ABSTRACT. This talk uses the process of boardgame digitization to examine the implicit bias in the asymmetrical boardgame Shining Path: The Struggle for Peru which deals with the Peruvian Armed Conflict 1980-2000. We argue that this process reveals the voice of the Peruvian people marginalized by the conflict in a game that would otherwise be understood as promoting a technically neutral, sanitized, US foreign policy-oriented depiction of a traumatic period in Peruvian history.

ABSTRACT. A case study, and media history, of the Battle Game at the Bannockburn Visitor centre, a 30-player digital game installation which was developed from 2010 to 2014, and was installed and debuted to the public in February 28, 2014. The game ran until 2020, when the National Trust of Scotland removed it from the centre. The study places its production in the context of national historical memory, addresses the game's design and its implicit historiographical commitments, and discusses its effectiveness as part of a visitor experience: the battle game was itself a centrepiece of the Bannockburn Experience, an interactive and immersive exhibit run by the National Trust of Scotland.

ABSTRACT. Following Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter’s hypothesis that “video games are a paradigmatic media of Empire—planetary, militarized hypercapitalism—and of some of the forces presently challenging it”1 (2009, xv), and in line with Robbie Fordyce’s call for political interpretations of games experimenting with new forms of social organization in their imagined political futures (2020), this paper considers the aesthetics and nostalgic discourses found in the post-apocalyptic playground portrayed by the indie video game Golf Club Nostalgia (Demagog Studio 2021) as signs of a process of balkanization2 of its gameworld.

ABSTRACT. While most scholarly works in the field seem to be unable to escape the faith of assigning definitions to video games before commencing their analyses, I wish not to fall into the same loop of compiling a list of definite attributes nor excruciatingly comb through the genealogy of digital games all the way from Tetris to League of Legends. Not due to the reason of negating the importance of doing so, but instead of tackling the reductive question of what video games are, I wish to explore how video games come into existence—in an epistemic sense, not physical as in the production of games. This paper argues that video games and players come into their epistemic existences through what Karen Barad identifies as “intra-action,” where it is only through the act of play that programs, codes, and audio-visual materials are transformed into “video games,” and those who perform the act of play into “players.” Nonetheless, this paper focuses on how ludic race as an entangled identity (and agency) is configured and reconfigured in the four selected games, which are set in East Asia but not all produced by local developers—namely Kowloon’s Gate (Zeque 1997), Sleeping Dogs (United Front Games 2012), Detention (Red Candle Games 2017), and Ghost of Tsushima (Sucker Punch Productions 2020).

ABSTRACT. How are past and play grounded in each other and how can this mutual grounding be leveraged to reshape play and past as theory and practice in Game Studies? In this panel, scholars working at the intersection of games studies with archaeology, geography, and heritage and media studies will explore the idea of the past as a playground through a series of discussion papers based on playful practices from the deep past to the current day.

ABSTRACT. Licensable game engines and their vast developer support communities democratize the process of videogame development by packaging complex graphics and physics algorithms, building streamlined tool workflows, and opening a marketplace of shared assets and knowledge. However, each game engine leaves a characteristic signature imprinted on its end products, which some scholars call “grain” (Nicoll and Keogh 2019, 64). Grain is everything; from scripting languages, to default algorithms, to available plugins, to available rendering perspectives. Grain is also always culturally freighted, a product of many compromises between artistic, corporate, and consumer stakeholders as well as available technology. This panel focuses on reading the grain, looking at how the incidental and accidental choices of tools becomes a meaningful experience for players. Each author looks at specific games as a window to understand the technical system behind its production, but also how that system subtly bends the game’s intended effect. Each of the papers on this panel offers an intersectional feminist perspective on the imbrication of the technical elements of game engines with larger systems of power. We offer a particular emphasis on the Unreal engine, contributing to ongoing conversations about engines and other creation technologies as platforms (Freedman 2020). This conversation is both timely and relevant to the DiGRA community because it represents a critical outgrowth of platform studies that responds to criticisms form feminist and critical race scholars about the artificial reification of the technical apparatus (McPherson 2014, 177-88; Anable 2018). In this panel, game engines are not just pre-existing infrastructure for production, but are co-produced alongside distinctions of race, gender, epistemology, and identity. Ari Gass’s paper, “Latency, Framerate, and Experiential Lag,” offers a genealogy of contemporary optimization algorithms in real time 3D applications, surfacing how drives towards optimization and hegemonic narratives about the role of technology in gaming culture are in tension with our understanding of human perceptual limits. They explore the “bad feeling” of lag in the context of two independent art video games, Sunset (Tale of Tales 2015) and Latency Interrupt (Tabitha Nikolai 2021), both of which modulate players' experience of time through strategic frame rate degradation; in the first case as a metaphor for stolen time, and in the second for the difficulties of communication while enduring distance. In James Malazita’s paper, “Elizabeth and Threads of Kismet: Agency as Queer and Affective Entanglement in BioShock Infinite,” he brings feminist literary understandings of entangled agency into platform studies, tracking the development of Elizabeth, a character from 2013’s BioShock Infinite and the game’s 2014 expansion, Burial at Sea 2. Elizabeth was multiply enacted by her development staff in Unreal and Kismet, Unreal’s visual programming system; sometimes treated as a mangle of code, sometimes as a collaborative designer, sometimes as an independent agent, and sometimes as a piece of broken code. These shifting enactments of Elizabeth had material impacts on the development of BioShock Infinite and its sequels, resulting in large changes to gameplay, the game’s narrative arc, and the game’s text. Rather than framing agency as an agonistic contesting of power—player vs. game, agent vs. world—Elizbeth represents an intra-active kind of agency, one that emerges through the weaving of Unreal’s Kismet programming, and that recognizes Elizabeth as an agent distributed across and through BioShock’s programmed world. Peter McDonald’s paper, “What is Dimensionality Anyway,” explores the porosity of 2D and 3D perspectives in the Unreal engine. Unlike Unity or Godot, the Unreal engine does not have a dedicated 2D rendering engine, built in 2D components, or robust 2D tools such as tilemappers (though there are experimental versions that can be added). In this talk, Peter discusses the way Unreal developer Cardboard Sword adapted the engine for its platformer The Siege and the Sandfox using the Paper2D system and custom lighting tools, and what that has to teach us about the deployment of two-dimensionality in the present. Aleena Chia argues that game engines are a test bed for targeted and monetizable application of generative AI. Her paper, “Operational Play in the World Engine,” focuses on Motorica and Inworld, Unreal plugins developed through Epic’s MegaGrant that use generative AI to automate character animation and NPC dialogue and behavior, respectively. In contrast to the hype and harms of AI image synthesis and large language model-based chatbots released for public experimentation (and scrutiny), Unreal is cautiously adapting such foundation models to game-specific data for content that is usually baked in rather than generated at runtime. Just as games have historically provided structured environments for developing and evaluating AI, engines will provide human subjects for refining large-scale technical systems—especially as generative processes shift from production to runtime. Contextualizing operational images (Parikka 2023) in gaming’s automated turn (Fizek 2022) and engines’ platform ambitions beyond gaming (Chia 2022), this paper speculates on how generative AI renders play as operational and experience as probabilistic. As game scholars and game designers, we believe that the grain of these technologies becomes even more important to attend to as game engines are increasingly being used to produce other media, including films, medical training and simulations, architectural models, and product designs. These engine technologies and their default assumptions have long tendrils that reach far beyond the scene of play. These engines are multiply enacted, they become configured and reconfigured over time through material practices, discursive utterances, and infrastructural entanglements. Understanding game engines, and in particular the Unreal engine, as an enacted object means our analysis must always be grounded in an interrogation of systems of power. Put differently, the technologies used to make video games aren’t (and really never were) just about games: they are technologies that produce realities, communities, and ways of being that exist far beyond the screen.

ABSTRACT. Understanding how video games function as digital playgrounds emphasises the value of critically inspecting players and how their experiences intersect with both material and immaterial concepts. While players interact with the digital arenas of video games to learn and play in a spatial context, a less considered element is the exposure to temporal concepts in game spaces. This article will provide an experimental typology to articulate how play is intimately related to temporal experiences through design, behaviour, and positioning in player lives. Three frames relating to the play of video games and temporal concepts will be introduced; Game Time, Play Time, and Affected Time. While Game Time and Play Time have been used previously to describe temporal distinctions in video games, this article will broaden the historical definitions for a holistic typology.

ABSTRACT. The extended abstract examines the similarities between European Baroque gardens in the 16th to 18th centuries and open-world game landscapes. It asserts that both are shaped by a Eurocentric and Christian-romanticized perspective. The authors maintain that open-world games, like hyper-realistic gardens, perpetuate colonialist narratives through frontierism by portraying wilderness conquest as a commercialized amusement park. The abstract highlights the need for a critical analysis of the Eurocentric blueprint of Open-World landscapes, while promoting an exploration of alternative viewpoints. A call to action is presented to encourage playful debates and collaborations among researchers, game designers, and artists to imagine utopian paradises free of baroque power fantasies.

ABSTRACT. This presentation aims to demonstrate how Venba’s (Visai Games 2023) gameplay makes use of authenticity-porn as an affective appeal to its purported target audience. The actual ludic mechanics of Venba, advertised as a “story about family, love, loss, and more” (Venba 2023) have little to do with the emotional message of the game, which is instead rooted in peripheral objects. The processes of gameplay, namely reading and deciphering recipes, cooking, and clicking through dialogue, are rendered background processes in the face of this performance of authenticity.

Diasporic identification functions at the level of set dressing: a popular brand of soap packaging among first-gen Indian immigrant households is centered in a montage; pottus line a mother’s mirror; a Murugan Travels calendar is visible in each phase of the game’s establishing shot. Marking these material realities as inherently diasporic--beyond their classification as inherently Indian, or further, inherently Tamilian--awards them a semiotic weight that is allegedly “only” recognizable to members of the diasporic Tamilian in-group. In dressing the visual environment of the game in this way, Venba reassures its in-group players that the story they are playing belongs to them, and conversely that they belong to the story. This identification ensures that players attend to this packaged authenticity. The game behind the game is in the recognition of these non-interactable game objects as authenticity markers, developer-winks that they “get it” and are writing, designing, and creating from a place of acceptable and aligned lived experience.

Kempshall (2019, 3), investigating historical sources and player expectations in WWI video games, points to a “desire to recreate the tactile reality of the time period”, which he also refers to as the “accuracy of ephemera”. Drawing from this, we posit an understanding of Venba and diaspora games in general as being bound to player expectations of accuracy in the depiction of what we term diasporic ephemera. Similar to the practice of “nostalgia-mining”, such practices foreground the accuracy of the easter eggs included within the game, which then, in turn, substantiate the credibility of the developers’ marginalized positionalities, and thereby the credibility of the story being told. Additionally, we build on Veale’s (2017) discussions of affective materiality to explore how and why the staging of authenticity of experience is prioritized and emphasized in and around play.

In Venba, the kitchen, a space of invisibilized and gendered labor, is transformed into a playground of “marketed authenticity” (Wright 2017). The game’s message, carried through the medium of this playground, functions through players’ interaction with diasporic ephemera, where perception is weighed as a form of interaction. Player agency is virtually nonexistent given the game’s linear narrative, affording more meaning to the perceptual actions that the player is able to engage in since these are not constrained by the game’s controls. Furthermore, these controls themselves perpetuate this marketed, pre-packaged authenticity in their limitations for the player. The operationalizing affective engagement of the game discourages failure in-game to further uphold the sanctity of the packaged (and plated!) authentic recipe. Recipes that are followed “incorrectly” prompt the player to try again, erasing possible failures and reaffirming the mythos of the perfect Tamil mother; these safeguards against player error reinforce the single game-storied (Rizvi and Mukherjee, 2023) fantasy of cooking, in contrast to the reality of a series of mundane and assumed domestic labors.

Venba is the diaspora as playground, as kitchen, as recipe, and this presentation is an investigative reading of the props, practice, packaging and plating of the aesthetics of diasporic experiences in the playful ritual of interactive memorializing via affect and embodiment.

ABSTRACT. This paper analyzes the popular video game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (Bethesda Game Studios, 2002), from an ecocritical retrospective. While it cannot be properly considered an ecogame, nor was it made with explicit ecocritical goals, Morrowind offers insights relevant to the current conversation about game design and sustainability. The study examines the ways in which the game’s narrative, gameplay and design choices make relevant points on environmental issues, such as depiction of flora, human-nature relationship, and landscape relevance. Drawing on the most recent ecocritical theories, this paper argues that Morrowind represents a virtuous example for more sustainable game design. The analysis highlights the potential of commercial and massively distributed video games as a medium for environmental education and awareness-raising, while proposing strategies for integrating ecocritical approaches into game design and development.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract examines how dinosaurs feature as spectacle whether in nineteenth century exhibitions in parks to modern-day videogames. While noting the often-made claim of authentic science and of preservation (whether physical or archaeological) in the representation of dinosaurs in entertainment media including videogames, the paper looks the dino-theme park as a Foucauldian heterotopia wherein multiple layers emerge to expose hope bias, othering and commodification actually play out (literally) in a locale that advertises the opposite - namely, preservation, authenticity and representation. It will particularly focus on the game Jurassic World: Evolution.

ABSTRACT. The abstract discusses Sims 4: Eco Lifestyle in terms of how it presents a distorted view of both environmentalism and the environment. It also argues that such a distortion is not caused by the simplification or misunderstanding of the environmental issues but rather by a profitable strategy employed by EA of diminishing the environmental action for economic purposes.

ABSTRACT. The evolution of playgrounds into digital spaces within video games reflects a significant shift in how we can understand the importance of learning through play. However, specific mechanics of learning opportunities in video games, including visual exploration and manipulative investigation, have yet to be fully explored in relation to particular learning outcomes in children. This study examined causal reasoning through own-experience digital play in 4-5 year old children (N=37), and whether time constraints would impact learning. Results showed that children learned causal reasoning through exploration and own-experience in digital play. However, children were unable to transfer learned causal properties to a novel scenario. Moreover, time constraints had no impact on the children’s ability to learn causal properties. Implications from these findings suggest that video games present a valuable and efficient digital playground for explorative learning.

ABSTRACT. During the past decade, China has seen significant growth in its game sector, with female gamers surging to half of the whole gamer population (Niko Partners, 2023). Chinese scholars and industry experts have been investing more in understanding the female gamers. However, when it comes to different age groups, young girl players in early to middle childhood seems to be under-considered. They are usually either grouped together with their boy counterparts as ‘children/minors’, or with the teenage/adolescent girls as ‘young girls/schoolgirls’; while the gaming characteristics of the specific group are overlooked, understanding of their experiences of playing video games stays ambiguous. Girls have the double bind of gender and youth (Cunningham, 2020). In contemporary China the concept of ‘girl’ can be more complicated when it takes accounts of a particular age as well as the living experiences. This study focuses on twelve girls aged from 4 to 10 years old who play video games on consoles. Three key features of the participants include: 1) coming from the middle class (socio-economic status of their family), 2) developmental resources (school education, family resources, and social resources), and 3) growth environment (core family, local surrounding, and the lived city economic and culture background). Each of the twelve participants have engaged in online gameplay led research interactions, including in-depth interviews and observation. Researchers and findings (Casey et al, 2000; Connell et al., 2014; Cooper et al. 2015; Greenspan and Pollock, 1991; Huston and Ripke, 2006; Larvie and Fischl, 2016; Mah and Ford-Jones, 2012; Montemayor et al. 1990) from child development studies to neurological studies provide a range of evidence that the impact of the experience gained in early childhood can deeply affect the development in adulthood. In addition, the dominant power driving the feminist movement in China currently are widely formed by women born in 1980s and 1990s (Zhou and Qiu, 2020) who are the one-child generation formerly known as the ‘little emperor/empresses. (Li et al., 2021) The parents of the study’s participants are from this generation, who are also the first generation to be born and grew up in a relatively more developed society attributed to China’s Reform and Open-up policy implemented since 1978. Since their children were born, China has become the second largest economy by GDP with however an expanding gap between the poor and the rich. (Credit Suisse Research Institute, 2021) The choice of focusing on console game rather than mobile games with a larger audience is that the researcher intends to utilise this particular genre as a ‘filter’ to find the interested group: girls from middle class background in urban China. This is because that console games as an imported concept and foreign culture initially are historically dwelled in cities transforming into a genre of youth sub-culture through time, as well as is less affordable than mobile games with a slightly higher entry bar to play. The twelve young participants aged from 4 to 10 are recruited by non-probability sampling, and interestingly, all of them are from the developed cities and majority from the advanced coastal belt of China. Despite the fact that there are now roughly as many girl game players as boy players, the bias of ‘video game is for boys’ is still strong in the society widely and as game historically constructed for men (Cote, 2018), especially when it comes to the genre of console games. It is not considered as a typical ‘place’ for girl playing at. In western academia video game playing as a leisure activity is considered as ‘gendered’ (Cunningham, 2020; Lynch et al., 2016; Williams et al., 2009), something also evidenced by the participants of this study in China. One key finding of this study found that when girls were asked about their ‘criteria’ of choosing games to play, some mentioned that the gender of the protagonist in the game affect their choices as they think ‘if the main character is a boy, usually the game is more difficult and having too much fighting and killing.’ Despite that they actually enjoy playing in those games in general where they ‘like to feel strong when climbing up on an extremely high tower, riding horse, running very fast... but not really interested in killing and fighting all the time.’ Thus to understand what the girls value (or not) for a game from their perspective makes this study meaningful.

ABSTRACT. Building in the idea that rogue children are one of the most typical examples of rogues in Picaresque Literature, this paper/extended abstract aims to study the use of this type of rogue in the CRPG Baldur's Gate III. It is focused on how they are portrayed and the narrative and mechanical consequences of their inclusion in this video game.

ABSTRACT. This paper analyzes the engagements with space and cultural difference in three Nancy Drew computer games in order to interrogate the politics of girlhood that these games put forward.

ABSTRACT. Initiative is a concept which describes certain behaviors in collaborative or competitive play. Due to the broad usage and qualitative nature of the initiative concept, quantitative modeling poses several challenges. We propose to model competitive initiative by measuring what players pay attention to during gameplay. For this purpose, we decompose player actions into discrete types, Voronoi spaces and time-ranges. We test and analyze our model empirically on a Real Time Strategy (RTS) dataset. As part of the analysis, we use our model to predict game outcomes through time with the Random Forest algorithm. Results show that a Pareto front can be established between game time and the predictive accuracy of game outcomes, which starts at 50%, followed by an exponential growth towards 80%. We conclude that there is empirical support for attention-based initiative. Future work can be directed towards refining and expanding on the model for analytical and/or predictive usecases. For reproducibility, we share data and corresponding results in a public repository.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the instances of Nash Equilibrium in competitive video games focusing on its impact on player strategies and game dynamics within the context of League of Legends. By determining how Nash Equilibrium contributes to a phase of predictability that can both stabilize and stagnate the flow of the game through analysis of gameplay patterns and strategic choices, formulaic strategies between individual player agency and team objectives are revealed to negatively impact player engagement and spectator experience. Our findings prove that Nash Equilibrium has significant concern for game design, requiring adjustments that improve strategic diversity without endangering the competitive integrity of the game. With the study’s insight into the relationship between player behavior and game mechanics, we aim to offer a valuable addition to the growing field of game theory in esports.

ABSTRACT. A player's journey in digital games is often perceived as a continuous forward motion. However, Daniel Vella has emphasized the significance of dwelling in digital games, wherein players pause to find a sense of home and familiarity (2019). As a place where this act of dwelling is particularly prompted, this paper examines home bases as unique loci of dwelling in gaming environments and the player(-character) who frequents these. These spaces, typically associated with safety and repeated returns, establish boundaries between the familiar and the foreign, the inside and outside, thereby shaping the player's journey within the digital playground. The first part of this paper conceptualises home bases in various digital games, while the second half takes these considerations to Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Studios 2018), a game where the home base is integral to the question of home. Beyond being a central locus for the player’s journey, the game’s home base acts as a metaphorical storytelling device to tell the story of the vain quest for home in the Wild West.

ABSTRACT. Playing games involves mental exertion, this includes strategizing and taking actions. Earlier research has primarily focused on objectively measuring and quantifying this effort. Such attempts do not consider the subjective nature of effort from different players' perspectives. This has resulted in a gap in our understanding of players’ experience. Effort being an integral part of gameplay experience, this gap affects our understanding of games. To address this gap, we conducted an empirical study using qualitative methods from a constructivist viewpoint, which involved ten tabletop games of different genres. Our analysis of the collected data sheds light on the association between rules and players in relation to effort. We argue that effort emerges dynamically as players interact with the rules, indicating its nature of being in a "state of flux". This dynamic nature of effort is inextricably linked with fluctuating player emotions. These findings prepare the grounds for understanding the nuances of player experiences and emotions through the lens of effort within a constructivist framework.

ABSTRACT. The Dark Souls game series (FromSoftware, 2011-2016) is known for its incidental multiplayer encounters wherein players can watch, be aided by, or fight other players throughout a single-player campaign. This extended abstract outlines an assessment of how fan community-produced player vs player etiquette may respond to Dark Souls III PvP encounters, in which one player chooses to invade the playground of the other. In this extended abstract I will outline my examination of this etiquette, asking if it may be read as a set of formalized identity-producing moves that appeal to fairness in order to negotiate the precarity that is central to game design and player experience in Dark Souls III.

ABSTRACT. What We Take With Us is a series of interconnected wellbeing-focused pervasive games I created based on my experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The game was played in three formats, or “playgrounds” – an online alternate reality game, a physical room-based game, and game-based workshops. The design of these formats is discussed, followed by an analytic autoethnography of my experiences deploying and running each format. These accounts are thematically analysed with reference to existing research to suggest challenges and opportunities for consideration when deploying such games. This includes targeting and community issues, struggles around the presentation of pervasive games and the labour involved in making them, the dissonance felt as both a designer and researcher on personally situated projects, and the issues deploying such games in a post-pandemic era. Notable opportunities are also discussed, including the use of social media algorithms for advertising, the effect of the lusory attitude on games research participation, and how success can be defined in such projects.

ABSTRACT. Games are everywhere (Zimmerman et al., 2013) and for every play practice comes a specific playground, from arcades (Kocurek, 2015) to urban environments (Lammes et al., 2018). This contribution delves into gaming houses, “co-operative living arrangement[s] where several players of video games, usually professional esports players, live in the same residence” (2022). These spaces might be viewed as one of the most peculiar “esports playgrounds”, for their importance in shaping esports practices (franzò, 2023; franzó et al., in print). Adopting an ethnographic approach, this work draws from first-hand observations to analyse an Italian gaming house called Qlash House through the three-folded Lefebvrian model of space (Lefebvre, 1991). Emphasising how the structure navigates through a set of formal and informal boundaries, the work will highlight the ambiguity embedded in the working (i.e., playing) and living practices that constantly re-organise the House’s space, accommodating the daily needs of its users along the pre-designed uses of space planned by its founders. An ambiguity embedded in the esports sustaining spaces that reflects the one of the gaming practices (e.g., leisure/work, product/producer, digital/material). Finally, if every game has its own rules, it also has its elective playgrounds. Gaming houses may be the one of esports, granting that materiality even to the most volatile sports disciplines we know.

ABSTRACT. This study delves into the relationship between embodied experience and user-generated content (UGC) in the electronic game “Eggy Party”. It focuses on the game’s unique UGC map editor and park map gameplay, aiming to fill literature gaps in understanding bodily experiences in virtual environments and UGC’s role in enhancing these experiences. The research examines players’ roles as creators and interpreters within the game’s UGC ecosystem, exploring how their cognitive processes, such as spatial and kinaesthetic perceptions, influence their creative expressions. It also investigates the societal implications of UGC in “Eggy Party”, particularly how players’ cultural expressions and worldviews are mirrored in their UGC creations. Methodologically, the study assesses the types of embodied experiences encountered in “Eggy Party” and their effects on player experience, self-perception, and expression. This approach provides a nuanced understanding of how UGC in electronic games can foster unique embodied experiences that reflect and influence individual and societal dynamics.