing upon phenomenology and existential philosophy, this theory considers how, by inhabiting this subject-position and existing in, and towards, the game from this position, the player enacts a ludic self that takes shape through their actions and choices, and that embodies a particular comportment or way of being equally determined by the game’s formal structures and the player’s disposition.

This presentation shall contextualize the notion of ludic subjectivity within T.L. Taylor’s concept of the assemblage of play (2009), unpacking, by means of an autoethnographic case study founded in the author’s self-observation and examination, the complex negotiations of meaning that play out in the encounter between the game’s formal structures of ludic subject-positioning and the socio-cultural situatedness of an individual player. The aim shall be to demonstrate, by means of close engagement with an individual playing, how the lived meaning of gameplay plays is negotiated at the interface between the network of cultural and material agencies in which the game, the player and the habitus of playing are enmeshed.

The focus of analysis shall be the author’s own playing of Gran Turismo 7 (Polyphony Digital, 2022). The autoethnographic method is demanded by the nature of the investigation, which requires paying attention both to the formal properties of the game and to the situatedness of an individual player (and an individual playing) towards, and in relation to, these formal properties.

Attention shall be paid to the various ludic subject-positions the game established. Primary among these is the embodied ludic subjectivity of the player as racing driver in the game’s central activity of car racing, and the demands it places in terms of kinaesthetic precision and the adoption of the goal-oriented attitude towards winning races, or completing missions, that characterizes “striving play” (Nguyen 2020). However, the presentation shall also consider other ludic subject-positions the player is invited to occupy while engaging with the game: for instance, that of the collector aiming to gather all of the game’s hundreds of car models in their garage, or the gearhead invested in tweaking their car’s settings to perfection, and expected to draw on extraludic knowledge of automotive engineering and car modding culture to do so.

It shall also touch upon notions of gamebour (Lund 2014) to theorize the accumulationist drive by which play is rewarded with the in-game credits required to purchase new cars, and a ‘Daily Workout’ system structures a habitual obligation towards such behaviour, invoking a similarity with familiar neoliberal practices of quantifiable self-optimization (Han 2017) to interpellate players into neoliberal subjectivities of play (Möring and Leino 2016).

The paper shall also pay attention to the way the player is invited to identify with markers of wealth, status, and the accumulations of economic and cultural capital. It shall highlight the game’s fetishistic relation with the car as a commodity and a cultural object, and the ways in which the decontextualization of the car from the material and labour conditions of its production – and from the effects of climate change for which the fossil fuel industry is culpable – allow Gran Turismo 7 to present itself as a cozy game, portraying a world of safety, abundance and softness (Waszkiewicz and Bakun 2020) in which the player is free to indulge in the aesthetic celebration of car culture, the fantasy of easy ownership and accumulation of exclusive commodities like luxury cars, and the assumed social capital such ownership is perceived to convey. It shall consider the extent to which the game participates in the gender politics of car culture and its long association with masculinity (Walker 1998), as well as with Western-centric discourses of centre and periphery in its foregrounding of a cultural sphere that centres western Europe, the United States and Japan.

In relation to all of this, however, the presentation shall also consider how the experienced meanings emerging from inhabiting the game’s multiple subject-positions is the result of a process of negotiation. This shall be done through a reflection on the author’s own playing, and on their situatedness towards the game – as a player of a particular gender, social class, semi-peripheral national identity, cultural background, political beliefs, etc. This autoethnographic reflection shall be informed, among other salient conceptual tools, by notions like the idea of aesthetic self-fashioning through the development of personal playstyles (Zhu 2018), the expressive freedom to dress one’s avatar (Tosca and Klastrup 2009) in user-created outfits, constituting “tools of agency used outside the conventional play frame” (Felczak 2018) – as well as, more broadly, a framework for conceptualizing lived disposition and experienced cultural value invested in Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and cultural capital (1984).

REFERENCES: Aarseth, E. 2003. “I Fought the Law: Transgressive Play and the Implied Player.” In Situated Play: Proceedings of the 2007 Digital Games Research Association Conference, edited by Akira Baba. Tokyo, Japan: September 2007, 130-133.  Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique on the Judgment of Taste, R. Nice (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  Felczak, M. 2018. “Aesthetics and Cosmetic Transactions in Path of Exile.” Paper presented at DiGRA 2018, Turin, Italy, July 25-28, 2018. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/DIGRA_2018_paper_259.pdf  Han, B.C. 2017. Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, E. Butler (trans.). London, UK: Verso.  Klastrup, L., & Tosca. S. 2009. ““Because it Just Looks Cool!:” Fashion as Character Peformance – The Case of World of Warcraft.” Journal of Virtual Worlds Research. 1(3), 3-17.  Lund, A. 2014. “Playing, Gaming, Working, and Labouring: Framing the Concepts and Relations.” TripleC. 12(2), 735-801.  Möring, S., & Leino, O.T. “Beyond Games as Political Education: Neoliberalism in the Contemporary Computer Game Form.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds. 8(2), 145-161.  Nguyen. 2020. Games: Agency as Art. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Polyphony Digital. 2022. Gran Turismo 7. Playstation 5 game. Sony.  Taylor, T.L. 2009. “The Assemblage of Play.” Games and Culture. 4(4), 331-339.  Vella, D. 2015. The Ludic Subject and the Ludic Self: Analyzing the ‘I-in-the-Gameworld.’ PhD dissertation: IT University of Copenhagen.  Vella, D. 2016. “”Who Am ‘I’ in the Game?”: A Typology of the Modes of Ludic Subjectivity.” Paper presented at the 1st Joint International Conference of DiGRA and FDG, Dundee, Scotland, August 1-6, 2016. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/paper_234.pdf  Walker, L.M. 1998. “Under the Bonnet: Car Culture, Technological Dominance and Young Men of the Working Class.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies 3, 23-43. Waszkiewicz, A., & Bakun, M. 2020. “Towards the Aesthetics of Cozy Video Games.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds. 12(3), 225-240.  Zhu. F. 2018. “Computer Gameplay and the Aesthetic Practices of the Self.” ToDiGRA: Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association. 3(3), 75-104.

ABSTRACT. The representation of game centers in digital games is diverse and vast: spanning from the early Eighties to modern games, by creators in various countries and included in many genres (beat-em-ups, rpgs, graphic adventures, puzzle games and more). However, despite their common appearance and historical significance for digital gaming internationally, research on the representation of game centers within digital games remains very scarce. Existing references often relegate them to mere easter eggs, ludic tributes, self-references or fourth-wall-breaking puns. Contrary to this perception, I suggest that game centers in digital games can be interpreted as theoretical objects (Careri 2019) that foster ludic self-reflexivity (Rapp 2008), by triggering critical reflection on the boundaries and thresholds of digital play (anonymised). The interaction with game centers in games make players aware of the ties between games and their spatiotemporal context, techno-human assemblage, sociocultural dynamics. Game centers as triggers for self-reflexivity seem to be especially common in Japanese videogames between the late Eighties and the end of the Nineties, exemplified by games as Golden Axe (1989), Tokimeki Memorial (1994), Game Tengoku (1996) Shenmue (1999) and game series such as Like a Dragon (2005-) and Persona (2006-). My hypothesis is that players’ engagement with arcades in these games lead to a self-reflexive experience on the dynamics of limit-making and threshold-crossing that characterise the act of playing games. This hypothesis is supported by a theoretical framework drawing from theories on the boundaries, paratexts and contexts of games (Fassone 2013, Montola 2005, Nitsche 2008, Walz 2010, Wirman 2021), studies on self-reflexivity in media and digital games (Noth and Bishara 2008, Caruso et al. 2016, Boluck and Lemieux 2017, Schubert 2021), researches on Japanese game centers (Ashcraft 2008, Kato 2011, Pelletier-Gagnon 2019, Kawasaki 2022, Koyama 2023) and the analytical concept of objet theorique (Damisch 1972, Bois et all. 1998), adapted for the analysis of digital games. To briefly illustrate this concept, the proposal exemplify it through the analysis of the action-adventure game Shenmue (Sega 1999).

ABSTRACT. This article assesses the development of reckless driving in racing and open world games and their nature as “safe” playgrounds for creative yet destructive simulated behavior. The aim is to address the crossing points of realism, replication, productivity, escapism, and controversy in creating virtual mayhem and understanding general affiliation towards it. Subjects analyzed range from the historical development of such games to other media text examples. As primary material, different types of crash-oriented gaming videos are selected for narrative content analysis, and then reflected upon player agency, simulation, and transmediality. Other aspects touched upon include the broader socio-cultural position of reckless driving, cultural memory, and moral/media panics affiliated with gaming.

ABSTRACT. Since the release of Detention (Red Candle Games 2017) and Devotion (Red Candle Games 2019) by Taiwan indie developer Red Candle Games in 2017, unexpectedly, Chinese horror has become an emerging subgenre that tends to associate horror more with specific socio-cultural reality of the past and present, especially the representation of Taiwan's historical trauma and folk religion (Scott and Alexander 2022; Wu 2022; Beadle 2022). However, even though "Chinese horror" has flourished in mainland China's gaming industry, it has not received commensurate academic attention—only a few papers in Chinese have discussed the topic. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring the entanglement of independent horror games and social reality in mainland China though the case study of two typical games, Firework (Shiying Studio 2021) and Comedy Funeral(Great fortune and great favour Unlimited 2022). These games create a playground, or in Foucault's words a heterotopia (Foucault 2005), that disrupts and questions the boundaries between fantasy and reality, between affect and reason. I call it "fearful realism." I will demonstrate the textual, contextual, and intertextual aspects of the games by analyzing the narrative and gameplay, as well as the online archival data such as reviews and discussions. The aim of this paper is not to delineate a fully genealogical or prescriptive definition of the subgenre - "Chinese horror", but rather to show its potential to engage reality through the analysis and contextualization of typical games.

ABSTRACT. Recent years have seen much attention into how video games represent or 'receive' classical antiquity, with various articles, volumes or monographs discussing how contemporary game developers engage with ancient Greece and Rome in their work. Simultaneously, game studies has become increasingly interested in local game production contexts, in what scholarship has called regional game studies. This paper is a first attempt at combining these two fields, and presents the results of an exploratory pilot study where Greek game developers were interviewed regarding their opinions on the representation and reception of (ancient) Greece in games. In particular, this presentatation will discuss Greek game developers' potential motivations to depict (ancient) Greece in their games (or not), their opinions vis-à-vis the representation of (ancient) Greece by non-Greek studios, their feelings regarding historical 'accuracy' and whether a continuous line of heritage between ancient and modern Greece can even be drawn, among others.

ABSTRACT. This paper discusses the challenge of studying play and gaming activities in situations where participants are reluctant to disclose their participation, or in which researchers face limitations that prevent direct observations. To answer this question, we have focused on the material traces and clues of play left by the participants, terming this approach ‘ludological semiotics’: the study and interpretation of traces, clues and remnants of game and play activities. We base our methodology on historical and archaeological studies of traces, notably drawing from Carlo Ginzburg's method of clues. We will scrutinize the traces and clues of play we have identified and documented, presenting their categorization and our interpretation model. We will contemplate what assumptions about play can be made based on these clues. Finally, our approach addresses some methodological challenges in contemporary game and play studies.

ABSTRACT. In this study, we investigate the shifting meanings of play and religion in the recent proliferation of ‘game themes’ in public art and design of the urban street installations and pavilions of the UNESCO Cultural Heritage of Humanity-accredited Durga Puja in Kolkata, India, 2023. A carnival celebrating ten-day worship of the Hindu goddess Durga, the Durga Puja and its annual display of “pandals” (a mix of public installation and pavilion), with an average footfall of 10 million, has recently inspired a spate of scholarly works addressing its distinctive contributions to street art as global commentary, unique economic splicing of late capitalist consumerism with indigenous artisanal crafting communes, and complex interlinkages between political debates in India and undercurrents in Bengali public culture, and even diasporic and digital contestations of identity over organization of Durga Puja across the world (Chakrabarti 2024; Guha-Thakurta 2015; Bandopadhyay 2017; Mukherjee 2022). While much of the scholarship regarding Durga Puja focuses on the aforementioned themes, we will examine the intriguing displays of games—digital as well as analog—put forth in three major pandals of the most recent iteration of Durga Puja in 2023. Triangulating three different modes of ludic thought—Johan Huizinga’s classic “magic circle”, the Hindu religious notion of the universe as “leela-kshetra” [playground] of the supreme deity, and recent political operationalization of ludic registers in Bengali political contestations between, popularized as the slogan of “Khela Hobe” [“We shall play”] during the West Bengal State Assembly Elections in 2021 and thereafter, our case study focuses on understanding the pandals as offering an interpretive map of conversations between global game cultures and the shifting histories of gameplay in Bengal, ranging from the ancient Hindu Gyan Chaupar to the postmodern Augmented Reality games.

Part photo-essay, part autoethnographic journalism, part playful travelogue, part critical intervention, this case study blends academic enquiry with lived and embodied experiences of play and ritual through the medium of the highly participatory Puja celebrations. In doing so, this paper explores the rationale behind Puja committees in the city turning their attention to videogames as a medium for commenting on technological modernity in the popular imagination. The form, logic and content of games are employed as paratextual supplements (Genette, 1997; Consalvo 2007, 2017; Mukherjee, 2016; Švelch, 2020) to pique nostalgia, identification and commentary on the past, present and futurity of the collective experience of Durga Puja in the space of the pandal. The ludic architecture of Puja pandals are an instance of incidental gaming, creating a productive avenue for studying the shifting nature of the magic circle within and through ritual, religion and cultural practice which are always already intertwined in South Asia. In this, these are playgrounds which actively resist the dangers of the single game-story (Rizvi and Mukherjee, 2023) by (dis)playing multiplicitous possibilities of game as paratext in non-Western pluralities. This case study seeks to open up this avenue to critical study in the purview of game studies by presenting the playground of the pandal which is populated by the iconography of the goddess as well as that of chessboards, snakes and ladders, and indigenous games.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract investigates how recreational urban tree climbing is a playful activity that creates new ways of experiencing the city by transforming a liminal space, the canopy, into a place of play. I demonstrate how the canopy is liminal and how tree climbing is a liminoid experience. Then, I investigate how the use of liminal spaces creates actual playgrounds, beyond those designed by urban planners. In doing so, I reveal how this activity shares qualities with recreational skateboarding and flaneurism and how climbers blur the boundaries of play and non-play. This research is motivated by the possibility that the canopy could function as a sort of nature-based playground, that is if tree climbing creates micro-spaces of play and mediates human-nature interactions.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract, in the vein of autoethnography, reflexively analyzes an organic approach to play in Minecraft that resists extractive, colonial tendencies common to sandbox crafting games. In primary theoretical use are Melissa Kagen’s postapocalyptic pastoral to assist in my reading of the game, and Rachael Hutchinson’s observant play to dissect the playstyle and what it means to modify a game to better match or explore one’s reading of it.

ABSTRACT. This paper develops an approach to digital fishing and its cultural significance in times of ecological crisis. As a minigame, fishing is often deployed in games to provide counterpoint to the neoliberal temporalities and pressures involved in mainstream game experiences. Red Dead Redemption 2 offers an interesting example of this limited use of fishing. However, fishing minigames frequently fail to challenge Western binaries between human societies and the nonhuman world: they elevate romanticized notions of nonhuman wilderness as opposed to human subjectivity. My two examples of “radical digital fishing”—Dave the Diver (Mintrocket 2022) and Dredge (Black Salt Games 2023)—go much further: they create incongruous situations that defamiliarize players’ imagination of fishing in both the real world and digital gameplay. They do so in profoundly different ways, though: Dave the Diver through humor and incongruity on both a thematic and a formal level; Dredge through dialogue with weird fiction, by conflating human subjectivity and the nonhuman materiality of the waterscape. In this way, I show how modern games resonate with what Nicole Seymour has called “bad environmentalism,” using fishing to disrupt the conventional understanding of the nonhuman of Western modernity.

ABSTRACT. In this paper, we explore the possibility of expressing poetic gameplay devices as game design patterns and examine how practicing game designers make use of these patterns to design an “art game”. To do this, we reformulated a set of poetic gameplay devices as a pattern language consisting of 33 patterns. We asked 8 pairs of game designers to use these patterns to create a simple prototype of an “art game” based on a given theme. Observations suggest that although designers found the patterns familiar, they did not find them useful during the earlier stages of the design process, as they were more focused on problem creation than problem solving. It was only when they had a preliminary design that they would make use of the patterns. They also felt that it wasn’t clear who would benefit from the patterns, since expert designers are already familiar with the patterns, whereas a novice designers may not have enough background to use of the patterns. These findings suggest that more work needs to be done to consider how to incorporate game design patterns into the creative process, particularly for specific forms of game design such as the creation of "art games".

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the concept of ‘game feel’ in videogames, exploring its connection with affective science. Game feel describes the player’s sensory and emotional response to a game’s mechanics, aesthetics, and environment, contributing significantly to the overall play experience. By integrating theories of constructed emotion (Barrett 2017) and core affect (Barrett and Bliss-Moreau 2009), this study provides a nuanced understanding of how players perceive and interact with game worlds and systems. It examines the dynamic interplay between the game’s designed elements and the player’s anticipatory brain functions, which are responsible for shape each game's unique ‘feel’ at a given moment. The paper further discusses the significance of the ‘affective niche,’ highlighting the role of internal affective states and external stimuli in creating engaging gaming experiences. This approach offers a holistic perspective of game design, emphasizing the need for an inclusive approach that has the potential to resonate with a diverse player base.

ABSTRACT. Judge, jury, executioner or more accurately: grim reaper or recycling factory supervisor. The player is allowed to embody death in macabre yet morally fascinating ways in three indie games: Death and Taxes (Placeholder Gameworks, 2020), Death Coming (NEXT Studios, 2017), and Organs Please (Techhome, 2023). While death is an integral part of gameplay across genres, it is rare to find gameplay mechanics which place the power of sacrifice in the hands of the player in such a direct and morbid way. This paper seeks to examine how the integral game design elements, as per Schell’s framework (Schell, 2018), namely aesthetics, mechanics, and narrative, combine to desensitise and challenge the player leading to a darker eudaimonic gaming experience (Daneels et al. 2020; Holl et al. 2022).

ABSTRACT. Modding the sexualities of video game characters is one way in which queer players have opened up new representational possibilities for themselves. This paper focuses not merely on what queer modding does but on how it does it. It highlights the extent to which queer modders engage with, leverage, and play in game data to customize their experience beyond what the base game permits, even if their changes are ultimately small when playing the modded game itself. Turning to a unique mod enabling asexual and aromantic relationships in Stardew Valley (Eric Barone 2016), this work also considers how a game’s technical structures, from its file system to its underlying development technologies, sustain but do not determine queer representation. With access to these structures, modders can turn them, and the games built on top of them, into playgrounds for queer expression.

ABSTRACT. The FIFA series (now known as EA Sports FC) of video games are football (soccer) sports simulation games that claim to provide “unrivaled authenticity” for fans (Escaravage and Ludlow 2023). EA releases a new version annually and each iteration routinely sells in excess of 10 million copies, outstripping rival football games such as Konami’s eFootball (formerly PES: Pro Evolution Soccer) and Sports Interactive’s Football Manager. The game has been described as one of a select few that is “familiar to people who have no interest in gaming – or even real football” (Parkin 2016) and “woven into global culture” (Markoff 2023: xiii). In this paper, I explore how the data in the FIFA/EA Sports series and its wider ecosystem is presented and used by developers and the player base. That data both replicates and represents the structures, machinations and history of association football but is also played with to create an alternate history. In this context the paper will consider how EA manages core aspects of the game data and what this means for authenticity.

ABSTRACT. The computer game sandbox is a unique cultural playground that presents digital culture as a ludic toybox for experimentation and play. Easy-to-use modded environments such as Garry’s Mod (Facepunch Studios 2004) and Roblox (Roblox Corporation 2006) quickly became testing grounds for how new generations define their creative logic, which often takes the form of pastiche of popular culture fragments (Nelson 2023), following a similar pattern of remix culture seen in music and visual media (Bourriaud 2002, 36-7) (Manovich 2001, 295). Participatory culture in the form of modding is a well-established revenue model for game developers (Küchlich 2005), and the aesthetic status of user-generated content in computer games is a function of the continually negotiated economic relationship between the proprietors of these games and their users (Nelson 2023). The founding story of early sandboxes such as Garry’s Mod was the humorous repurposing of memes and game fragments, where the reverence for historical legacies is replaced by a playful irreverence that treats culture like a set of discarded children’s toys (Kirby 2009, 16). But these discarded toys never truly belong to their players and for over three decades, computer game modding has tested the limits of how co-creative media (Morris 2003) can co-exist alongside copyrighted content. Looking at visual culture more broadly, recent advances in easy-to-use AI generators such as Stable Diffusion (Stability AI 2022) and MidJourney (Midjourney 2022) have resulted in a markedly different conversation regarding remix and postproduction culture, where artists are increasingly concerned about how their works are being used to creatively inform the weights of AI models. By setting up a series of comparisons in the legal framework of modding and creative disciplines such as music and visual art, this paper examines the fractures and contradictions in the current landscape of creativity and copyright and speculates on how this might affect the aesthetics of modding and sandbox culture. In 1991, Jameson rationalised the paradox of a historically focused remix culture and its relationship to market forces as a broader reflection of globalised capitalism, where a schizophrenic “rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers” spoke to a more generalised collapse in the historical imagination, and an inability to think outside of an apocalyptic feedback loop of historical remixes and pastiche (1991, 72). This remix culture, described by Manovich (2001) and Bourriaud (2002) is arguably the native language of modding culture and the operational principle of AI image generation, where prompts are resolved by a retrospective reformulation drawing from a cultural dataset. Where in previous publications I have examined the relationship between aesthetics and copyright in sandbox game creative works (Nelson 2023), this paper examines how the language of remix and pastiche is undergoing a re-examination in an era where the cultural lexicon has become a dataset for remixes performed by a proprietary AI model. While it has been a convenient legacy to assume that copyright only functions to constrain players in a remix culture, this narrative has been reversed in response to widely accessible machine learning image generation systems. In January 2023, three visual artists filed a lawsuit against Stability AI (creators of Stable Diffusion), claiming that these models included copyrighted images scraped from websites such as Deviant Art and Pinterest within their training data (Edwards, 2023). The artists alleged that the derivative outputs of these systems should be considered a form of copyright infringement. On the surface, the appeal to authorship and originality suggests a curious reversal in the typical relationship between artists and remix culture. In the case of computer games, the story of modding and game sandboxes typically pits the player as the remixer, liberated by easy-to-use sandbox software, but constrained by the IP enforcement of large companies such as Time Warner, Nintendo, and Sony (Hayes 2007). But in the case of machine learning, it is the artist as the owner of original creative works who appears to be exploited by new easy-to-use machine learning systems that threaten their agency and livelihood. Where copyright presented a constricting limitation for modders and sandbox players, it has become a defense tactic for artists to push back against a new generation of easy-to-use creative automation tools. Looking beyond this simplistic binary, this paper combines an examination of legal frameworks and software studies to explore how technological innovations in ease of access and useability intersect with shifting relationships to authorship and ownership, from Creative Commons attributions to derivative works and the controversial rise of machine learning models trained on proprietary materials. By comparing and contrasting the creative ecosystems of sandbox playgrounds with debates surrounding IP and automation, this paper will challenge the stasis implied by Jamesonian pastiche, and examine some of the more exciting creative developments to emerge from sandbox culture.

ABSTRACT. This paper shows that reality dating shows can be games, and that when they are studied as such, they provide novel takeaways for the design of digital games. Using Consalvo and Dutton’s (2006) game analysis, the paper examines object inventories, interface studies, interaction maps, and gameplay logs of 10 top-ranked dating reality shows. The results of this study are of relevance and interest to DiGRA’s audience as they provide insight into new approaches to game design practice which is useful for practitioners and educators alike. Specifically, the research results in recommendations for: competitive multiplayer design; use of strategic and informative user interfaces; greater consideration of choices offered to non-player characters; and allowing exceptions for rule breaks when cohesive with the ludonarrative. With the rise of streaming and online competitive gaming, these design tips may be helpful in creating games which are as interesting to watch as they are to play.

ABSTRACT. Video games, while not alien to the realm of the speculative, have often shied away from serious engagement with futuristic themes, treating science fiction as a given rather than a realm worthy of critical exploration. However, a shift in this trend is emerging as game designer increasingly tackle hotly debated technologies, placing them at the core of their creations. This study explores the intersection of gaming and the discourse surrounding the emergence of AI as a social reality. Through an analysis of Zachtronics' 2019 title Eliza, I aim to showcase how games, as virtual playgrounds, act as mirrors reflecting societal fears and hopes, while also serving as laboratories for experimenting with potential futures. This exploration reveals the evolving role of video games as powerful tools, not just for entertainment, but actively shaping and questioning the narratives that underpin our understanding of the evolving relationship between humanity and technology.

Like any other medium, video games can influence the culture and society that consumes them, transforming the ludic media into vassals that can serve different functions such as entertainment, education, and critique. One reason that makes games even better suited for the task I am concerned with here, i.e. social critique, is that they are what Bogost calls “modes of experience.” In playing games, individuals assume roles on a spectrum of choice and agency, stepping into “the shoes of someone else” (Bogost 2011). According to Ihde, treating video games as experiences links them to broader social issues and “the construction of social reality as a set of designed experiences” (Ihde 1998). Video games can thus become “mediating tools that connect with ‘other’ realities” and what might be (Muriel and Crawford 2018). Moreover, the integration of play with computers, in the broad sense encompassing PCs, consoles, and handheld devices, opens up the world for interpretation (Sicart 2017). The ubiquity of this medium enhances accessibility, making it a valuable and effective tool for critical thinking about our world. Additionally, I agree with Krzywinska and MacCallum-Stewart in thinking of games as “cybernetic systems”, a network of human and machine actors, which lead the player to both do and think things while playing (Krzywinska and MacCallum 2009). In other words, while playing the game, the player is embodied on two levels, both the real (the actions that one can take in the game) and the imaginary which enables thinking to happen. This fact is arguably a step above the other mediums that deal with science fiction, such as novels and movies, in that it has the added benefit of being more active in the narrative.

For the purposes of this study, I have chosen to focus on Zachtronics’ Eliza which portrays life in a world where artificial intelligence is no longer a dream – a theme that gained even more relevance since ChatGPT went viral in 2022. Eliza narrates the story of Evelyn, a former software engineer, who is working as a proxy, or human operator, for the eponymous AI-driven therapy program. As players guide the narrative, the game explores the complexities of human emotions and ethical dilemmas, providing a thought-provoking examination of the intersection between artificial intelligence and mental health. The game addresses some of the major concerns surrounding corporate-owned AI systems in mental health settings, including privacy, data transparency, and accountability while incorporating a broad range of viewpoints about the topic. The hope is that these conversations can eventually expand and engage a wider audience, encouraging players to critically ponder the directions our world is taking and better prepare for the future.

REFERENCES Bogost, Ian. 2011. How to Do Things with Videogames. U of Minnesota Press. Ihde, Don. 1998. Philosophy of Technology. Paragon House. Krzywinska, Tanya, and Stewart MacCallum. 2009. “Digital Games.” In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction. Routledge. Muriel, Daniel, and Garry Crawford. 2018. Video Games as Culture: Considering the Role and Importance of Video Games in Contemporary Society. Taylor & Francis Group. Sicart, Miguel. 2017. Play Matters. MIT Press. Zachtronics. 2019. Eliza. Microsoft Windows, Linux, macOS, digital release, ver. 10141640, Zachtronics.

ABSTRACT. Surveillance images play a crucial role in forming the surveillance habits and shaping the sociotechnical imaginaries of entire generations. This is particularly evident in so-called surveillance games. From Watchdogs (Ubisoft 2014) to Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Project Red 2020) and from Papers, Please (Pope 2013) to Orwell (Osmotic Studios 2016), these games paint interesting, though not necessarily accurate, pictures of dystopian surveillance societies (Albrechtslund and Dubbeld 2005; Hennig and Schellong 2020; Solberg 2022). In doing so, they open spaces in which the logics of surveillance can be explored, and counter-imaginaries can be constructed. Importantly, however, digital games are neither safe spaces nor are they ‘worlds apart’ in the sense of being separate from the power structures governing real life. In this paper, we present the first results of a third-party funded project that analyzes surveillance images in digital games from a normative perspective. By approaching surveillance games as playgrounds, we seek to critically discuss the cultural work they do without losing sight of their ludic dimensions and transformative potential.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents an ongoing work that the offline gaming practices of Chinese otome gamers, with the primary objective of elucidating how female gamers employ love fantasies within otome games to construct significant romantic spaces. (Andlauer, 2018). These games are posited to afford female players the opportunity to cultivate relationships with male characters, featuring a diverse array of characters and intricate plotlines to fulfill the romantic fantasies of young girls (Ganzon, 2019).

In the context of China, the development of otome games can be traced back to 2001. Over subsequent periods, mainland China has actively introduced foreign otome games while endeavoring to produce locally developed games (Tian, 2022). In 2017, the Chinese game company Papergames launched Love and Producer, a mobile otome game, followed by subsequent releases from other prominent game companies, including Tencent and miHoYo. Notably, the female protagonists in these games often possess a predominantly visual representation without explicit character bias, a design choice intended to enhance player immersion. Furthermore, these otome games lack a complete overarching narrative; instead, they continually introduce dynamic activities and evolving storylines, purporting to provide a form of companionship in daily life. Through the integration of a virtual social media system within the game, female players can engage in calls or messaging with their virtual boyfriends during gameplay.

Despite the inherently digital nature of these games existing on mobile screens, the imaginative worlds they portray extend into the physical spaces inhabited by players. Many enthusiasts have erected tangible playgrounds inspired by these otome games, allowing them to materialize and experience the romantic fantasies depicted in the games. These playgrounds are geographically dispersed throughout China, each designed with distinct thematic elements, occasionally influenced by the initial style of the venue, thereby transforming them into carnival spaces that encourage openness and creative expression (Zubernis & Larsen, 2018). Initial ethnographic research focused on online, including collecting promotional posters and photos of these playgrounds and aggregating feedback from players' experiences across platforms, but given the complexity of the evidence and the amount of data available, we will also be interacting and playing with players to gain a more nuanced view of their experiences.

Most non-host players gain entry to these playgrounds through the purchase of tickets, necessitating a certain level of appropriation and role-playing to align their real-world appearance with that of the female protagonist in various otome games, denoted as "I." This mode of cosplay closely aligns with James Paul Gee's (2007) concept of a projective identity, signifying a presence formed by the amalgamation of self-perception with a digital avatar.

Beyond serving as mere fan gatherings, these playgrounds orchestrate the involvement of selected players crossplay the roles of male characters in the game, a practice referred to as official “Wei Tuo”(commission). It is noteworthy that these playgrounds often impose distinct regulations, encompassing age and gender restrictions, with specific venues exclusively accessible to players aged 18 and above, and those identifying as female biologically. Female players engaged in cross-playing male characters may either specialize professionally or participate as amateurs. However, the inherent linkage of the body with gender, coupled with a patriarchal emphasis on gender norms (Loke, 2016), often dictates specific physical appearance expectations, such as appearing "tall or strange enough" through chosen attire.

The practice of cosplay/crossplay engenders an intimate and intricate relationship between the player and the character (Lamerichs, 2011). On one hand, players assume the role of the "I" in the Otome, relishing the experience of falling in love with the male character, encompassing activities such as holding hands, hugging, capturing photographs, and kissing. This experiential domain is considered relatively "safe" within the confines of a female-only space (Lewis et al. 2015). On the other hand, players engaged in cross-playing male characters find satisfaction in embodying their preferred character, expressing a profound attachment to the character (Lamerichs, 2015), under the belief that they are "able to see the world through the lens of their favorite character."

Theoretically, there exists a congruence between cultural theories of affect and fan studies. The creative endeavors of fans, encompassing activities such as writing and drawing, are often construed as forms of affective engagement or investment. Matt Hills (2001) underscores the significance of communities as emotionally charged loci, and Nicolle Lamerichs (2014) extends this understanding to the concept of "affective space," positing that fan conventions construct fan intimacy through motivational dynamics and interpersonal relationships. However, in contrast to the emotional connections fostered in fan conventions, it is imperative to consider that the physical spaces where the enactment of 'love fantasy' occurs can significantly intensify interpersonal relationships among fans or players. This phenomenon results in a transformation of affective dynamics between those involved in cosplay or crossplay. Observationally, players embodying the female protagonist in the game may experience an emotional downturn upon witnessing interactions involving cross-players with other participants. A comprehensive comprehension of this process necessitates continued observation of these offline playgrounds.

ABSTRACT. In video games studies, observing player has a tendency to fragment them into two parts: body and rationality, where the body is usually relegated to the background. An Ethnography was carried out between 2020 and 2021 with four Chilean players through Twitch.tv. with the objective of understanding the embodied experience of playing video games as virtual scenarios that establish continuities with reality. The bodies will be understood from their Cyborg positions relationships mediated by affects. As a whole, video games and bodies are related as semiotic-material assemblages in constant transformation. The main results will be presented based on three axes: simulated bodies, social bodies and ethical bodies. It is concluded that virtual bodies differ from real bodies in a pre-reflexive perspective. It is through reflection on communication, socialization and identification that this continuity becomes evident.

ABSTRACT. This work proposes examining the social virtual reality (VR) platform, VRChat (VRChat, 2014) as a contemporary site of online avatar embodiment for the furry fandom, and through doing so contribute to the growing discussions around this platform as a site of potential social connectedness (Deighan et al, 2023), examinations in terms of embodiment and immersion (Asshoff, 2022), or as discussed via experimentation with avatars as a form of identity formation (Montemorano, 2020), among others. Whilst some might argue that VRChat is not a video game, if we draw upon the advanced topography of games outlined by Aarseth et al. (2003), VRChat fulfils the criteria of being a video game as a 1st person, multiplayer game with dynamic environments and infinite teleology and therefore worthy of examination through this lens.

Alongside the discussions above around VRChat, and as hinted with Asshoff’s work, is the link between embodiment and immersion – the latter of which is greatly contested in academia. For instance, Brown and Cairns (2004) are drawn upon for their model on the different stages of immersion; engagement, engrossment, and total immersion in many works about video games (Jennett, et al., 2008; Michailidis, et al., 2018). This model of immersion does fail to acknowledge the differences in modes of involvement with the game texts (Ermi and Mäyrä, 2005), which arguably leads to an arguable lack of universality to their claims. However, there are elements of this model that have been built upon that are prudent to use in the examination of VR games.

A particular discursive point Brown and Cairns’ statement that the highest stage of immersion results in ‘participants describ[ing] being cut off from reality and detachment to such an extent that the game was all that mattered’ (2004: 1299). This total immersion is described as a fleeting experience, and it is the player’s level of attention that is the primary cause of distraction from this state. Given the encompassing nature of the technology used for VR games, it could be argued that there is less capacity for distraction with this mode of involvement. As such, there is a possibility that an examination of VRChat – and VR games generally – could provide the opportunity to analyse this “highest stage” in a less fleeting fashion.

The furry fandom has been chosen as the community to be studied in this regard due to the status of the group as a predominantly online community. Although it has its beginnings in sci-fi conventions of the 1960s and 70s, the community has actively embraced various advancements in online communication. This began with the adoption of Multi-User Construction Kits (MUCKs) in the 1990s to communicate with each other online via text and was also an early example of the community embodying their fursonas – anthropomorphic animal avatars - through descriptive text. The next leap for the community was Second Life (Linden Lab, 2003), which then allowed for the community to further embody their fursonas and now visually, however through a third person perspective.

Furthermore, the furry fandom is distinct in that a large percentage of the community interact with each other via these avatars. This allows the placing of this potential examination outside the previous works discussed on VRChat as these previously discussed this embodiment within the platform without specifically including the personal attachments to the avatars as a key factor. This runs contrary to the furry fandom who often see their fursona as either an extension of themselves or an ideal self. So, as and initial observations, VRChat could be the next stage in this ongoing embodiment for the furry fandom, especially given the game’s flexibility in customisation of avatars and the potential for this customisation to build immersion with players (Ting, 2010).

This customisation allows the player to create – or have created by request to an artist – a 3D model of their fursona in which they can place themselves where multi-media technologies substitute interactions with the outside world (Herbelin, at al., 2016). In VRChat, this not only comprises of the physical interactions with the game world through the technology itself, but through the documented use of body language and non-verbal communication between people with gesticulations being used during interactions or, as Asshoff (2022) states, the mimicry of the behaviours through the replication of physical action to digital action. It should be highlighted here that the levels of embodiment experienced will differ between the full VR and non-VR desktop modes of the game, however this does not negate the proposed direction of this work.

Wider implications and goals of this future work would be further interrogation of VRChat as a site of embodiment for players of the game and to highlight the increased immersive capabilities of this game as a potential site for Brown and Cairns (2004) proposed state of “total immersion”. Also, as mentioned earlier, this would work to fill the gap in literature on VRChat in that it proposes looking at a specific community that arguably uniquely uses embodiment compared to the previous investigations into identity generation and immersion. Furthermore, this work would contribute to the currently scant literature studying VRChat and the far lower amount of academic works examining the furry fandom, furry media and furry video games.

ABSTRACT. With roughly 3.5 billion fans and 250 million players worldwide, football (also known as ‘association football’, or ‘soccer’) is the most popular sport in the world. Football is widely known as “the beautiful game”, but for those who follow the game closely, the appeal of the game is greater than the moments of extraordinary individual skill or seamless teamwork. Football is also very much about unmannerly behavior including provocation, bluffing, time-wasting, and other actions that aim at winning the game by scamming opponents and hoodwinking match officials.

The dark arts of football, ‘shithousery’ or ‘housery’ (Football Daily 2023) as this phenomenon is often called in UK, come in a variety of forms. ‘Housery’ is about finding ways to beat the system and identifying the creative loopholes in the game. In many ways, it is about engaging in dialogue about the rules and their interpretations. The actions employed by the masters of football dark arts share qualities with cheating (Consalvo 2007), dark play (Mortensen, Linderoth & Brown 2015), foul play (Rowbottom 2013), gamesmanship (Potter 1947), or optimizing (Paul 2024), but cannot be reduced to them entirely.

As university lecturer and football referee William Lai (2020, 150) suggests “There is no doubt that the Beautiful Game and the Dark Arts are forever entwined and will evolve together as long as football exists as a competitive sport and a major commercial industry”. We argue that the field of game studies can significantly benefit from a detailed analysis of ‘housery’ and how the clever hacks performed on a football pitch change over time. We are especially interested in the impact of the Video Assistant Referee (VAR), a new supportive role that allows a review of match officials’ decisions using video footage. If experienced players have traditionally been able to identify moments when the on-pitch referees have a limited view, the VAR, utilizing high-resolution multi-camera systems, makes it much easier to capture “old-school” tricks and forces players to come up with entirely new strategies.

ABSTRACT. This study addresses the prevalent issues of social interaction within virtual and mixed reality environments, characterized by their inherent isolation. As a possible solution to enable more social gameplay we propose to use "Pass and Play" of a head mounted display as a core game design element. Based on our research questions, a MR game was analyzed aimed at leveraging the strengths and mitigating the drawbacks of "Pass and Play." By redefining VR/MR headsets as dynamic, socially immersive displays, our aim is to establish a novel social reality at the core of gameplay, fostering a more engaging and interconnected experience.