ABSTRACT. As instructed in the CfP the extended abstract is attached as pdf.

ABSTRACT. I am a second year interdisciplinary PhD student in History and Human Computer Interaction. I am about to begin data collection. My research explores how co-producing a historical video game about childhood play with older and younger people in a local community might foster intergenerational connection. My research aligns well with several of the conference themes, including:

• Community games as tools for learning and expression and inclusive engagements • Making Pleasurable Experiences – games creation. • Intersectional Games (intersections of age and class)

As I am still early in my project, this extended abstract provides an overview on where my research sits within existing scholarship and my methodology. By the time of the conference, I will have completed most of my data collection and will have results to share at the consortium.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on our doctoral experience on production and reception of videogames in Switzerland and our observation in the Swiss game histories, we identify how the critical conception of "the local" encounters the pragmatic constraints of scientific inquiry. We discuss the limitations of this approach and propose alternative methods for addressing locality beyond self-evident spatial categories. Ultimately, we aim to reaffirm a critical conceptualisation of the local that enables us to distinguish and understand “places, spaces and territories” (Labinal 2019) through the perspective of actors, communities and their networks, while avoiding the risk of celebrating “local specialities” and reproducing national categories and mythologies.

ABSTRACT. In this extended abstract I propose the need for a project which investigates the use of affordances within game studies as a way further interdisciplinarity with other fields, chief among them HCI. I further argue for the need of more scrutiny towards "the player(s)" constructed when using affordances and how questioning the assumptions made about the player can help mend bridges between HCI and game studies.

ABSTRACT. Keywords Story, Narrative, TTRPG, Tabletop-Game, EXTENDED ABSTRACT Storytelling through tabletop games is a well-established recreational activity which is enjoyed all over the world. The process of how these games operate is well documented but the recognition of the stories which have been generated by these games as literature is not as common. This research seeks to understand how we might better see playfully and experimentally generated stories as worth reading and how we might seek to apply the literary technique of ‘perhapsing’ (Knopp, 2009) to this type of game, as a way of generating personal, yet collaborative speculative memoir. There is an underexplored similarity between how storytelling games encourage the generation of speculative material and the way in which the literary genre of speculative memoir encourages the author to engage in ‘perhapsing’ which is active speculation about unknown events which have shaped the story being told. I contend that by designing a game which invites the participants to address the gaps in their own memory, that social, place-based histories may become revealed. This project is situated within play studies and creative writing studies, specifically in explorations of the burgeoning genre of speculative memoir. Play to this project exists as a space where we can test the ‘formally bound space determined by the rules and community of play.’ (Sicart 2014: 6.) Researchers in play studies often seek to engage with players as co-creators and co-researchers who are instrumental as part of a research project’s method of inquiry. Play studies has been and continues to be a Proceedings of DiGRA Australia 2026 © 2026 Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Personal and educational classroom use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author. place where we see non-typical methods of meaning-making pushed to the forefront. Play is both structured and subversive (22) and it is through the tension that we can see alternative methods used and appreciated. Life-writing and particularly writers of speculative memoir share the aim to promote the genre and to foster a better understanding of how speculation may be used as a tool in life-writing. Further exploration and inquiry into the technique of ‘perhapsing’ (Knopp: 2006) through playful means will add to and aid discourse on speculative memoir. There exists a small but dedicated informal cohort of ‘perhapsers’ that explore and continuously define this technique through blog posts and journal articles. From its definition as a technique designed to fill gaps in knowledge by using contextual clues (Knopp: 2009) to its informal development as a tool for exploring how personal or ancestral histories may be reconstructed (Verall: 2021), (Dolezal: 2023) and further contextualization as a technique designed to ‘maintain trust in the reader through… open admittance in conjecture’ (Fish, 2024) discourse around ‘perhapsing’ is developing into a point of conversation amongst those interested in speculative memoir.

Through play, provocations and community engagement, this research seeks to explore how an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the writing technique of ‘perhapsing’ may be accomplished using play.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Fish, K. (2024). Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps… The Art of Flash Fiction. https://artofflashfiction.substack.com/p/perhaps-perhaps-perhaps Knopp, L. (2009). Perhapsing: The use of speculation in creative nonfiction. Fourth Genre: Explorations https://doi.org/10.1353/fge.0.0067 in Sicart, M. (2014). Play matters. MIT Press. Nonfiction, 11(2), 151–158. Verrall, R. (2021). Situational perhapsing. In A. Mason & A. Sharr (Eds.), Creative Practice Inquiry in Architecture (pp. 28–39). Routledge.

ABSTRACT. This is a PhD Track Submission for the doctoral consortium.

Through globalization of new digital media, like AI, social media, and games, we are going through an uptick in polarization and a relapse in reading comprehension. Games are the most common active leisure activity, and changing their consumption could help re-direct these trends. Three types of curated game experiences (to be tested with non-hierarchical action research) are proposed for this pursuit, connected by critical media literacy education: 1) Playing innovative “provocative” narrative games, 2) Creating identity visual novels, 3) Co-op playing “reflective” puzzle games.

ABSTRACT. Within Australia, there remains a significant lack of games designed for learning in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (also known as GLAM or Collections organisations). This is despite two decades of sector-wide re-orientation of value away from interpreting physical objects towards creating engaging visitor experiences, and an emphasis on interactive design as a strategy to achieve this. Moreover, since the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, there has been great pressure on Australian collections to expand their educational offerings past in-person tours and school excursions. These factors, alongside studies into the utility of games for learning in multiple contexts, have led to significant professional interest in games as interactive experiences. Yet the area of Australian collections learning games remains largely underdeveloped and understudied. This presentation follows the five mixed-methods studies of the author’s PhD research, including the design of a creative artefact and two industry-specific games, as an exploration into potential causes behind this phenomenon as well as strategies to encourage realistic ideation of games for learning.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract presents an ongoing PhD project to design a framework for digital game‑based learning (DGBL) in health sciences education at a public university in Gauteng, South Africa. Grounded in constructivist and design‑based research, the study maps current practices, barriers, and collaboration needs between educators and game developers, and iteratively co‑designs and pilots gamified simulations. Expected contributions include a practical, equity‑focused framework, implementation rubrics, and institutional recommendations to enable sustainable DGBL adoption.

ABSTRACT. This PhD research investigates the performative poetics of virtual architecture in real-time game engines. Bridging Bachelard’s spatial phenomenology and Bruno’s emotional geography with game studies, the project asks how interactive environments function not merely as backdrops, but as "lived" psychological structures. The study utilizes autoethnography to analyze the author’s creative practice, specifically the experimental works & and Ruinenlust, treating the design process as a form of embodied research. Findings indicate that virtual architecture is fundamentally temporal, generating meaning through the rhythm of traversal and procedural feedback rather than static representation. This research contributes to the field by reframing the game engine as an autobiographical instrument, offering a new framework for understanding how emotional experience is authored, tuned, and performed through spatial interaction.

ABSTRACT. N/A

ABSTRACT. This submission presents ongoing doctoral research developing a cross disciplinary framework that links architectural space, virtual cinematography, and gameplay experience to analyse spatial design in contemporary videogames.

ABSTRACT. In my dissertation, I focus on the representation of the Czech landscape in Czech digital games such as Kingdom Come: Deliverance I (2018) and II (2025), Someday You'll Return (2019) and HROT (2021). Due to its constructed nature, landscape in digital games is formed by material understanding, social predispositions, or aesthetics traditions of depictions of it. The main research question is therefore how the Czech landscape is depicted in local digital games.

ABSTRACT. My doctoral project examines the various ways in which landscapes of Greco-Roman antiquity are conceived and implemented in video games and what influence these representations have on the gaming experience. Using the examples from several PC and console games, I trace the forms of ‘antiquity’ described by the various levels, spaces and environments. Depending on genre, mechanics and player behaviour, landscapes can be mere backdrops through which players move, or spaces which enable interaction and manipulation. They can represent specific locations (perhaps places even still accessible today or archaeologically excavated), implement mythological content and traditions, or (supposedly) do without concrete references to real models and texts. In order to analyse the range of representations and possible effects on players, appropriate reception categories and theories from various fields of research, such as geography/cartography, classical studies and cognitive psychology, are drawn upon and combined. The aim of my research is to find answers to the following questions or, where this is not possible, to develop reliable hypotheses that can serve as a basis for further (empirical) investigation: How do video games evoke antiquity and what kinds of ancient spaces do they create? Do video games intrigue their audience by their depiction of ancient landscapes? How do the medium of video games and the study of antiquity influence each other?

ABSTRACT. This doctoral project aims to create a new framework for understanding videogame aesthetics that accommodates both play and narrative. The research will be conducted on the intersection of philosophy, literary studies, game studies and art history. Drawing on various aesthetic theories, narratology theories and the concept of audiovisual ludonarrativity, the project will examine the notion of aesthetic experience in video games. The dissertation seeks to answer the question: How do both ludic and narrative elements contribute to the aesthetic experience evoked by a video game? Ultimately, the project aspires to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of videogame aesthetics that reflects their unique multimodal and interactive character.

ABSTRACT. This research proposes to investigate the thesis that, historically, the consolidation of videogames as both a digitally mediated game form and an autonomous cultural genre is accompanied by a shift from the aesthetic paradigm of choice to that of mastery. "Choice" is defined as an aesthetic principle based on witnessing the specific consequences tied to mutually exclusive actions, whereas "mastery" is defined as an aesthetic principle based on totalizing the possibilities provided by a dynamic system. Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative approach grounded in a dialectical movement between theoretical abstraction and close analysis – relying both on the critical reading of theoretical texts, and on the textual, procedural, and operational analysis of aesthetic effects made available by selected games.

ABSTRACT. This PhD research explores how video games can be used to simulate blue crab management within the Chesapeake Bay in the USA to model stakeholder conflict and decision-making in fisheries management. This project develops a simulation game that integrates ecological models with stakeholder perspectives from scientists, managers, and fishers. The game enables participants to experiment with management decisions and experience environmental and ecological trade-offs. Through workshops and interviews, this study investigates how different groups understand conflict within the blue crab fishery. This research aims to demonstrate how interactive simulations can facilitate dialogue, and create more inclusive methods to managing conservation conflicts

ABSTRACT. This submission is a revised version of my PhD research proposal. The study employs a mixed methodology consisting of self-fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, immersive observation, and coding analysis. It aims to explore how the roles of different players—namely live streamers, co-players, and regular gamers—affect their expressions of anger during gameplay. Additionally, it will examine how various game elements can evoke emotional anger beyond the player's role. This creative exploration will begin with a specific game: Where Winds Meet, which I have been actively engaged with in the streamer and player community, making in-depth research more feasible. Future comparisons with other games are also planned.

ABSTRACT. Longitudinal study of the Pokémon core games to analyze the depictions of age(ing) within (Japanese) video games by mixing the methods of close playing and content analysis

ABSTRACT. This transdisciplinary dissertation combines media theory, Daoist practice and philosophy, game studies, and game design to explore how games can be used for healing purposes, reconfiguring mainstream mindfulness and meditation gamification applications, such as Headspace and Calm. Scholars have criticized the gamification of Eastern practices, arguing that such approaches often center Western ideologies (Hu, 2022; Zeitlin-Wu, 2023). Game studies scholars have also challenged the capitalistic and neoliberal logic embedded in game design and gamification, which can lead to issues of exhaustion and exploitation in gameplay (Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009; Galloway, 2012; Bogost, 2014; Paul, 2018; Scully-Blaker, 2022). This dissertation proposes a game design framework for mindfulness and meditation exergames (physical exercise games) that is rooted in Daoist practice and philosophy. By integrating Daoist philosophy into the design of a game for healing and reparation, it seeks to avoid the problem of “value capture,” wherein a simplified value structure within a game replaces the complex social or moral values of real life (Nguyen, 2020). Unlike many games framed as “brain exercises,” the game developed in this dissertation emphasizes games as embodied experiences, drawing on somaesthetics (Tedesco, 2012; Shusterman, 2008)—an embodied aesthetics grounded in the body’s perceptual processes—to investigate the relationship between body and game in design process. I will explore how to incorporate the notion of distributed agency of the human player into the design framework named mind-body-game alignment. Distinct from HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) approaches on designing computational systems and serious games, this dissertation is grounded in media studies, emphasizing the cultural aspects of games and healing through qualitative methods and artistic intervention. It aims to address the limitations of quantification and measurement prevalent in much of HCI and serious game research. Utilizing autoethnography (Ellis et al., 2011; Pink, 2015; Pink et al., 2022) and research-creation (Manning & Massumi, 2014; Loveless, 2019) as my primary methodologies, I examine the significance of rhythm, embodiment, and game environment in designing Somatic Play, the concept focusing on the mind-body-game alignment. I use game creation as research to explore how to address the problem of gamification in design process. While situating my work within Western game studies and media art theory, this dissertation centers Daoist classics and practices in developing the notion of “Somatic Play.” I primarily look at Daoist classical texts such as the Daode Jing, Zhuangzi, and Baopuzi, along with secondary literature focusing on Daoist views of the body (Lévi, 1989; Catherine, 2005), Daoist meditation traditions (Kohn, 1993; Komjathy, 2020), and the role of Daoist traditions in modern society (Raphals, 2015; Sivin, 1995).The dissertation includes the creation of a Zhan Zhuang (Daoist standing meditation) Virtual Reality game, titled Standing Within. This is a 30-day meditation game that player can practice Zhan Zhuang and use “Qi” to give rise to the myriad things, including trees, flowers, grasses, rocks, ponds, and mountains. The game has been co-created with Tai Chi masters, Traditional Chinese Medicine doctors, educators, and Taiji practitioners in Canada and China by using the methods of somatic design (Schiphorst, 2008; Höök, 2018; Rajko, 2018) and co-creation (Sanders & Stappers, 2008; Ingrid, 2012; Jones, 2018). This game will be tested through both autoethnographic playtesting and sessions involving practitioners and individuals from other professions, conducted in both individual and collective workshop settings. My self-playtesting process will be documented as a performance, with the resulting data transformed into 2D and 3D installations for a gallery exhibition. The creative component is more than a case study of somatic play and healing; it serves as a mode of active thinking and inquiry, an embodied form of research that explores this idea through practice. This dissertation focuses on the question: how to use ethnographic game design method and somatic principles to address the limitations of current health gamification applications centering on the Daoism practice. I see healing as a subjective, intra-active, and culturally bounded process. I explore how to achieve this notion of healing through the act of playing and making games, how to position the player’s body in the time and space according to Daoist cosmology, and how to make Somatic Play by centering on body in game design process. By bringing Daoist philosophy and practice into dialogue with Western game studies, I aim to contribute to the emerging field of Chinese game studies and broader game studies in Sinophone culture by centering traditional Chinese culture in the development of game design theory. Somatic Play is introduced as a Daoist game framework intended to diversify and decolonize the Eurocentric tradition of game studies. Through the use of autoethnography as a central methodology, I also reflect on how to approach game design through an ethnographic lens to bridge traditional practices with game studies and game design. This dissertation offers insight for future game designers and digital media artists who wish to incorporate ethnographic methods into their creative practices. Finally, rather than viewing the game as a purely mechanical computational system, this dissertation raises broader questions about vitality and organism of machine. Developing this Daoist game as a form of “spiritual machine-making” invites us to consider the agency of game that moves beyond rule-based systems being situated as external in relation to human body as internal. This dissertation aims to deploy Daoist cosmology to inform a reconsideration of the ontology and epistemology of games and computational media. In summary, this research-creation transdisciplinary dissertation uses game creation as research to explore how to use Daoist philosophy and Tai Chi practice to reconfigure the problems of gamification in mainstream meditation and mindfulness applications. By centering on ethnographic methods and somatic principles in game design, this dissertation goes beyond the notion of adaption and translation in game design, positioning the traditional practice and videogame in non-binary relationship as “intra-active technologies” that reimagine the future of games for healing.

ABSTRACT. Character art commissions are a valuable part of the fan ecosystem. They feature characters that are owned by people (as original characters) as opposed to companies (as intellectual property). Some of these characters may even represent the people themselves - the target of this study will be furries, because self-inserts as original characters are very common in this particular fandom. This paper will explore commissioning, creating, publishing and interacting with original character art as different affective practices to highlight the meaningful and playful nature of this type of fan activity.

ABSTRACT. In my dissertation, I examine early video game programming in the 1980s and -90s and develop a framework for the study of (historical) source code of games. The question guiding my research resolves around if the humanities are able research source code on a structural level and if video game source code offers us any insights we can't access by any other means. In this endeavour I have a strong focus on how developer intentions materialise in code and how this process enables the transfer of their wishes and ideas to the experience of players.

ABSTRACT. This project builds on earlier work on fascist play and the far-right relationship with game worlds, pivoting to explore the possibilities and challenges of designing antifascist games. Across two linked work packages, it asks what an antifascist game might look like, what it might mean to design one, and what political, practical, and aesthetic challenges this entails. Crucially, it also explores what the antifascist strategy and imagination might gain by thinking through game design. The first work package uses participatory analogue game-making workshops with grassroots activists to examine how diverse antifascist ideas, strategies, and utopias are translated into game rules and mechanics. The second work package explores the possibilities and challenges of digital antifascist game design through interviews with game developers and an experimental game jam centred on antifascism. Together, the project examines the various possibilities and challenges that the antifascist game might pose, both to designers and to the conventions and cultures of games, and positions game design itself as generative means of thinking through radical political strategy, subjectivity, and prefigurative politics.

ABSTRACT. This doctoral research project makes a case for the playable monster as the site at which queerness, posthumanism and play intersect. Utilising practice-based methods, this research seeks to contribute to the field of queer game studies, specifically concerning queer understandings of game-making. I will outline the theoretical contexts within which the research is situated, I will then provide the background for game-making-as-research, detailing the objectives and specifics of the methodological approach.

ABSTRACT. This submission outlines the foundations of a doctoral project examining, through a research-creation approach, the specific ways video games are designed in academic contexts. The empirical corpus comprises four projects developed at the University of Liège, involving interdisciplinary and institutional collaborations, and navigating scientific constraints, ludic ambitions, and societal expectations. The games—pandemic crisis management simulations, augmented-reality experience about a belgian author, historical investigation game on a 17th-century murder in Liège, and chocolate company ethical management game based on the Doughnut Economics framework —illustrate diverse approaches to translating thematic concerns into gameplay mechanics. The study focuses on the ideation phase, where researchers negotiate knowledge, institutional objectives, and technical constraints. This work documents how academic video game creation integrates scientific knowledge, gameplay practices, and mediation goals. Its aim is to contribute to an epistemology of video game creation in universities, highlighting its logics, tensions, and potentialities.

ABSTRACT. This paper introduces the Braiding Framework (BF), a model that combines semiotic and hermeneutic perspectives to help designers and scholars understand how meaning is shaped in digital games. While notable frameworks often prioritize rhetorical or critical purposes (Flanagan 2009; Bogost 2007), the BF approaches expressive game design from a broader point of view, focusing on how the different layers of a game work together to produce thematic coherence. The framework is built around three strands - Elements, Meaning, and Association – all of which interact throughout the process of development. The research follows a hybrid process, pairing theoretical foundations (Aarseth 1997; Juul 2005; Fernández-Vara 2019) with small practical prototypes used to test how these strands behave in real design situations. This analysis suggests that it is possible to weave layered meaning into accessible and engaging play without diminishing players engagement. The BF therefore offers both a conceptual language and a set of tools for exploring expressive potential in games.

ABSTRACT. This study examines the emergence of "virtual morality" within Chinese embedded gaming philanthropy, investigating how platforms restructure moral participation through gamification. Grounded in platform governance theory, we analyze how integrating philanthropic functions into gameplay transforms altruism into quantifiable engagement. Our findings reveal a new moral economy where benevolence is aestheticized and commodified, often prioritizing performative engagement over intrinsic motivation. We argue that while this mechanism expands visibility, it risks "moral alienation" by substituting civic agency with algorithmically mediated affects. This paper contributes to the DiGRA community by critiquing the intersection of ethics and game mechanics, offering a theoretical framework to understand how algorithmic governance redefines the moral subject and value systems in digital play.

ABSTRACT. This research analyzes the use of the term 'NPC' or 'non-player character' within a late-modern cultural context to investigate how play and playfuless can operate as mechanisms of dehumanization within a broader colonial framework of power.

ABSTRACT. This doctoral consortium submission discusses the profoundly negative French fan response to Croissant Curry in Pokémon Legends: Z-A through the lens of Iwabuchi's theory of mukokuseki ("stateless" / "culturally odorless") media. I argue that despite prior work from the 90's suggesting that massive transmedia franchises like Pokémon do not transmit ideas of Japaneseness due to both decisions in the production process and decisions in localization and translation, modern Pokémon games are produced markedly differently, and now possess the audio-visual properties to transmit a profound cultural odor -- in this case, one that smells of curry.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to demonstrate how The Sumerian Game shaped the reception of the ancient Near East in popular culture. By focusing both on its development’s context and the historiographical context of Mesopotamian studies in 1960, this case study will try to shed a light on how a video game can affect the reception of an particular imaginary in the contemporary world and, de facto, how video games can whether teach ancient history or convey a certain view of the ancient world through narrative and gameplay. Using methodological tools from game studies, cultural studies and philosophy, this paper will also show how imaginaries can become graspable objects, allowing us to study reception in popular culture in a new way.

ABSTRACT. This thesis concerns the teaching of archaeological narrative construction through a video game in which the player will enter a mosaic, in a manner similar to Super Mario 64 and Pentiment, to expand the narrative within the mosaic. The game will have three art styles: full-motion video opening and concluding the game, a 3D reconstruction and narrative choice game of a specific Pompeiian house, and a 2D game in the art style of opus vermiculatum (a type of Roman mosaic art).

ABSTRACT. This doctoral research examines independent video game production in Argentina, focusing on developers who integrate local themes, cultural elements, and social, political, or artistic intentions into their work. These productions articulate situated practices from the Global South, negotiating structural inequalities—digital, socio-economic, geographic, racial, ethnic, and gendered—that shape access to technologies, production processes, and circulation. By analysing eight case studies through semi-structured interviews and content analysis, the study investigates how developers translate critical intentions into narrative, aesthetic, and mechanical configurations, and how these decisions interact with material and symbolic constraints of the local context and the global video game industry. Drawing on the political economy of communication and culture, social studies of work, video game studies, technofeminism, and decolonial theory, this doctoral research proposes a situated analytical framework to understand how independent Argentine games function as spaces of cultural, political, and gendered resistance, contributing to pluralistic and alternative expressions in digital media.

ABSTRACT. Using the case of Southern European digital games that center local places, cultures, and histories, this ongoing research attempts to locate spatialization in games at the intersection of production cultures and situated play.

ABSTRACT. Videogames today circulate as global commodities and cultural artefacts, yet scholarship still lacks a vocabulary for games that are designed from the outset to move across languages, nations, and media. This project develops the concept of the “world videogame” to describe and analyse such titles. Drawing on world literature, translation studies, and game studies, it asks how contemporary games function simultaneously as world-making artefacts and world-travelling commodities. Focusing on games with multilingual releases and transnational player bases, the study examines three axes: language, nation, and reality. It considers games as born-translated works that disrupt hierarchies between originals and translations; as sites where national and regional narratives are encoded, displaced, or contested; and as platforms where public discourse and media collaborations blur the line between reality and virtuality. By theorising the world videogame, the project offers a framework for rethinking games’ role in global cultural production and circulation.

ABSTRACT. This research is part of the researcher's PhD project and examines whether video games can be catalysts for museum digital transformation and cross-cultural understanding. Building on existing debates regarding museums’ shift from object-oriented to experience-oriented practices, this study investigates how digital games, particularly those that integrate cultural heritage, produce museum-like engagements, and connect physical and virtual modes of cultural participation. The project will especially explore a distinctive Chinese model of collaboration between museums and game developers, in which mobile games inspired by 'guofeng'(Traditional Chinese style) aesthetics and museum collections function as new forms of cultural dissemination for digital-native audiences.

Within this broader framework, the study incorporates Wu Hua Mi Xin (物华弥新) as an example of playable heritage, analysing how the game personifies artefacts, constructs affective and narrative based encounters with cultural objects, and operates as a form of interactive museum experience. Using qualitative content analysis, walkthrough methods, questionnaires, and interviews, the research investigates both the design mechanisms that communicate cultural knowledge and the responses of players, visitors, and museum professionals.

The aim is to generate insights into how video games can support museums' digital transformation and to identify what Chinese museum and game collaborations may offer as innovative models for future cultural development.

ABSTRACT. Digital games frequently model the natural environment through a “mechanic of extraction,” reinforcing settler-colonial aesthetics of abundance. This doctoral research intervenes in this narrative through a situated Research through Design (RtD) inquiry in the Okanagan Valley, a region facing severe water scarcity. Grounded in Syilx (Okanagan) epistemologies, specifically the decision-making protocol of En'owkinwixw, the project asks how participatory game design can cultivate an ethic of care. By co-designing with Indigenous Elders, youth, and educators, the research seeks to translate oral histories into procedural rhetoric, reframing water not as a managed resource, but as “kin.” This work contributes to the fields of eco-games and decolonial design by demonstrating how interactive media can function as a boundary object for cross-cultural dialogue and epistemic justice.

ABSTRACT. The abstract is about empirical data on how flow-theory intersects with game-based learning. Our long term goal is to develop a game-based application, which helps users learn chemistry. There will be implemented game elements and a framework that fosters flow. The current pilot study showed promising results regarding the framework we developed. Flow Short Scale questionnaire and focus group interviews were conducted in order to obtain the necessary data. The study contributes to DiGRA by demonstrating how flow theory can guide the design of educational games.

ABSTRACT. This PhD project aims to define the functioning and structure of fictional societies inhabited by NPCs within single-player video games. After defining the various types of social structures, a new methodological approach will be attempted to understand whether ethnography can be used as a tool for studying fictional non-human societies through selected single-player video games.

ABSTRACT. My research looks at a variety of players and their gaming habits throughout their lives to investigate what gaming and play can reveal about a player both directly and indirectly. Through in-depth interviews and a bottom-up investigative approach, my study allows participant experiences to guide potential theory development. I aim to understand how individuals' gaming experiences and behaviors in both digital and analog games can reflect their motivations (both implicit and explicit) and psychological state. The purpose is to use a player-centered approach to find new ways of connecting the psychology of play and motivation with observable behavior, particularly highlighting new ways to understand implicit and subconscious psychological processes. My research aims to contribute to both gaming and psychology research fields by proposing new frameworks for understanding the relationship between play behavior and psychological motivations. The findings have the potential to inform both game design practices and our understanding of how gaming experiences can reveal deeper psychological patterns.

ABSTRACT. This abstract describes an in-progress dissertation chapter focused on representations of dementia in digital games. It draws from science fiction studies, critical disability studies, and game studies to examine the role speculative imaginaries play in representations of dementia in participatory media. It attempts to nuance the conversation within game studies about empathy in games by arguing that the failure of representational models to capture the totality of another’s experience may be more significant to cultivating empathy than the degree to which they succeed. The argument focuses specifically on representations of age-related cognitive decline, which is often overlooked in discourses on games, disability, and empathy.

ABSTRACT. This is a non-anonymized submission of an extended abstract for my participatory research creation dissertation project exploring the commonalities between life-paths of game-makers with ADHD, explored through the lens of critical disability studies and Crip theory.

ABSTRACT. My doctoral project explores video games as intermedial ideological apparatuses. By synthesizing Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony with intermediality, I introduce the concept of "hegemonic intermediality." This concept describes how video games establish a dual dominance: first as a hegemonic interface that transmits hyper-capitalist ideologies into civil society, and second as a metamedium that establishes cultural dominance over older media forms by simulating them.

Focusing specifically on the utilization of television, radio, and the internet in video games, I argue that video games use these intermedial instances to manufacture active consent for capitalist hegemony through two distinct forms: Ambient Intermediality and Procedural Intermediality. Ambient Intermediality refers to the use of these media as environmental storytelling elements, such as watching in-game television or listening to radio broadcasts, to normalize capitalist realism and legitimize authority. Procedural Intermediality describes instances where the manipulation of these media forms becomes the core gameplay mechanic, allowing players to actively participate in the manufacturing of consent. By analyzing case studies such as Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and Not For Broadcast, I trace the structural shift from passive environmental storytelling to active procedural process, demonstrating how video games utilize the familiarity of older media to familiarize players in the logic of the new technofeudal empire during our current political interregnum.

ABSTRACT. This interdisciplinary doctoral project examines video game portrayals of climate change, environmental degradation, and technological transformation within post-apocalyptic and dystopian contexts, and how their aesthetics and rhetoric influence player values. The research explores the transformative potential of post-apocalyptic and dystopian gamescapes in shaping the game medium’s green transition within our techno-dominated Anthropocene.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract describes my PhD project about developing a multi-layered framework for analysing queerness in videogames; examining how queer meaning emerges through mechanics, aesthetics, narrative temporality, and the material conditions of game development.

ABSTRACT. As brands increasingly interact with customers in virtual environments like Roblox and Fortnite, understanding how digital self-representation shapes consumption behavior has become increasingly important. Avatars play a central role in this dynamic by moderating the consumer interactions in these spaces. This research investigates how the interplay between consumers’ gender identity and their avatar’s gender shapes gendered product choices. In a 2 × 2 experiment conducted in a custom Unity-based virtual environment (N = 388), participants completed a series of gendered consumption decisions. Results show that both self-identified gender and avatar gender predict choices in the virtual world. An interaction effect suggests the impact of the avatar is significantly more pronounced for male participants. Men using female avatars present a significant shift towards more feminine products, while women demonstrate a smaller variation in their choices.

ABSTRACT. As interactive environments increasingly integrate Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), they risk becoming invisible monoliths of Western linguistic imperialism. This paper argues that pleasure in these spaces is fundamentally restricted for African and diasporic communities when the interface of communication is encoded with Western cultural frameworks. By examining the "friction tax" imposed on African language models like Lelapa AI versus the "frictionless" integration of Western models in engines like Unity, this work proposes a framework of "agentic access" to dismantle the algorithmic hegemonies silencing indigenous ways of knowing.

ABSTRACT. My name is Wanyue Zhang, and I am a PhD student at the Division of Humanities in the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. My research interests include digital games, media theory and gender studies.

I am currently working on my doctoral project, which adopts a feminist analysis of Chinese female-oriented games. The attached file is the ongoing research proposal I developed for my doctoral thesis. Overall this project will include textual analysis and reception studies, and intends to cover a more inclusive and broader female-oriented game genre that is gaining growing prominence in China recently.

ABSTRACT. This presentation aims to offer some reflections from ongoing PhD research about tabletop role-playing game (TRPG) communities' practices. The research aims to analyse Chilean TRPG communities’ practices in a global north-global south dialogue, from a decolonial perspective, and recuring to nostalgia studies as a lens to comprehend these.

ABSTRACT. With this project, I aim to explore video games as sites of embodied experiences, where non-normative embodiment can be represented, performed, and potentially reimagined. By exploring the intersection of queer theory, disability studies, and game studies, I aim to investigate how games challenge or replicate the hegemonic norms of who is allowed to be visible and afforded agency within game spaces, specifically in role-playing games (RPGs). I aim to analyze how contemporary RPGs encode normative notions of embodiment and ability that create and uphold hegemonic myths of the body. From there, I want to explore how queer and crip play practices disrupt the predominance of this ‘mythic body’ and highlight the potential of inhabiting game worlds non-normatively. Ultimately, I want to highlight Alison Kafer’s call for the “need to imagine crip futures because disabled people are continually being written out of the future” and aim to argue for a playful and pleasurable queer-crip mythmaking that enables players to reclaim worldbuilding as a way to write themselves into the world in defiance of erasure.

ABSTRACT. In the 1980s, the feminizumu [feminism] boom happened. It means that women were able to be hired in a flourish number and in a variety of corporate positions. Prior to that, she were limited to positions as “office ladies”. Following the conclusion of the World War II, in the 1960s, Japan needed to rebuild its economy. Focusing on the manufacturing and service industry, the economy skyrocked. In only 10 years, the national gross product expanded at a rate of 10%. The country reached the pinnacle of growth in the 1980s. Because of the economic need, Debates about genre have been highlighted in the political discourse. They called this period “Onna no jidai”, the era of women. As Brooke McCorcle Okazaki said, “the feminist movement supported goals that Japanese companies sharded with the government: increasing profits and growing the economy”. (2024) As a result, women were able to get a job as video game creators and not only “Office ladies”. The best-known example is the women sound designer team of Capcom in the 1980s. During this time, the music of capcom game was made mostly by this team. Including a lot of action arcade game: Ghosts ’n Goblins (1985), Commando (1985), Bionic Commando (1987), Final Fight (1989), Ghouls ’n Ghosts (1988) and Street Fighter II (1991). (Lemon & Rietveld, 2021) The team was composed of Ayako Mori, Tamayo Kawamoto, Junko Tamiya, Manami Matsumae, Harumi Fujita, Yoko Shimomura and Tamayo Kawamoto. Unfortunately, the bubble exploded after “Final Fight had been completed”. (Lemon & Rietveld). That may seem, at first glance, a moment that overturn all the gender discrimination, but the non-rigourous credit policy inhibited the highlight on these women creators. In the 70s and 80s, the company Capcom assigned to its artists various pseudonyms, which were neither fixed nor individual and could change from one project to another. In this context, for example, Yoko Shimomura appeared under several names, such as Oimonoyouchan, Pii, ShimoPii, Shimo-P., P-Chan or even Pi-Bomb Shimomura, and sometimes was not even credited. This practice made it impossible to identify the gender of the composers and reinforced the dominant perception that these creators were necessarily men. (Fritsch, 2022) To prevent that, my research focuses on how we can build a women’s legacy in video games. Many of them were invisibilized by policy who served men. Kaori Ikeda, an employee at the promotion of the company Asmik, observed that, in the 80s and 90s, women were seen by companies as people who could attract a young audience thanks to their sensitivity. (McCorkle Okazaki, 2024, p. 206) In a process of essentialization of the video game industry vis-à-vis women, the latter are relegated to work on productions aimed at young audiences. This mechanism is not limited to video game medium. The researcher Jessica Kohn explains that one of the reasons for this invisibility is because the female creators of comics were at the production of stories intended for little girls. Thus, the history of comics was built around periodicals that could appeal to an adult audience. (Hertiman, et al., 2024, p.40) Women faced an essentialization of their capacities. To get out, I need to use the concept “strategic essentization” of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. My corpus was formed by productions classified as A according to the scale of the CERO, the equivalent to the PEGI in Europe, ESRB in North America, or ACB in Australia. The productions classified as A are accessible to all ages. This corpus consists of games from the licenses like Kirby, Hello Kitty, Doraemon, Rilakkuma, Kirarin, Cinnamon Roll, etc. My method to find invisibilized creators consist of using french concept “constellation créatrice” on videogame. This concept was created by a group of feminist researchers named “Les Jaseuses”. It consists of establishing links between different female, or gender minorities, creators from work to work, while including those who are usually excluded from the recognition circles. (Turbiau & al, 2022) I have tried this on one creator: Muriel Tramis, who worked on Adibou. It’s a very famous child game among French speakers. She is the first woman in the video game sector to have received, in October 2018, the Legion of Honor. You can see here that Muriel Tramis worked with the graphic designer Kaki Chapouillié: Freedom : Rebels in the Darkness (1988), Emmanuelle (1989), Gobliins 2 (1992), Asterix : Operation Getafix (1989). Muriel Tramis is part of the design constellation and Kaki Chapouillié is part of the artistic constellation. I had some difficulties here, Tramis is listed as the scenarist and Chapouillié as the graphic designer. Plus, Tramis didn’t only work on chil game, but but she also worked on NSFW games like Emmanuelle, an erotic adventure game, or Méwilo, a 'point and click' game taking place in Martinique and which deals with themes related to colonization and slavery.

ABSTRACT. In this extended abststract, I present my ongoing dissertation project on representations of suicide in computer games, which approaches simulations of suicide through the lens of suicide research.

ABSTRACT. Since Aristotle, generic studies have tended to establish formal system classifying works in heterogeneous and fixed categories. Most of the time, these systems don’t reflect factual or historical uses of genres. Indeed, researchers prefer to create theorical categories that are more useful in hermeneutic or heuristic research. In contrast to these approaches, this presentation aims to show the importance of examining categories drawn by user communities through a study of players’ online discourses around the classification of Resident Evil 4.

ABSTRACT. This paper places works involving the Flesh Modification narrative (primarily films and games) within a historical timeline and social cultural space background. Following Foucault's archaeological method, taking the external object as a variable, this study establishes a ‘Devil—Mech—Implant’ lineage as a basic analytical framework to organize data and build archives. Furthermore, by employing deep description from a phenomenological perspective regarding the body and intersubjectivity, this research analyzes the medium and relationship evolution between flesh and objects.It aims to answer the following research questions: 1.How have the replacements of external objects been situated within the episteme of technological concepts, biopolitics, and capital logic of different times? 2.Comparing these three categories of works, how do protagonists differ in their inter-subjective experiences under different media connections? And how do these reflect or influence players'/audiences' survival experiences in the real world? 3. How does the historical dimension of the Flesh Modification narrative reflect the changing notion of human subjectivity regarding technology, the body, and human-machine relationships during modernity?

ABSTRACT. How can we use game engines, controls, and mechanics to support memory projects and articulate cultural nuances? My research focuses on black women whose practice or production of African-derived and -syncretic spiritualities guide their transit across the Americas and haunt American landscapes from the 20th century to the present. I converge black feminisms, black geographies, digital media, and Afro-Caribbean ancestral practice to investigate how these spiritualities, often operating without name or institution, act as cartographic and navigational systems. Restructuring our relationship to space, memory, and possessions, these spiritualities complicate colonial mapping techniques, challenge geographies of power, and produce life in places designated unlivable. While I am interested in these critiques and constructions of space, I am also interested in how these spiritualities become tradition and seep into techno-culture.

As such, I use game engines, controls, mechanics to strategically expand the expressive capacities of new media and to ground computational humanities in lived experience. The digital chapter of my dissertation, “9Night and Good Mourning,” is a hands-on immersive media installation about memory; what it means to be remembered and to remember in environments that fail to sustain black life. Taking its title from the African-syncretic spiritual-cum-cultural mourning ritual practiced across the Caribbean, Nine Night, this installation homes in on 31 Albouys Street, Albouystown, Georgetown, Guyana - my great-grandmother’s two-bedroom, one-bathroom cottage, undetectable by lot number on most digital maps. This digital exhibit is a 3-D diagrammatic representation of the house, a map to the psychic location of memory conjured at a Nine Night, and a virtual altar simulating sacred communion with the dead. Upon contact with extended reality components, visitors journey through memories of a woman whose spirituality guides her travels through Guyana, to the States, and as a spirit collecting her plate on the ninth night of mourning.

This touchstone installation surfaces nodes of convergence between African-derived and -syncretic epistemologies, geospatial media, and game design. It expands considerations on remembrance that are non-exploitative and avoids the uncanny in the age of holograms and deepfakes. To build this installation, I employ immersive media design, a method that expands space by providing users with interactive sight, sound, and touch media. This method gets at the interplay between the literal and figurative by converting spatial data (collected both by myself and others) into spatial media — visually and linguistically re-rendering and re-reading the landscapes they occupy and the maps that symbolize where they dwell, so that my readers can see the interoperable layers of spirit, ecological imagination, and ritual that sustain Black life in the Caribbean and its diaspora. This artisanal tech solution skirts conventional approaches to geography and history that do not have existing mechanisms for foregrounding the body and representations of space to unlock memory. In particular, I lean on RealityCapture, Unity, and motion capture to further engage domestic archives and cultural tradition. They have been essential in spatializing and thus representing how navigational literacies and space-making practices of Black women who engage African-syncretic spiritualities transform our engagement with standard mapping technologies.

ABSTRACT. My ongoing PhD research explores methods for which live-service videogames can be preserved in cooperation with game developers. The findings of this research will be used to advocate for further cultural inquiry into how live-service games can be preserved and by whom.

ABSTRACT. A PhD consortium abstract for the upcoming Digra conference.

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ABSTRACT. Contemporary gaming platforms such as Roblox and Minecraft have evolved into essential digital playgrounds for children, driven by the social functions and sharing of User-Generated Content (UGC). However, this dynamic exposes minors to systemic risks, including hate speech and radicalization, which current frameworks like the Digital Services Act (DSA) fail to adequately address due to reliance on reactive moderation measures or neglecting the video game industry as a relevant sector. This leads to new regulatory proposals. The paper analyzes the impact of emerging EU Child Safety regulations, specifically the Digital Fairness Act, which are expected to target the video game industry. By examining the shift toward structural accountability, the paper addresses the tension between providing a safe environment for children by mitigating risks and maintaining the pleasure arising from freedom of play.

ABSTRACT. This doctoral dissertation seeks to investigate the educational potential of competitive gaming in classroom settings and how the E-sport movement is repackaged to fit educational objectives and purposes. Theoretically, I use mediatization theory to analyze how media constitute new forms of sport (“media as sport”) and borrow concepts from sociology of education and Nordic sports pedagogy to understand the interrelationship between media, education, and sport. Empirically, I examine Sweden as it provides a unique educational landscape characterized by privatization and free choice models. Preliminary findings inform a discussion on the role of digital media in our ways of learning and developing civic awareness through sports participation.

ABSTRACT. This project examines how esports reconfigure contemporary understandings and performances of masculinity by making new forms of male embodiment widely visible and pleasurable to watch, granting them symbolic and social powers typically reserved for hegemonic masculinity.

Through a mixed approach of ethnographic studies of esports events, historical analyses of competitive gaming and gaming communities, and sociological and theoretical examinations of media and visual culture, I outline the implications of esports allowing viewers to encounter a broader, more relatable spectrum of masculine embodiments. More specifically, I argue that esports enable narcissistic dimensions of spectatorship for a wider base of male viewers, because the professional gamer’s body is one that does not need to be physically honed or genetically privileged to access the financial, symbolic, and social rewards typically associated with traditional athletes or other public figures who have mastered an embodied practice. This relatability of the male gamer’s bodily presence adds a distinct layer of voyeuristic pleasure for audiences that emerges from closeness, rather than distance, between the spectated body and the spectator.

ABSTRACT. Part of my PhD thesis consists in thinking about how we approach video games. This proposal seeks to establish a model that allows to map ou how we (as researchers and as players) engage with video games.

ABSTRACT. Extended abstract for PhD Consortium.

As part of my ongoing PhD research on gaming and socio-cultural practices related to cooperative video games, this study investigates how players interact differently depending on distinct game affordances and mechanics in cooperative video games. Specifically, it compares how Twitch streamers engage with a story-driven cooperative title — Little Nightmares 3 (Supermassive Games, 2025) – or with a friendslop game — RV There Yet (Nuggets Entertainment, 2025). By focusing on the social dimensions of Twitch and contrasting such distinct cases, this study aims to develop a broader understanding of how different game structures and design features shape specific forms of player agency, in-game behaviours, and social practices.

ABSTRACT. While from seemingly disparate disciplines, designing a game and composing a musical work for improvisers have much in common. In both circumstances, a framework is provided for the achievement of goals. The designer/composer will communicate to everyone involved what that framework is in some manner, whether that be verbally, graphically, in writing, or perhaps even by demonstration. Meanwhile, all participants internalize these rules and realize them in time, yielding a result that is born out of the moment. All minds are voluntarily present and actively in play.

This understanding drives my dissertation capstone project, Duet for Flute and Video Game, a dynamic system that casts a volunteer into the role of “musical improviser.” One player improvises live on an acoustic instrument, often myself on flute, while another uses conventional PC gaming controls to play a custom game designed with musical improvisation as its core guiding principle. As the instrumentalist improvises, the system listens to their performance and detects pre-determined pitch-tracked cues that make in-game events happen. The other player can both see and hear these events, enabling them to choose how they musically respond. They can also enact their own in-game events to which the instrumentalist responds. In this way, the video game encapsulates the system that permits a musical conversation to happen between the two players. The exploratory nature of gameplay is highlighted as a framework for improvisation-based music composition.

ABSTRACT. The present dissertation offers a detailed analysis of the corpus of in-game group and individual anthroponyms, as well as self-selected usernames, in both Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 76, aiming to identify naming motivations through a core-periphery matrix. Additionally, it examines how players address and reference one another in cooperative and battle-royale online gaming contexts, drawing on a dataset of 40 videos in English and German.

ABSTRACT. This research develops a three-layer ontological framework for understanding how rules structure both constraint and freedom in digital games. By distinguishing between system-constitutive, meaning-constitutive, and regulative rules—each with different forms of breakability—the study provides a unified explanation for diverse player practices such as creative play, deviant play, counterplay, and antisocial behavior. It further demonstrates how digital games transform real-world norms into programmable possibilities, revealing a unique mode of technologically mediated agency.

ABSTRACT. In Modes of Play, Deterding (2013) identifies “thwarted autonomy” as a recurring perception in how players feel unable to freely choose when to play or disengage. Contemporary game design arguably leans toward this autonomy thwarting through daily quests, battle passes, and scheduled events to shape when and how players engage. Building on Juul’s (2010) distinction between permanent and transient goals, this study considers how players interpret the time costs and consequences of these systems. While earlier work has shown that players evaluate games in temporal terms (Byers 2024; Byers et al. 2025b), there remains limited understanding of how specific features are experienced in relation to temporal values. This study addresses that gap by examining how players respond to common temporal design structures, and how those responses reflect tensions between design intent and player time.

ABSTRACT. This dissertation studies what happens when video games refuse the demand to move quickly. Bringing together time studies, disability studies, and queer theory, it argues that slowness is not just an aesthetic but a political and embodied reorientation of how games structure labor, ability, and value. The project traces the stakes of slow games across four chapters: the first shows how slow games resist meritocratic pressure by centering waiting, drifting, and non-progression; the second examines slowness as something imposed, reading games about illness, care, and crisis to reveal the unequal distribution of time; the third turns to production, asking what it means to design games slowly in an industry built on crunch and exploring reparative, small-scale, low-barrier creation as an ethic; and the fourth presents a creative praxis portfolio of prototypes and interactive installations that test slowness as a method. Together, these chapters show how slow games challenge dominant temporal logics in gaming and gesture toward more accessible, sustainable, and reparative futures for play and game-making.

ABSTRACT. China presents a unique paradox in the global gaming landscape with its strict digital censorship alongside a thriving market for AAA games. This doctoral research, responding to the DiGRA 2026 theme of "Intersectional Pleasures," investigates the material politics of console gaming in China. It focuses on "backdoor" mechanisms in the Chinese versions of PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S—features like "Backup and Restore" that bypass region locks.

Challenging the assumption of standardized hardware, this study introduces "Platform Mutation" to describe how technical standards adapt in authoritarian contexts. Using the Walkthrough Method, I analyze these consoles as "Boundary Objects," which appear compliant but are materially flexible. The project argues that these backdoors serve as "Material Safety Valves," offering specific pleasures of transgression and infrastructural competence while balancing local sovereignty with global connectivity.

ABSTRACT. This contribution stems from an ongoing PhD Thesis questioning the history of video game practices in a local context – French speaking Switzerland from the 1970s to the 2000s. Especially, it aims to understand how players' experiences were related to the temporality of play. How did they perceive and experience these times of play? How did their playtime and experience interact with local temporal structures? How did the players manage their everyday life to create space for this emerging and to-be-stabilized leisure practice?

ABSTRACT. This project will focus on the indexical locations and practices of peoples of Southeast Asia as they are represented in video games, analysing the traces of people in reality in the digital simulations.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract presents my current PhD research project, which delves into the study of Table-Top Roleplaying Games digital shows known as “Actual Plays” from a perspective of Television, Media and Game Studies, particularly in the Italian national context. I illustrate the current state of the literature and theoretical review, as well as the structure of Actual Plays’ channels and series analysis to be carried out in the forthcoming months. I conclude with the expected results, which consist in a comprehensive understanding of Actual Plays as sites of stratified synergies and tensions between digital platforms, performative play, transmedia practices, cultural industries, fan activities, and creative labor.