ABSTRACT. The main aim of this paper is to map different political elements of ecogames in search for ecopolitical patterns, to better understand how the ecological aspect of these games is configured. Contemporary landscape of ecomedia theories and research (Rust, Monani, & Cubitt, 2016) offers numerous points of entry into the problematic of ecogames. From researching the analogies between green utopias and digital spaces (Farca, 2024), through analysis of ecoplay rhetorics (Bianchi, 2020), to critical studies of the whole gaming ecosystem’s impact on climate (Abraham, 2022). These points of entry show that whenever one touches ecology a Pandora’s box opens: education (Wu & Lee, 2015), ecofeminism (Woolbright, 2018), ecology and imperialism (Mukherjee, 2024), colonization (Frelik, 2024), awareness and social impact (Schønau-Fog & Bjørner, 2024), animal studies, being with (Bianchi, 2017) and hauntology (Youngblood, 2024), not to mention tech and material infrastructures (Fizek, 2024). And that list does not even represent a grain in the whole sandbox of what ecocritical game approaches offer to contemporary game criticism (Chang, 2019). However useful and needed these approaches are, I would like to propose a different path for ecogame analysis, one that looks at the building blocks of ecology and politics as one assemblage, thus the insertion of brackets into eco(politics). What my contribution to this sprawling landscape offers is a structural map of eco(political) game elements, a mapping tool, or an algorithm. With this approach I would like to tackle the problem of the in-game basis for “thinking ecologically” (May & Hall, 2024), by looking at the game ontology which differentiates between four layers projected onto any game: physical, communicational, structural and mental (Aarseth & Grabarczyk, 2018). Thus, my aim is mapping the building blocks of eco(politics) in games. The map then serves two purposes. First, it serves as a critical and analytical lens for game scholars looking for eco(politica) cues. Second, this map can be used by developers or gamejammers as an easy introductory material for creative, artistic practice. I want to maintain that this is a research tool first and foremost, as there already are certain solutions focusing on game design (Walk, Görlich, & Barrett, 2017), systemic solutions (Wearn & Back, 2017) or design as practice (Chang, 2024; Coulton & Hook, 2017). I chose eco(politics) because of its proximity to biopolitics, which makes the aims of mapping easier to depict as a search for ecogaming assemblages in play, their power structures, dependencies, habituses they produce. The biopolitical lens already combines two critical elements for thinking ecologically: life and politics. There is no singular biopolitical method to approach eco(politics), which makes this endeavor an exploration of alternative ways to think and apply biopolitical reflection in game studies. The four accounts of ecopolitics I reference mark significant paradigms that offer fundamental understanding of the core notions: of the eco- and of politics. I start with Verena Conley’s anticipation of an ecofeminist revolution as part of a struggle within XXth century theoretical buzz and realigning of ecological vectors of humanities and sciences (Conley 1997). A decade later Blühdorn and Welsh note a fiasco of ecopolitics showing significant shift towards greenwashing, corporate deals sustaining the unsustainable economy, and simulation politics (Blühdorn and Welsh 2008). Fast forward another decade, Stoett and Mulligan propose an alternative reading of the multi-layered and decentralized ecopolitical agency introducing a tool to evaluate it and move forward (Stoett and Mulligan 2019). Lastly, coming back to ecofeminist and object oriented philosophies of kinship and being with the other, Kuperus redefines ecopolitics less as a legislative and more as an experiential politics of being detached from social contract, and rooted in the non-human communities (Kuperus 2023). I use these paradigmatic shifts to map eco(politics) in ecogames and to identify which game ontology elements align with the four conceptualizations of ecopolitics. This paper uses concept mapping according to the main aim of this method, “to outline relationships between ideas” (Davies, 2011, p. 282). Martin Davies explains that concept maps differ from mind maps because they offer a tighter and more advanced structure, introduce hierarchy and schematics for better understanding of concept relationships, thus allowing knowledge to be rigidity organized. Their limits lie in their linear nature, complexity and abstractness (Davies, 2011, p. 286), so they are less likely to be used as educational tools and more likely as analytical supplementation of the research process (Davies, 2011, pp. 291–292). The strengths of concept maps lies in the combination of verbal and visual components, consolidation and summarization of information, avoiding of single channel information overload, and simplification of data by reorganization of structural relationships (Schroeder, Nesbit, Anguiano, & Adesope, 2018). I advocate for the use of concept mapping in this study for two reasons. First, I want to better understand the relationships between ecology and governance in ecogames. Second, my aim is to better understand and visualize the building blocks, or elements that formulate the assemblages of eco(politics) in games.

References Aarseth, E., & Grabarczyk, P. (2018). An Ontological Meta-Model for Game Research. Proceedings of DiGRA 2018. Retrieved from http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/DIGRA_2018_paper_247_rev.pdf Abraham, B. J. (2022). Digital Games After Climate Change. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91705-0 Bianchi, M. (2017). Inklings and Tentacled Things: Grasping at Kinship through Video Games. Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, 8(2), 136–150. https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2017.8.2.1354 Bianchi, M. (2020). Ecoplay: The rhetorics of games about nature. In S. I. Dobrin & S. Morey (Eds.), Routledge environmental literature, culture and media. Mediating nature: The role of technology in ecological literacy (pp. 15–29). London, New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group. Chang, A. Y. (2019). Playing nature: Ecology in video games. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Chang, A. Y. (2024). Change for Games:: On Sustainable Design Patterns for the (Digital) Future. In J. Raessens, S. Werning, G. Farca, & L. op de Beke (Eds.), Ecogames: Playful perspectives on the climate crisis (pp. 73–88). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.10819591.4 Coulton, P., & Hook, A. (2017). Games design research through game design practice. In P. Lankoski & J. Holopainen (Eds.), Critical practices in game design (pp. 97–116). Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press. Davies, M. (2011). Concept mapping, mind mapping and argument mapping: what are the differences and do they matter? Higher Education, 62(3), 279–301. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-010-9387-6 Farca, G. (2024). Ecology in the Postapocalypse: Regenerative Play in the Metro Series and the Critical Dystopia. In J. Raessens, S. Werning, G. Farca, & L. op de Beke (Eds.), Ecogames: Playful perspectives on the climate crisis (pp. 241–258). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.10819591.13 Fizek, S. (2024). Material Infrastructures of Play: How the Games Industry Reimagines Itself in the Face of Climate Crisis. In J. Raessens, S. Werning, G. Farca, & L. op de Beke (Eds.), Ecogames: Playful perspectives on the climate crisis (pp. 525–542). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.10819591.28 Frelik, P. (2024). Green New Worlds? Ecology and Energy in Planetary Colonization Games. In J. Raessens, S. Werning, G. Farca, & L. op de Beke (Eds.), Ecogames: Playful perspectives on the climate crisis (pp. 275–294). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.10819591.15 May, L., & Hall, B. (2024). Thinking Ecologically with Battlefield 2042. Game Studies, 24(1). Retrieved from https://gamestudies.org/2401/articles/mayhall Mukherjee, S. (2024). No Cyclones in Age of Empires: Empire, Ecology, and Video Games. In J. Raessens, S. Werning, G. Farca, & L. op de Beke (Eds.), Ecogames: Playful perspectives on the climate crisis (pp. 163–180). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.10819591.9 Rust, S., Monani, S., & Cubitt, S. (Eds.) (2016). Ecomedia: Key issues. London, New York: Routledge Earthscan. Schønau-Fog, H., & Bjørner, T. (2024). A Dynamic Engagement Model to Provide Ecological Awareness of the Climate Crisis through Video Games. In J. Raessens, S. Werning, G. Farca, & L. op de Beke (Eds.), Ecogames: Playful perspectives on the climate crisis (pp. 129–144). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.10819591.7 Schroeder, N. L., Nesbit, J. C., Anguiano, C. J., & Adesope, O. O. (2018). Studying and Constructing Concept Maps: A Meta-Analysis. Educational Psychology Review, 30(2), 431–455. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-017-9403-9 Walk, W., Görlich, D., & Barrett, M. (2017). Design, Dynamics, Experience (DDE): An Advancement of the MDA Framework for Game Design. In O. Korn & N. Lee (Eds.), Game Dynamics (pp. 27–45). Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53088-8_3 Wearn, A., & Back, J. (2017). Experimental game design. In P. Lankoski & J. Holopainen (Eds.), Critical practices in game design (pp. 157–170). Pittsburgh, PA: ETC Press. Woolbright, L. (2018). Ecofeminism and Gaia theory in Horizon Zero Dawn. TRACE: A Journal of Writing, Media, and Ecology, 2. Retrieved from http://tracejournal.net/trace-issues/issue2/02-Woolbright.html Wu, J. S., & Lee, J. J. (2015). Climate change games as tools for education and engagement. Nature Climate Change, 5(5), 413–418. https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2566 Youngblood, J. (2024). “Have You Ever Heard a Worm Sing?”: The Spectral Ecology of Kentucky Route Zero, Act V. In J. Raessens, S. Werning, G. Farca, & L. op de Beke (Eds.), Ecogames: Playful perspectives on the climate crisis (pp. 335–352). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.10819591.18

ABSTRACT. This presentation examines how time loop games, roguelike games, and looping levels in linear video games can be analysed as “loop-based games”. It argues that these types of games have grown increasingly popular in recent years, yet little research has explored how their shared looping structures shape these games' narratives. Drawing on the concepts of narrative time and the narrative puzzle, this presentation compares how these different genres use this cyclical approach to video game storytelling and outlines the contribution this approach offers for the study of video game narrative.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines a range of JRPGs (Japanese Roleplaying Games) which employ time travel as a narrative or gameplay mechanic, exploring the intersections between time and history in these games, and their implications for both player and scholarly understandings of history. Time travel is a common trope in the JRPG genre, and games are in any case especially good at facilitating temporal play. While other media forms explore different temporalities, games offer specific temporal (Gopinath and Holopainen 2025) or temporal-ergodic agency (Bódi 2023, 48-53) absent elsewhere. Yet, in time travel games, this agency is often applied in pursuit of transforming the timeline and ‘changing’ history. But what does history mean, here, how is change to it represented, and with what moral implications? This paper contributes to discussions in Historical Game Studies (HGS) about how far we can read fantasy games within academic historical frameworks, arguing that they can shape how we understand history, rather than be ‘historied over’ (Marino Carvalho 2025) by modernist perspectives. The paper will interest researchers working on HGS, along with those engaging with JRPGs as a genre.

ABSTRACT. /

ABSTRACT. This paper will conduct a close comparative analysis of the use of detective boards in two videogames, The Roottrees are Dead (Evil Trout Inc. 2025) and A Hand With Many Fingers (Colestia 2020). Both games centre their experiences on the filling in and arranging of detective boards; The Roottrees are Dead’s focuses on determining the genealogical lineage of a wealthy fictional family and A Hand With Many Fingers sees players unravelling a real-world conspiracy by trawling through a dusty physical archive and manually pinning and connecting clues on a board. I build upon Fernández-Vara’s (2018; 2023) exploration of the connections between mysteries and game design and argue that filling in informational gaps via the detective board can be both playful and pleasurable and shapes the player’s understanding of both their own knowledge and a game’s narrative. In this paper I argue that filling in a videogame detective board with information can be thought of as pleasurable in the same way solving a puzzle is – it becomes the structure through which a player’s knowledge and progress is tracked and rewarded. The detective board is a trope in mystery narratives that describes how information and clues are depicted visually with connective string and pinned images, similar to the image of the conspiracy board (Brotherton 2018, 3). The detective board foregrounds a connection between games and mysteries that a range of scholars have identified (Buckles 1985, 87; Fernández-Vara 2018; Jenkins 2004; Ryan 2004, 352; Suits 1985). As Fernández-Vara (2023, 59) describes, “mysteries are an essential way of understanding game narratives”. Mysteries, like videogames, are “playful by nature” and are interested in the art of leaving gaps for the reader or player to fill in (49). Citing Danesi’s (2002, 35) “puzzle instinct”, Fernández-Vara (2023, 53) describes gaps and mysteries as creating a compulsion that drives us to uncover missing information. Detective boards have been used in several recent videogames, including Outer Wilds (Mobius Digital 2019), Alan Wake 2 (Remedy Entertainment 2023) and Tactical Breach Wizards (Suspicious Developments 2024), though in this paper I focus on two videogames that use them as their central mechanic, The Roottrees are Dead and A Hand with Many Fingers. The Roottrees are Dead’s detective board both foregrounds the pleasurable gap-filling game design process that Fernández-Vara (2023) describes and visually depicts the networked structure of its narrative. Roottree’s central goal is to fill in the details of the entire Roottree family tree by determining each living relative’s name, occupation and picture, which plays out across multiple generations and fifty characters (see figure 1). Roottree, through both its story and the design of the detective board, elicits comparisons to the structure of the network narrative (Bordwell 2007, 189; Campora 2014; Narine 2010). Compared to narratives that take place across an ensemble cast of characters, network narratives tend to be organised in what Kerr (2010, 38) calls the “n-degrees-of-separation” template where each thread is directly or indirectly connected to one another, in an increasingly expansive and elaborate network of connections. Roottree’s board therefore becomes both a visual depiction, and a shaping influence, on both its central narrative and the player’s conception of it – it primes the player to conceive of its genealogy through a networked narrative puzzle full of gaps that the player must resolve. In contrast, A Hand with Many Fingers foregrounds the tactility and pleasurable epistemic free play that a board can provide. Focused on the solving of a real-world conspiracy by trawling through a physical archive, Kunzelman (2022, 22) notes that the game’s process of investigation is intentionally analogue and slow in how it depicts the manual and mundane acts of research and organising information. A Hand with Many Fingers, unlike Roottrees, also allows the player to freely arrange information on its two corkboards however they desire, turning the detective board into a site of free play, or paida (Ryan 2009), and giving players the tools to playfully shape their own understanding of the game’s narrative. This also become integral to how A Hand with Many Fingers visualises the network narrative – as more diffused and fragmentary, with connections between events and characters being determined by the player and the real-world sociopolitical context of its conspiracy. Both games therefore offer a way to think about the playful and pleasurable experiences that the detective board as a game mechanic articulates – the board becomes the structure through which puzzling satisfaction and the free play of epistemic awareness occurs.

ABSTRACT. This study employs a reflexive thematic analysis to systematically examine the design patterns of 48 first-person Virtual reality (VR) animal avatar games. The research identifies four primary design themes: Animal Biomimicry, Limited Animal Simulation, Hybrid Human-Animal Features, and Human Behavior with Animal Avatar. The analysis reveals that approximately 77 percent of the games remain grounded in human-centered interaction logic, with animal forms primarily serving as visual representations. The study highlights the core tension between authenticity and usability in current VR animal avatar design, and points toward design opportunities for achieving more authentic animal avatar's interactive experience through directions such as controller innovation, unconventional body mapping, and dynamic feedback. This research provides a thematic classification framework for understanding the representation of non-human perspectives in VR games.

ABSTRACT. This paper aims to provide a case study of select games from the Call of Duty franchise in order to analyze the relationship between pleasurable mechanics and the games’ political messaging. Focusing mainly on the Modern Warfare series, I will use the methodology of procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2007) as a means of showcasing how Call of Duty’s systems make persuasive claims about the nature of armed conflicts.

The problematic nature of the franchise’s portrayal of war starts with the very characteristics of the genre it belongs to. As First-Person Shooter games, Call of Duty is designed to make the action pleasurable and mechanically satisfying. A key component of the genre is embodiment – the player sees conflict directly through the eyes of their character, which makes their perspective in the geo-political context of the game more impactful (Godfrey, 2022). The gameplay relies on the affective immediacy of encounters, with the fast pace of the game “defying critical distance” (Väliaho, 2014). This means that more often than not, the player has no time to properly analyze the actions in which they are partaking. This becomes particularly problematic in some of the scenarios showcased in the franchise. In one of the missions in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (Infinity Ward, 2022), the player is tasked with chasing members of the cartel through a town on the US-Mexico border, running through multiple civilian houses in the process. When faced with a couple panicked civilians, the player is met with a prompt to de-escalate the situation. However, when pressing the assigned button, the player character proceeds to aim their weapon at the civilians, which is one of the examples of how the franchise portrays military violence as a mandatory solution (Gagnon, 2010).

Another mission in the same entry sees the player controlling an AC-130 in order to eliminate enemy forces residing in small Mexican towns. In the section, the player can fire upon and destroy civilian infrastructure, such as schools or residential buildings – which is prohibited by the Geneva Convention (Donald, 2019). However, the campaign never brings this up as a potential issue – as if the rules of war did not apply to the special forces controlled by the player. Call of Duty's problematic approach to war crimes is further exemplified by the Killstreak mechanic in multiplayer, which rewards the players for eliminating multiple enemies without dying. In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward, 2019), one of the Killstreak rewards is white phosphorus, which while not explicitly prohibited, may fall into the category of weapons causing unnecessary suffering, thus also possibly breaching the Geneva Convention (Donald, 2019). The placement of white phosphorus as a Killstreak reward alongside ordinary missiles, UAVs, or gunships may reinforce the idea of its usage in conventional warfare being just.

In the original Modern Warfare trilogy (Infinity Ward, 2007-2011), the main threats come from the possibility of nuclear warheads falling into the hands of terrorists; the games also show a Russian invasion of the United States soil, where the player is shown the destruction of suburban neighborhoods and Washington D.C. The aforementioned scenarios are directly tied to post-9/11 anxieties and discourses promoted by the Bush administration (Gagnon, 2010). By reinforcing these narratives, the trilogy shows a vision of modern warfare that is inherently America-centric and based on the fears of the time. This is also apparent in the games’ portrayal of the enemy forces: the enemies are a dehumanized mass stripped of their identity, with their designs often resembling Islamist extremists, their combat tactics often wild and unpredictable; a stark contrast to the professional way the games depict the US forces. (Šisler, 2008).

The Modern Warfare series aims to provide an authentic portrayal of war, but it seems reduced solely to aesthetics. While certain parts of the game, such as the attention to detail in weapon designs or the AC-130 footage appear realistic, the vast majority of it showcases a sanitized version of the battlefield (Godfrey, 2022). As many military personnel note, the games do nothing to show the real-life trauma, PTSD and the moral complexities of warfare (Thang, 2012). This is especially important when we consider the impact Call of Duty has on the US army’s public perception. A former US army colonel advised on the development of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Infinity Ward, 2007), focusing on using video games to “teach about the military’s heroic sacrifices” (Godfrey, 2022). The army has also taken steps to modernize their ways of recruitment, running sponsored Call of Duty tournaments on Twitch, where they would send out giveaways directly linking to recruitment forms (Goodpastor, 2020). The Modern Warfare remake (Infinity Ward, 2019) was also criticized for rewriting history – the Highway of Death mission shares its name with a real-world location, where the US military bombed a convoy consisting of both military vehicles and civilian refugees (Hall, 2019). However, in the game’s story, an eerily similar war crime was committed by Russia.

Through the lens of procedural rhetoric, this analysis demonstrates that Call of Duty's game mechanics are not politically neutral but actively construct and reinforce specific ideological positions regarding modern warfare. The series’ design choices work in tandem to glorify the portrayal of the US army and sanitize armed conflict. The franchise depicts a vision of conflict that is meant to feel authentic but deliberately omits the most glaring issues of real-life warfare. Thus, the games rewrite the way war is viewed, creating something akin to Baudrillard’s (1994) simulacrum. With the franchise having documented ties to military recruitment programs, reinforcing certain political narratives and the games’ characteristics actively working to defy critical distance, it’s important to critically examine the way the series embeds its messaging in pleasurable mechanics.

REFERENCES Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. University of Michigan Press. Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. The MIT Press. Donald, I. (2019). Just War? War Games, War Crimes, and Game Design. Games and Culture, 14(4), 367–386. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412017720359 Gagnon, F. (2010). “Invading your hearts and minds”: Call of Duty® and the (re)writing of militarism in U.S. digital games and popular culture. European Journal of American Studies, 5(3). https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.8831 Godfrey, R. (2022). The politics of consuming war: Video games, the military-entertainment complex and the spectacle of violence. Journal of marketing management, 38(7–8), 661–882. Goodpastor, J. (2020, August 7). How the Military Uses Call of Duty as a Recruitment Tool. Game Rant. https://gamerant.com/call-duty-modern-warfare-recruitment-tool/ Hall, C. (2019, October 30). Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’s Highway of Death controversy, explained. Polygon; Polygon. https://www.polygon.com/2019/10/30/20938550/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-highway-of-death-controversy Infinity Ward. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007). Activision. Infinity Ward. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019). Activision. Infinity Ward. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022). Activision. Šisler, V. (2008). Digital Arabs: Representation in video games. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 11(2), 203–220. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549407088333 Thang, J. (2012, February 23). What do real soldiers think of shooting games? IGN. https://www.ign.com/articles/2012/02/23/what-do-real-soldiers-think-of-shooting-games Väliaho, P. (2014). Video Games and the Cerebral Subject: On Playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Body & Society, 20(3-4), 113-139. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X14546057

ABSTRACT. This presentation studies descent narratives in video games. It explores how video games translate and engage with the images and motifs of traditional katabases (descent journey to the underworld), and how these playable descent narratives present opportunities for complex emotional experiences.

ABSTRACT. An extended abstract proposing a close reading of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's tragic endings by way of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy.

ABSTRACT. A new category of “desktop moyu games” (摸鱼游戏)1 has quietly emerged within the Chinese gaming landscape. Unlike traditional idle games, these lightweight farming, management, or virtual-pet simulations are designed specifically for the workplace: they sit unobtrusively as thin horizontal bars or semi-transparent windows on the desktop, running automatically while the user types documents, answers email, or attends online meetings. The defining feature of desktop moyu games is their camouflage. The player can instantly minimize the game, turn it fully transparent, or disguise it as a productivity widget whenever a boss or colleague walks by. Rather than offering leisure outside of work, these games insert play directly into the workflow, producing a hybrid condition of working while quietly playing. This arrangement, though slightly humorous, expose the tension of contemporary precarious digital labor and neijuan (involution) culture. Desktop moyu games become a subtle tactic through which workers reclaim micro-moments of rest and pleasure. Read as a reparative screen practice, these minimal, hideable, and semi-automated forms of play enable workers to reorganize the spatial and temporal rhythms of the desktop itself. Existing research on idle and incremental games has largely examined their mechanics and the shifting boundaries of player agency under conditions of automation. Alharthi and colleagues(2018), as well as Cutting(2019), have mapped the genre’s typologies and emphasized its minimal-interaction, “from playing to waiting” logic, while design-oriented scholarship such as Spiel(2019) highlights how idle games originated as a self-reflexive commentary on grind-based, labor-like play and later developed affective dimensions of care, attachment, and letting-go. More recent debates link idle games to “cozy” aesthetics, exploitative monetization, and the optimization pressures of contemporary game economies, noting how automation can simultaneously comfort players and erode their sense of agency (Buergi 2024). Yet across this body of work, idle games are almost exclusively theorized through leisure-time contexts: browser tabs, mobile apps, moments of waiting. What remains underexamined is how automated, minimal-input play operates within workplace environments shaped by 996 schedules, where play must remain hidden. Likewise, although public debates around involution and “lying flat” in Sociology foreground the structural precarity faced by contemporary Chinese youth, they rarely attend to the small, improvisational, and alternative imaginaries through which workers navigate these pressures in everyday life. “Moyu”, stealing moments of play and rest within work, offers precisely such a micro-tactic, one that desktop moyu games materially and playfully mediate. To theorize this hybrid workplace play, this paper draws on interpassivity in idle playing (Fizek 2023) and screen studies. Interpassivity describes situations in which actions or enjoyment are delegated to external objects, allowing subjects to “outsource” what they cannot (or are not allowed to) perform directly. Desktop moyu games operate precisely through such delegation: they play themselves, accrue resources, sustain a sense of progression when players are working, and later present the small desktop landscapes it generates to the player. What is conventionally a flat, utilitarian workspace dominated by spreadsheets, slides, messaging apps, and meeting software is subtly reshaped into a dynamic, viewable micro-landscape of miniature gardens, aquariums, or pet-raising interfaces. This transformation reconfigures the screen from a site of productivity and monotony into one of ambient pleasure, companionship, and visual rest. In this sense, desktop moyu games enact a reparative force, resonating with Sedgwick’s reparative reading and Braidotti’s “ordinary micro-practices of everyday life.” Delegation and camouflage do not simply hide play within work; together with this re-landscaped desktop environment, they open a small but meaningful surface where labor, rest, and play overlap. Methodologically, this ongoing project draws on game analysis and interviews with players of representative cases, including Tiny Pasture (CaveLiquid, 2025), Fish to Dish: Idle Sushi (Kygua Tech, 2025), Cornerpond (foolsroom, 2023), and Rusty’s Retirement (Mister Morris Games, 2024). By examining their visual design, automation cycles, camouflage functions, and spatial integration with everyday work software, alongside insights from interviews, the analysis traces how they construct a peripheral, low-intensity landscape of play within the rhythms of office labor. Supplemented by paratext like player reviews, promotional materials, and online discussions of “moyu culture,” the study situates these games within broader practices of digital labor and everyday micro-resistance. Taken together, by bringing idle mechanics into the workplace, these games offer a new lens for understanding idle games and screen ecologies. This study highlights desktop moyu games as a distinctive cultural form that reconfigures the temporal, affective, and spatial dimensions of everyday digital work, contributing to discussion about automation, workplace play, and the politics of digital labor.

ABSTRACT. Game poems – short, affect-driven hybrid works at the intersection of poetry and digital play – have the potential to produce distinct forms of pleasure. Rather than centering achievement, challenge, and fun, they evoke pleasure through defamiliarisation, expressive intimacy, and formal constraint. By blending poetic techniques with interactive systems, game poems renew perception, foreground subjectivity, and create reflective, participatory experiences that unsettle assumptions about what games are for and how playing them should feel. Their constrained, minimalist designs operate analogously to poetic form, transforming limits into aesthetic and messaging. Simultaneously, their hybridity disrupts dominant gaming logics and opens spaces for non-normative, intersectional pleasures shaped by identity, lived experiences, and relationships to slowness, ambiguity, and vulnerability. Presenting both theoretical background and examples, the paper illustrates how game poems reconfigure pleasure as relational and resistant to market-driven expectations of fun, expanding creative practice and challenging prevailing paradigms of play and its pleasures.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes to examine how discursive norms and interpretations of toxicity are constructed in the context of video game live-streaming on Twitch, through a discourse analysis of the “Court of the bans” phenomenon. The “Court of the bans” is a popular format in French-language streaming, in which streamers review live, in front of their audience, messages from viewers who have been banned from their channel due to problematic behavior and who have submitted a request for rehabilitation. Based on the requests of these banned members (which are accompanied by justifications), the streamers and their chat collectively determine whether or not they deserve to be reintegrated into the community of active viewers. Their discussions thus reveal the interpretive process that gives meaning to the statements made on the platform, as well as the resources and formal clues that are used to support this interpretive work.

ABSTRACT. This article examines how game environments can be narratively experienced and interpreted through a case study of the award-winning What Remains of Edith Finch. The analysis is guided by the 4E cognition framework and adopts the method of playthrough poetics. It reveals four layers of embodied player experiences in environmental storytelling: environment as perceptual cues, environment as action affordances, environment as affective tones, environment as spatial metaphors.

ABSTRACT. This is an extended abstract submission.

We analyze how streaming culture has influenced game cultures of children and young people. We also look at how streaming culture has influenced those areas of game cultures that are persistently gendered. We especially focus on how streaming has influenced the game cultural participation of girls.

Our theoretical framework for analyzing gaming motivations is through self-determination theory. Through a large quantitative dataset, We analyze how streaming influences gaming motivations and how they influence social gaming habits. We present our findings with gendered models both for girls and non-girls.

ABSTRACT. This work-in-progress extended abstract is based on an ethnographic exploration of the subreddit r/SurvivalGaming, a pre-study to a planned larger project on participant’s perspectives of the intersections between survival games and survivalism. Online forums can be a useful way to get an initial understanding of a field. Anonymous author 1 visited r/SurvivalGaming 10 different times September 2024 to April2025 and documented 80 potentially relevant threads. Reddit is pseudonymous (to comment, sign up through username is needed) and to ensure user privacy, no usernames are reported here. Quotes have been slightly altered to reduce searchability, trying to maintain the core message of the quote as accurately as possible.

Previous player studies show that norms, gendered and otherwise, dictate who is welcome in certain gaming communities based on players’ intersectional identities, limiting their play. Thereby, to develop a bottom-up understanding of survival games as perceived by the player communities, we focus on topics and titles made relevant by the players through the lens of previous research on gender norms and hegemonic masculinity, the apocalyptic turn in masculinity, and gamer masculinity.

ABSTRACT. Grand Theft Auto (Rockstar Games, 1997-; GTA) occupies a unique position in the cultural and industrial history of digital games. Initially developed by DMA Design (Dundee, Scotland), and later Rockstar North (Edinburgh, Scotland) under the global brand of Rockstar Games, GTA is simultaneously a local product and a transnational cultural artefact. We argue that GTA operates as a liminal artefact of identity: Scottish in origin, British in sensibility, American in setting, and global in circulation. Through its production context, aesthetic strategies, and reception, the franchise demonstrates the complex interdependence of national identity and transnational media. Our paper contributes to discussions in game studies on national identity (Webber 2020; Wills 2019) and global production (Kerr, 2017).

ABSTRACT. Landmarks, natural sites, and human-made structures often function as a social memory anchor for collective experience, serving as lieux de mémoire that connect past, present, and future experiences. More often, places connect generations as reference points of memory and identity. Sacred Places is a 360° narrative VR game exploring Greek-Australian immigrant memory through landmarks, designed for hybrid CAVE and mobile HMD. The story follows a third-generation immigrant who visits his family’s birthplace, Arcadia, for the first time. For the main character, Arcadia’s landmarks unfold as a kaleidoscope of family history; for visitors and players, they evoke a sense of familiarity rooted in a shared immigrant past. The project integrates human-made narrative experiences with motion capture and skeleton tracking, allowing participants to engage physically and performatively with the virtual environment. Our goal was not simply to retell a story through extended technologies, but to design a mnemohistoric “device” that participants could experience—engaging with traces of a shared past, long gone yet not forgotten—and to invite them to bring their own memories to the table, initiating a cultural dialogue. Preliminary findings from user studies provide insights into human–technology interaction, accessibility, and emotional design.

ABSTRACT. This paper responds to the question of how digital games—as cultural properties composed of composite materials—should be preserved in Japanese game archives, which face environmental conditions such as a high-temperature, high-humidity climate and specific market practices. Addressing the dilemma between "static preservation" and "dynamic preservation," this paper applies the theory of the "Variable Media Network (VMN)" to propose an "Intervention Level Framework" based on insights from conservation science. This model serves as an index for selecting optimal methods ranging from preventive conservation to data migration according to specific objectives, while considering environmental risks inherent to Japan, with the aim of establishing a sustainable preservation strategy.

ABSTRACT. In contemporary digital culture, the permanence and searchability of online records have created new forms of retroactive accountability, where past statements by developers, streamers, and reviewers are resurfaced and judged through present-day gender norms. This paper examines how such mechanisms shape current debates in Chinese gaming culture through two key cases: the resurfacing of gender-related controversies surrounding Black Myth: Wukong and the public backlash against Bilibili streamer Xiaoyao Sanren. These events reveal how gender conflicts are intensified by platform algorithms, cross-platform audience segmentation, and long-standing patterns in which women players experience exclusion and objectification while male players identify with difficulty, mastery, and hardcore gaming as central pleasures. At the same time, escalating moral mobilization has led domestic studios to adopt increasingly risk-averse strategies, narrowing creative space through gendered branding categories such as female-friendly or male-hardcore. Drawing on feminist media theory and digital ethnography of player discussions, the paper argues that Chinese gaming culture lacks a discursive middle ground for negotiating gendered pleasures. The convergence of visibility, accountability, and gendered affect produces polarization rather than transformation. Understanding this dynamic is essential for imagining more balanced and inclusive futures for China’s domestic game industry.

ABSTRACT. This study examines how Chinese horror games developed under strict regulation from 2001 to 2024. It built a framework with three parts: regulation policy, streaming platforms, and cultural storytelling. The research analyzed games from three periods to show how these forces work together. The findings show that regulation pushed developers to use psychological horror instead of visual shocks. This created strategic pleasure. Streaming platforms then turned private scares into shared social fun. This opened new business paths. Finally, developers moved from folk symbols to social themes. This helped games reach global players. This work demonstrates how institutional constraints can catalyze creativity. Chinese developers internalized regulations as narrative drivers while leveraging platforms to reconstruct consumption patterns. This study contributes to game studies by providing an empirical model of how cultural industries in controlled markets achieve international competitiveness through creative adaptation rather than imitation of Western and Japanese paradigms.

ABSTRACT. Abstract This research explores how docugames (Bogost, 2008, 12) can be designed to examine conservation and animal advocacy biopics through the practice-based design. This research investigates, through design, the docugame spectrum from simulation to fact-based entertainment (Grace, 2011) and the tensions between representational reality and abstraction in game design. Through the development of a digital walking simulator game, The Moose of Fiordland, that explores the field accounts of naturalist Richard Henry of Resolution Island in his efforts to save the Kākāpō parrot population from extinction at the turn of the last century. Central to my discussion is a comparative analysis of docugame design through a selection of thematically related games: Walden, a Game (USC Games, 2017), Old Friends Dog game (Runaway Play, 2021), Wolfquest (Eduweb, 2007) and Toroa: Skycall (Atawhai Interactive, 2025). Using Michael Renov’s documentary fundamentals, as explained by Tracey Fullerton (2008, 3), as a mode of docugame analysis.

Designing for docugames Fullerton (2008) describes docugames as a play experience that explores historical or realistic scenarios in which the player has an active role, either simulating or exploring the histories presented. Frasca (2003) describes simulation within games as an opportunity in which “change is possible,” based on a combination of manipulation rules, player decisions, and the open-ended opportunities for play enabled by the game designer. He claims simulations can express messages in ways that narrative simply cannot. For the player to have a relatable ludonarrative experience with the real-world history of the game, it needs to primarily embody the social, behavioural, and physical aspects of the historical experience, and, from this knowledge, enable the player to set their own priorities and influence within the game in relation to the framing of historical events. Tracey Fullerton (2008) acknowledges that the term “documentary” within games is “potentially quite flexible” and that the open-ended nature of a ‘representative scenario’ does not diminish the historical integrity of the narrative. Lindsay Grace (2011) describes this narrative framing as akin to a diorama (p. 4), which implies a more balanced design that incorporates both simulation and representation. Oldenburg (2017) argues that abstraction in the game's visual rhetoric and narrative can prompt players to fill in gaps in a realistic simulation, encouraging a “stronger feeling of reality”. Chang (2019) states that abstraction can also enable players to process overwhelming data into “manageable experiences” (p.14). The games chosen for analysis vary in realism across both narrative and visual style. They also differ in the levels of player autonomy for simulated and player-decided choices. Drawing on Michael Renov’s documentary fundamentals (2012, 21). Described as

1) to record, reveal or preserve 2) to persuade or promote 3) to analyse or interrogate 4) to express

Design observations from these games will be compared with design decision-making in the Moose of Fiordland game, which is currently in prototype development. Docugame research is still being defined, and as such, criteria from documentary filmmaking can be explored alongside game design systems to conclude how best to design for the docugame genre.

The Moose of Fiordland game as a comparative analysis The Moose of Fiordland (working title), designed by the author, is a digital walking simulator game designed in Godot that explores the field accounts of naturalist Richard Henry from Resolution Island, New Zealand, Aotearoa. My volunteer work inspires this project with Kākāpō recovery, working on offshore conservation islands. Richard Henry, the man, is an unlikely animal ally - starting his life in Fiordland as a trapper and taxidermist, he switched to conservation when he saw the impact humans had dealt to the environment. Much like the moose, released into the wilderness of Fiordland, which gives him his avatar, Richard doesn’t belong.

The game uses a rich archive of Richard Henry’s field journals, photos, and letters as a primary content source. Players play as the Moose, a spiritual guide in the form of a cryptid that mimics the disconnect humans feel from the birds' world. Through the Moose’s experiences, you gradually reveal more of Richard’s story and the meta quest to save as many Kākāpō as you can. Exploration of detail through abstraction and metaphor - this is an amplified reality, as the source material consists of text, which, in itself, has ambiguity about how it can be visualised and interacted with. Richard’s memories are subjective and marked by his isolation, loneliness and frustration with government conservation policies of the time. Players explore Richard Henry’s world through the eyes of the Moose, as an outsider with no instruction manual who is prone to making mistakes. Through repeated cycles of simulation, Richard’s process and findings are revealed through the manifestation of his journal.

Conclusion The story of Richard Henry and his contributions to the field of conservation is an underrepresented part of the history of contemporary conservation techniques. Docugames provide an entertaining and informative way to disseminate this narrative tangentially, allowing users to both simulate Kākāpō conservation experiences and analyse their techniques. Real content from field journals and letters can be preserved within the game format. Abstraction will be a core part of the visual aesthetics employed in The Moose of Fiordland, as it can encourage the player to question their experience and develop empathy for Richard Henry’s sacrifice in preserving Kākāpō.

References

Bogost, Ian, and Cindy Poremba. 2008. “Can Games Get Real? A Closer Look at ‘Documentary’ Digital Games.” In Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon: Games Without Frontiers War Without Tears, edited by Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and Ralf Stockmann. Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Chang, Alenda Y. 2019. Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games. University of Minnesota Press. Kindle Edition.

Frasca, Gonzalo. 2004. “Simulation versus Narrative - Introduction to Ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader. Routledge.

Fullerton, Tracy. 2008. “Documentary Games: Putting the Player in the Path of History.” In Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games, edited by Zach Whalen and Laurie N. Taylor. Vanderbilt University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctv16759mn.

Grace, Lindsay. 2011. “Gamifying Archives, a Study of Docugames as a Preservation Medium.” 2011 16th International Conference on Computer Games (CGAMES), July, 172–76. https://doi.org/10.1109/CGAMES.2011.6000335.

Oldenburg, Aaron. 2017. “Abstracting Evidence: Documentary Process in the Service of Fictional Gameworlds.” Game Studies 17 (1). https://gamestudies.org/1701/articles/oldenburg.

Runaway Play. 2021. “Old Friends Dog Game.” Accessed December 8, 2025. https://www.runawayplay.com/games/old-friends-dog-game.

“Toroa: Skycall | Coming Soon.” 2025. Accessed December 8, 2025. https://www.toroagame.com/.

“Walden, a Game.” 2017. Accessed December 8, 2025. https://www.waldengame.com/.

“WolfQuest.” 2007. Accessed December 8, 2025. https://www.wolfquest.org/.

ABSTRACT. Love and Deepspace (LADS), a globally popular otome game released in 2024, has sparked sharply divided player responses—some denouncing its gacha system as “rigged,” while others openly celebrate spending money on their favourite love interests. As a games-as-a-service otome title, LADS ties romantic progression to loot boxes and gacha draws, a model that has generated over US$750 million in player spending while attracting criticism for predatory and gambling-adjacent monetisation. Existing research increasingly highlights the emotional attachments that motivate players’ engagement with gacha systems, particularly the intimate relationships players form with game characters. Building on this work, our study examines how LADS leverages otome conventions and gendered dynamics within the gaming industry to enrol its predominantly female audience into cycles of commodified desire and affective investment. Using a feminist game-studies framework, we analyse the game’s mechanics through an application walkthrough and a discourse analysis of Reddit and RedNote discussions. Our findings suggest that LADS transforms gacha pulls into moments of romantic advancement, creating a gendered emotional economy in which financial, temporal, and affective investments become intertwined in players’ pursuit of intimacy.

ABSTRACT. In 2010, Electronic Arts (EA) and Visceral Games released Dante’s Inferno, a violent and gritty hack-and-slash video game loosely inspired by the 14th-century literary epic by Dante Alighieri. As part of their merchandising campaign, EA published a bizarre object: a paperback reprint of Dante Alighieri’s original poem that was designed to look like a tie-in novelization of the game.

Rather than dismiss such an object as inconsequential or tasteless, this paper holds Dante’s Inferno: The Game: The Book (DITGTB) up to the light as a paratextual prism, seeking to capture phenomenological aspects of game culture and industry that would be invisible in more popular titles. By analyzing Electronic Arts’ attempts to make the original classic poem appear like a paratext of the 2010 video game, as well as reactions to these strategies from gamers, journalists, and scholars, this paper shows that Dante’s Inferno is more illustrative as a case study in failure than as a successful media property.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract presents the developement of "The Comet Cock. A Murderous AI Dating Sim", a Visual Novel developed with the Ren’Py engine. The first part of this presentation introduces the game’s ideation and creation process. The second part situates the AI-generated content of the game within a constellation of other important homophobic and phallocratic excesses in videogames and beyond.

ABSTRACT. As local policy changes across the world trend towards more permissive attitudes towards traditional gambling, digital games have enthusiastically embraced gamblification as a strategy for continuously increasing market growth in an already highly competitive and saturated market. The work undertaken here contributes a critical analysis of the rise and spread of prediction markets as intersections of gamblification, ludic pleasures, and inequalities.

ABSTRACT. Drawing on speech-act theory, this paper examines the player’s voice in escape rooms as a discrete form of agency that can alter the conditions of play, affect tangible change in the ludic environment, and shape how a group of players collectively navigates a space. It highlights how speech mediates collaboration, world-building, and progression, and how the experience of using one’s voice in these settings can be shaped by a range of perceptual and embodied factors. More broadly, this paper and framework offers a way to think about how designers might craft escape rooms that respond to the different voices within them, supporting more dynamic forms of participatory play.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates system design from the perspective of game balance, social rules, and uncertainty, taking a closer look at the very popular indie survivors-like game Megabonk (Vedinad 2025). [please refer to the extended abstract for details]

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the cathartic affordances of game-making and game-playing through Like mother, like burr, a series of autofictional game sketches that reconstruct my mother–daughter relationship as a first-generation Chinese immigrant. Building on Reparative Game Design, I operationalize its tenets—repair, care, and share—into a cyclical methodology of self-writing, iterative making, self-play, and theoretical reflection. Through a close analysis of the sketch “I (have) memorized these streets,” I show how bilingual dissonance, fragmented memory, and personal archival materials become procedural forms that re-story lived experience. Using aesthetic catharsis as an evaluative lens, I trace how game mechanics enact the untranslatability of immigrant identity and produce affective intelligibility for the maker-player. The paper contributes a transferable reparative approach centered on positioning, materiality, cycling, re-storying, and catharsis, offering designers a practical model for creating deeply personal, emotionally situated games.

ABSTRACT. We propose six words for talking about what a given theory or idea in games research is or does. Talking about the strengths and specialisations of each other’s ideas is more likely to foster interdisciplinarity than enforcing ontological accord across our field’s expanding landscape. First, we [1] review recent discussions about interdisciplinary games research and say why their recommendations don’t seem optimally pluralistic. We zero in on what we take to be a promising compromise for most games scholars: Embracing middle-range theory. To bolster our rationale, we [2] discuss theoretical debates in two other young fields (film studies and organisational research) and show how they arrived at (and have been well served by) middle-range theory. Centrally, we then [3] argue for the value of six meta-synthetically derived dimensions of theory. We review these six dimensions of theory and demonstrate the framework in use. Weaknesses of our proposal are flagged prior to concluding.

ABSTRACT. Please refer to attached PDF

ABSTRACT. Game studies has extensively examined how entertainment games represent war, yet it has largely overlooked professional wargaming—the structured use of games by militaries for education, planning, and strategic analysis. This omission persists despite the significant influence these games exert on how future conflicts are imagined, prepared for, and managed. Existing research on professional wargaming, typically situated in war studies or political science, rarely engages with game studies frameworks. This paper argues that professional wargaming constitutes a critical blind spot in the field and outlines a research agenda for integrating its analysis into game studies.

ABSTRACT. In this era of increasing lifespan and pronounced population aging, Alzheimer's disease (AD) has become an unprecedented challenge. Although serious games are increasingly being used as a rehabilitation approach to improve the well-being of people with AD, most of them merely focus on improving cognitive ability, ignoring social and emotional health of people with AD. Braidotti's analysis of posthuman conditions indicates the restriction of current interventions of serious games, as it conceptualizes humans as embedded, embodied and becoming subjects in an entangled web with other humans and non-human others. Within a posthumanist framework, my Research through Design project explores how game design represents and sustains the memory and identity of individuals with Alzheimer's disease, in the context of Alzheimer's care. I adopt a mix of research methods, mainly divided into three steps: i) use close reading to provide theoretical basis for game design; ii) design and iterate a 2D role-playing, roguelike and exploration game, targeting Alzheimer's care; iii) collect feedback including conducting playtest, questionnaire, and interview for evaluating the accessibility, playability and thematic relevance of the game.

ABSTRACT. This exploratory study maps the long-term career trajectories of 152 Swedish game design graduates from Uppsala University (2014-2017, n=152). Findings reveal that while 62% worked in games at some point, only 43% currently remain in games, with substantial movement into IT/programming and other creative sectors. These patterns challenge traditional measures of educational success and raise questions about how game education should prepare graduates for dynamic creative industries.

ABSTRACT. This abstract examines Molly House (Wehrlegig Games, 2025) through Edmond Chang's "queergaming" framework and Mary Flanagan's "thirdspace." Drawing on James C. Scott's notion of the "hidden transcript," I explore whether Molly House is a game about queer community or for enacting it—and what this tension reveals about games as sites of recuperative historiography, and spaces for performing alternatives to hetero normative play.

ABSTRACT. This is a long-term ethnography of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) as played at the Friendly Local Game Store (FLGS). It investigates the social and performative transformative of gender at D&D nights.

ABSTRACT. In modern tabletop games, themes are an indispensable game design element. They have a marketing function: luring the fandom of a particular franchisee to the tabletop game (Shipp 2024). A generic theme might invite players who are looking to engage with a theme's content. For instance, one can hope that players who wish to engage with the theme of nature prefer the ecology themed games like Meadow, Wingspan, Biotopia, Petrichor, Photosynthesis, and so forth. Themes also do ludological work, which forms the central thread of this abstract. Themes expose, hint, and communicate at the logics of the game world aiding the player make meaning through play (Shipp 2024). A theme entangles with visual elements, gameplay, actions, and even the meta-game by helping players develop and understand metaphors it stretches and maps onto the more formal aspects of game.

ABSTRACT. The proposed paper examines the intermedial transfer of the escape room phenomenon from fully embodied, spatially grounded experiences to their tabletop counterparts. As Bakk and Makai (2025) argue, the escape room format (ERF) is defined by a distinctive interplay of presence and agency, whose intensity is shaped by the medium through which the experience is delivered. While their analysis focuses primarily on the general dynamics of intermedial migration, the present study proposes the analysis of transposition of narrative mechanisms from physical escape rooms into board games. In contemporary board games, gameplay is only one dimension of the experience; games also constitute a system of signs, allowing analysis not only of formal features but also of the communicative structures, namely their narratives (Mochocka 2015). It seeks to investigate how storytelling structures, world-building strategies, and the rhythm of puzzle-driven narration are reconfigured when translated from a multisensory environment into the materially and semiotically constrained tabletop format. Narrativity in escape rooms is inextricably linked to the continuous, puzzle-driven progression of play (Clare 2016). The difficulty curve typically intensifies toward the midpoint of the experience (Heinonen 2018), producing a sense of flow (Csíkszentmihályi 1990), at the same time uncovering narrative segments through effort to advance the story - as the ergodic process (Aarseth 1997). This effort, in turn, amplifies narrative involvement (Calleja 2011), through which the player’s mental model gradually aligns with the logic of the fictional world (Busselle & Bilandzic 2008). Physical escape rooms exploit their spatial and multisensory materiality to facilitate strong forms of immersive presence (Murray 1997; Ryan 2001). Their design practices—such as diegetization of game elements (Galloway 2006), orchestration of affordances (Gibbons 2018) and the minimization of ludotopian (Maj 2022) and ludonarrative dissonance (Hocking 2007) — construct an environment that operates as a form of hyperreality. On the narrative level, escape rooms construct a storyworld (Ryan & Thon 2014; Kubiński 2015). Because narrative progression depends on exploratory and problem-solving actions, escape rooms often generate emergent narration, arising from players situated interaction with designed affordances. The combination of structured world-building and player-driven emergence supports strong mental absorption (McMahan 2003) and facilitates the suspension of disbelief (Kirkpatrick 2004). The growing popularity of escape rooms—further intensified by the conditions of the pandemic—opened the possibility for the format to expand into the domain of tabletop games. This transition exemplifies intermediality, understood as a process that “must be understood as a bridge between media differences that is founded in media similarities” (Elleström 2020). Transposing an escape room (a physical environment) into a card or board game differs fundamentally from adapting a video game to a tabletop format, as escape rooms are inherently spatial, immersive, and multisensory. As Arnaudo argues narrative in board games emerges from the synergy between the rules of the game, its material components, and the actions performed by the player (Arnaudo 2018). Board games function as a “transmedial narrative system” (Mochocka & Mochocki 2017), meaning in practice that they exhibit emergent properties: simple components, when placed in interaction, generate complex gameplay systems (Petrowicz 2017). A board game may thus be understood as comprising an external three-dimensional space (size, weight, and other physical attributes), an external two-dimensional space (typographic elements, illustrations on the box or cards), and an internal space, which consists of the rules and the gameplay built upon them. This reveals the intermedial nature of the system and of the narrative that arises through the combination of multiple media—image, text, and more (Mochocka 2015). o examine this intermedial shift, the study draws on a corpus of tabletop escape room games selected according to their ranking on BoardGameGeek, the largest international platform aggregating player evaluations. From each of four major publishers, the highest-rated title was chosen, resulting in a balanced sample comprising two internationally established series—Deckscape (Test Time) and EXIT: The Game (The Abandoned Cabin)—and two series developed by Polish designers, Escape Tales (Children of Wyrmwoods) and Side Quest (Nemesis). This selection enables a comparative analysis of different design traditions. Methodologically, the project combines autoethnographic playthrough analysis with intermedial analysis and comparative design study. The autoethnographic component captures the situated experience of narrative progression, puzzle pacing, and immersion during the real playthrough. The intermedial analysis investigates how narrative devices characteristic of physical escape rooms is reconfigured. Comparative analysis across the four titles then highlights design divergences. The study is guided by the following research questions: – Which narrative mechanisms characteristic of physical escape rooms are preserved, transformed, or lost in tabletop adaptations? – How is narrative pacing—and its parallel, the pacing of puzzles—constructed within the limits of the board game medium? – What strategies of immersion and narrative involvement do designers employ to compensate for the absence of spatial embodiment? Together, they establish the conceptual bridge between the narrative logic of physical escape rooms and their tabletop reinterpretations. By addressing these issues, the project seeks to contribute to broader intermediality studies by showing how narrative mechanisms evolve, adapt, or reconfigure while being transferred between media.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract examines how 1980s beat ’em up games drew on social and ludonarrative imaginaries shaped by representations of urban violence in major U.S. cities. Drawing on Pérez Latorre’s concept of the ludonarrative imaginary and Castoriadis’s theory of the social imaginary, this study examines how Japanese developers appropriated and reinterpreted cinematic tropes to construct the genre’s iconic narrative and aesthetic conventions through intermedial exchanges with Hollywood film.

ABSTRACT. "Games analysis, Transforming Pixels into Plates: Harnessing Game Strategies for Sustainable Food Practices." Anonymous First Author, Second Author, Third Author (include author info after acceptance only!) Institutional Affiliation Address line 1 Address line 2 firstauthor@institution.com , secondauthor@institution.com, thirdauthor@institution.com

EXTENDED ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to explore how game strategies are used in digital games to promote sustainable food habits. This study is part of Horizon's ANONYMISED research project, which aims to advance citizen-driven, gamification-supported approaches for transforming food consumption patterns toward healthy and sustainable practices. With growing evidence supporting the efficacy of gamification and serious games in fostering engagement, motivation, and awareness (Azevedo et al., 2018; Fatima et al., 2023; Bohm et al., 2021), this research seeks to delve into the gaming industry's approach to sustainability, particularly in the context of food systems. Recent systematic literature reviews have explored the current academic discourse on using gamification strategies and serious games to encourage behavioral changes related to sustainable practices (Authors, In Prep; Chow et al., 2019; Suleiman-Martos et al., 2021; Lim et al., 2024; Mabalay, 2025). These reviews highlight that a universal approach is often ineffective in achieving desired outcomes (Nasirzadeh, 2024). Instead, the effectiveness of the use of digital games to promote sustainable behaviors appears to depend significantly on the specific characteristics of the target audience and the primary objectives of the strategy employed.

For instance, scaffolding strategies, such as structured challenges and quests, have been shown to motivate individuals who are initially hesitant to overcome barriers to behavioral change (Jones et al., 2014; Mitis et al., 2019). On the other hand, Tracking strategies can increase environmental responsibility, resulting in a higher sense of self-efficacy among users, as seen in a gamified platform for environmental conservation (Du et al., 2019). Additionally, Cooperative strategies can increase motivation to engage in sustainable behavior, this was seen in a digital simulation game for sustainable Development discussed by Ivens et al (2020). These findings highlight the importance of tailoring digital game strategies to the specific needs and preferences of targeted audiences, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all approach. It is therefore relevant to have an understanding of the different ways in which digital games can be used to foster sustainable food behaviors. A recent literature review on existing academic literature on the use of digital games to foster sustainable and healthy food behaviors (Authors, In Prep) has concluded, however, that existing studies that focus on food-related games analysis are primarily focused on nutrition literacy or dietary behavior change, rather than sustainable food habits (Luhanga et al., 2016; Barwood et al., 2020; Azizi-Soleiman et al., 2023; Okpanachi & Adaji). This gap highlights the need for research specifically targeting the analysis of games on food sustainability.

This study aims to address this gap by investigating how game mechanics and aesthetics are utilized in digital games to promote sustainable food habits. Our central research question is: How are game mechanics and aesthetics used in digital games to encourage sustainable food practices?

In this study, we employ a qualitative methodological approach focused on the analysis of digital games with a focus on food sustainability. This study is currently in progress, and therefore, we cannot provide the final number of games analyzed, but the goal is to analyze at least 40 games.

The sampling strategy employed for this study was comprehensive sampling (Gray, 2004), meaning we examined each and every case we could find that matched the sampling criteria. The criteria include: (1) games must address sustainable food practices; (2) considering the language proficiency of the researchers involved, titles should be in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, or Dutch, or use no written/oral language; (3) they must be definable as games; and (4) at least partially digital. Games focused on quizzes and non-digital formats are excluded. Due to the absence of existing databases, for the identification of games that meet our sampling criteria, we are conducting a systematic online search using sustainability-related terminology in our search strings in Google, App Stores, and game platforms such as Steam. Initial broad search terms like "sustainability game" or "video games on sustainability". We refined our search terms and concentrated on game-play stores, gaming platforms, and platforms dedicated to sustainability or health games.

When studying these games, we plan to use the “utilitarian” analytical play approach as described by Mäyrä (2008). Analytical play in academic studies is a utilitarian form of play that involves connecting games to broader historical, conceptual, and social contexts within game studies. It requires engaging with new genres and understanding the language and thought processes of player communities. This type of play contributes to a comprehensive understanding of studied phenomena, essential for developing informed research questions (Mäyrä, 2008). For the game analysis, we plan to conduct thematic game analysis following the steps proposed by Clara Fernández-Vara (2024). This approach will allow us to examine the various game strategies used within the games and analyze their relation to different aspects of sustainability represented in the game content. By doing so, we aim to understand what strategies are commonly used for specific facets of sustainability and how these strategies are implemented.

As this study is ongoing, it is not yet possible to discuss specific results. However, the expected outcomes will provide insight into how digital games approach the communication of food sustainability-related themes. By examining the types of game mechanics and aesthetic elements present in games that aim to encourage sustainable food behaviors, this research provides insights into developing methods for promoting more sustainable habits through gaming. The findings from this study are anticipated to inform future endeavors in creating digital games that incorporate sustainability themes, potentially supporting broader educational and environmental objectives.

REFERENCES Authors (In Prep). Title anonymized Azevedo, J., Padrão, P., Gregório, M. J., Almeida, C., Moutinho, N., Lien, N., & Barros, R. (2018). A Web-Based Gamification Program to Improve Nutrition Literacy in Families of 3- to 5-Year-Old Children: The Nutriscience Project. Journal Of Nutrition Education And Behavior, 51(3), 326–334. Azizi-Soleiman, F., Heidari-Beni, M., Hemati, Z., & Kelishadi, R. (2023). Designing and Developing an Educational-Therapeutic Game for Improving Healthy Lifestyle in Children and Adolescents. International Journal Of Computer Games Technology, 1–7. Barwood, D., Smith, S., Miller, M., Boston, J., Masek, M., & Devine, A. (2020). Transformational game trial in nutrition education. The Australian Journal Of Teacher Education, 45(4), 18–29. Böhm, D., Dorland, B., Herzog, R., Kap, R. B., Langendam, T. S., Popa, A., Bueno, M., & Bidarra, R. (2021). How can you save the world? Empowering sustainable diet change with a serious game. 2021 IEEE Conference On Games (CoG), 1–7. Chow, C. Y., Riantiningtyas, R. R., Kanstrup, M. B., Papavasileiou, M., Liem, G. D., & Olsen, A. (2019). Can games change children’s eating behaviour? A review of gamification and serious games. Food Quality And Preference, 80, 103823. Du, H. S., Ke, X., & Wagner, C. (2020). Inducing individuals to engage in a gamified platform for environmental conservation. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 120(4), 692–713. Fatima, S., Augusto, J. C., Moseley, R., Urbonas, P., Elliott, A., & Payne, N. (2023). Applying motivational techniques for user adherence to adopt a healthy lifestyle in a gamified application. Entertainment Computing, 46. Fernández-Vara, C. (2024). Introduction to game analysis. Routledge. Ivens, S., Wiese, G., Dittert, K., Mußhoff, O., & Oberle, M. (2020). Bringing Policy Decisions to the People—Education for Sustainable Development through a Digital Simulation Game. Sustainability, 12(20), 8743. Jones, B. A., Madden, G. J., Wengreen, H. J., Aguilar, S. S., & Desjardins, E. A. (2014b). Gamification of Dietary Decision-Making in an Elementary-School Cafeteria. PLoS ONE, 9(4) Lim, W. M., Das, M., Sharma, W., Verma, A., & Kumra, R. (2024). Gamification for sustainable consumption: A state‐of‐the‐art overview and future agenda. Business Strategy And The Environment. Luhanga, E. T., Hippocrate, A. A. E., Suwa, H., Arakawa, Y., & Yasumoto, K. (2016, 1 oktober). Happyinu: exploring how to use games and extrinsic rewards for consistent food tracking behavior. Mabalay, A. A. (2024). Gamification for Sustainability: A Systematic Review of Applications, Trends, and Opportunities. Computers in Human Behavior, 108529. Mäyrä, F. (2008). An introduction to game studies. Sage. Mitsis, K., Zarkogianni, K., Bountouni, N., Athanasiou, M., & Nikita, K. S. (2019). An Ontology-Based Serious Game Design for the Development of Nutrition and Food Literacy Skills. Nasirzadeh, E. (2024). A Systematic Review of Gamified Systems: A new model for strategic development in future gamification research. Journal Of Information Technology Management, 16(3), 21–60. Okpanachi, V. A., & Adaji, I. (2024, 5 juni). The Design of Food Villain, a Serious Game to Influence Healthy Eating Habits Among African International Students. Suleiman-Martos, N., García-Lara, R. A., Martos-Cabrera, M. B., Albendín-García, L., Romero-Béjar, J. L., La Fuente, G. A. C., & Gómez-Urquiza, J. L. (2021). Gamification for the Improvement of Diet, Nutritional Habits, and Body Composition in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Nutrients, 13(7), 2478.

ABSTRACT. EXTENDED ABSTRACT

“Benevolent Leader, please don't judge me, but... I've always wanted to eat a meal made of poop! Will you help me satisfy this dark desire?” - Cult of the Lamb (Massive Monster 2022).

This excerpt of Cult of the Lamb (2022) initiates a choice for the player: either they can grant their follower their wish to eat poop, or deny it. The requests of the followers can escalate all the way where they present themselves as willing sacrificial lambs (quite literally), all the while the game aesthetics remain “soft”, a characteristic often associated with cozy games (Short et al. 2018). Subsequently, Cult of the Lamb has been used to expand the understanding of ‘cozy games’ (Bódi and Thon 2025), and even to coin a new category within cozy games that “partially reject the expectation of ludic safety” (Waszkiewicz 2024), known as “dark cozy games”. Building on that scholarship, our research focuses on the mechanics in Cult of the Lamb, as that allows us to further explore the tension between the “soft” and the dark story-values and affordances of the game, specifically in relation to the cult-related mechanics. In this contribution, we propose the concept of “cursed” as a useful analytical tool to approach this tension, and pose that the coziness carries, normalizes, and enables amplification of the cursed.

For this paper we analyze several cult-mechanics from the base game and from the additional content; Sinful Pack (Massive Monster 2024). We use a close playing approach (Lammes 2003) with the cursed as our analytical lens in order to map and analyse the cult related game mechanics. The game and its extension include mechanics that can be traced back to several behaviours and actions found in real life cults, remediated in other popular media such as documentaries, like Netflix’ “Wild Wild Country” (Way and Way 2018) and podcasts, like “American Panic” (Marchesi and Shattuck 2020). These actions frame the game’s cult-machanics, such as brainwashing followers with hallucinatory mushrooms, foregoing followers’ sleep in order for them to work, or declaring extended fasts. Seeing as Cult of the Lamb is seemingly expanding conceptualizations of what a cozy game can be (Bódi and Thon 2025; Waszkiewicz 2024), showing how its liminality makes it a compelling case study for analysis.

The term cursed can oftentimes be found in online discourse, evident from Reddit threads and in regards to memes. As of yet it does not exist as an academic concept, but it can serve as a vehicle to open up a reframing of game mechanics, especially in dark cozy games. The term ‘cursed’ can be interpreted in a variety of ways, in the literal way as something that inflicts harm, an evil mark left by uttering words, as well as something that is strange in an uncomfortable way, or an evil haunting that traumatizes you. Or, in a ‘chronically online’ context, as the “idea that having to think about the thing feels like a curse on your mind” (Reddit 2023). While there is no set definition, we conceive of the cursed as carrying concepts of social transgression, a disorienting reaction to discrepancies of perception between original context of an object and a new seemingly unfitting context, and aspects of problematized morality.

When applying the cursed as an analytical tool to the cult-related game mechanics of Cult of the Lamb, it can dissect the ways in which the cozy operates, demonstrating how it carries and amplifies “dark” elements. In the abovementioned example where the follower asks the cult leader to eat poop, the mechanics operationalize the socially transgressive. Additionally, the mirrored real-life cult context expressed in cutesy aesthetics and performed through mechanics, conjures a build-up of moral ambiguity that gets amplified mechanically, by the player acting as leader with all-encompassing command over their followers. When the player fulfills their followers request, the followers’ loyalty —an important resource in the game— increases, even though they might get sick. If the player refuses the request, the player receives a penalty of general loyalty loss. The player has no option to opt out of the decision, forcing them to make a choice. The mechanics allow the player to view the followers as resources to be managed, while humanizing them is an optional and conscious decision.

Moreover, reading the “prank” quest line as cursed, shows how the game allows a succession of problematic morality, as follower requests ramp up from eating poop, to throwing them in medieval stalks, to eventual murder and sacrifices. By approaching the cursed as an analytical tool to mechanics in this quest line, it helps us to analyze how the juxtaposition between cursed mechanics and cozy aesthetics open up a morally ambiguous realm of affordances for the player. Simultaneously, the tension between the cursed and the cozy allows players to explore more transgressive aspects of cult dynamics. By framing the mechanics within a “soft” and “safe” space, the game enables players to engage with normally heavy themes of power, control, and exploitation, offering an experimental playground where players can engage with “evil”, transgression, and morality.

With this paper we aim to take the first steps towards expanding the analytical toolkit with which to study “dark cozy games”. Which hopefully leads to a more in-depth understanding of mechanics as the conveyor of the liminality between darkness and the cozy. Moreover, this points towards the merits of further scholarship on the role of coziness in games, producing a better understanding of the growing cozy games genre.

ABSTRACT. Focusing on Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (2021) and Turnip Boy Robs a Bank (2024), developed by the LGBTQI± Canadian studio Snoozy Kazoo, this paper explores how these games subvert traditional mafia tropes, challenging entrenched representations of organised crime. This paper offers a textual analysis of the two games, and extends current research in the intersections between comedy and videogames. The paper will be of interest to scholars working across videogame studies and humour, the queer potential of videogames, cosy videogames, and those interested in the perhaps surprising intersections of organised crime and sentient vegetables.

ABSTRACT. Attached is an extended abstract of my study titled "On Inhabiting Nonhuman Bodies." The study aims at reviewing and organizing research perspectives on nonhuman animal game avatars. Although a significant number of scholars have so far addressed the topic of inhabiting animal bodies and various problems that arise in relation to it, this discourse seems to remain largely unformalized, with its participants rarely recognizing themselves as contributing to a shared conceptual field. In my review, I focus on animal games, placing them in the broader context of ecogame scholarship.

Using "Endling—Extinction is Forever" (Herobeat Studios 2022) as my main case study, I review and compare different perspectives present in the game studies discourse regarding the topic of inhabiting nonhuman animal bodies. Contrasting those perspectives with my own reading of the game, I examine the experience of what it is like—or what it would be like—to be a vixen. The analysis serves as an exploration into the relationship between animal games and ecogames. The reading of "Endling" as an animal-ecogame also evokes questions about the game’s representation of a nonhuman animal species and the implications of its lack of a “good” ending. Additionally, the proposed research expands and builds on my analysis of "Endling" as a representation of animal solastalgia and an example sumbiocritical reflection in art.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract investigates how the five fictional languages in Chants of Sennaar function as multimodal cultural systems that shape both world-building and player interpretation. While existing scholarship examines the game’s linguistic design and symbolic value, it tends to treat fictional languages as narrative devices rather than integrated semiotic assemblages. Drawing on Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis, this study analyzes linguistic, visual, and procedural resources in a complete gameplay recording, alongside community discourse. Preliminary findings show that meaning-making relies on intertextual inference across modes, with players constructing cultural knowledge through iterative decoding and analogy. The study argues that fictional languages operate as cohesive cultural systems whose meanings emerge through the dynamic interplay between designed signs and player engagement. This framework contributes to a broader understanding of how artlangs function within contemporary digital storytelling.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how cultural context shapes the interpretation of gender values in games through the case of Five Hearts Under One Roof (Storytaco 2024), a South Korean dating simulation game. The author argues that this case demonstrates the necessity of deeper localized cultural analysis when studying regional game industries, as what constitutes "feminist values" and who has access to gaming pleasures varies drastically across cultural contexts.

ABSTRACT. This article examines the temporality of ludobiographical (Gallagher 2019, 2022) narratives in Chinese indie games and, conversely, taking these discourses of temporalities as an analytical lens for understanding the current anachronistic situation of indie game-making in China. The term “ludobiography” in the title comes from Rob Gallagher’s idea that games can be autobiographical when creators present parts of their own lives, and they become “ludobiographical” when they also show how videogames challenge the humanist belief that people are fully independent individuals who control their own bodies, stories, and identities. Gallagher’s concept of ludobiography is based on the idea that videogames can be seen as a time-critical media (Ernst 2016) that extend the reach of players’ agency (Poremba 2007; Krzywinska&Brown 2015; Nguyen 2020; Bódi 2023) in time to repair and comprehend the anachronisme. This article adopts the concept of “anachronism” (Didi-Huberman 2000) to first express the contradiction faced by contemporary Chinese indie game creators between appropriating traditional cultural resources and pursuing authenticity in realist expression. In recent years, Chinese indie games that have attracted global attention are predominantly visual novels that carry the creators’ strong autobiographical impulses. This tendency arises from the resource-constrained circumstances in which many creators begin their game-making careers, leading them to select themes that depict conditions of reality life and use the game medium to convey the inherent vulnerability of personal emotions, memories, and the precarity of their social situations. However, the expression of such grassroots narratives must constantly navigate an ongoing compromise with capital, censorship, and platform infrastructures—circumstances that can ultimately render the creation of autobiographical games susceptible to becoming a form of overly individualized typical suffering narratives. It is likewise noteworthy that even the creative impulse to articulate what cannot be spoken within official contexts often grounds the structure of feeling of these autobiographical games in collective memories of historical trauma. Consequently, many works exhibit certain homogenized modes of expression, such as the deliberate display of folkloric spectacle or self-orientalizing representations (Said 1978). The causes of this phenomenon extend beyond state censorship: they also include the influence of prevailing market conditions and the anxieties stemming from the longstanding neglect of national game-cultural traditions. These factors together pose potential constraints on the future development of Chinese independent games. Another aspect of “anachronism” is manifested in players’ affective participation in autobiographical narratives: while the actions of players appear to reveal the game characters’ personal histories, they in fact constitute a mode of historical reflection. In this way, player actions within the narrative simultaneously enact resistance to externally imposed social temporality and symbolize the restoration of individual temporal consciousness. This is expressed through two implicit layers of expected player acknowledgment in autobiographical games. On one hand, players are guided to affective acknowledge the history of collective female tragedies (Zhan 2025). For example, in Laughing to Death (2022), players explore the grandma’s personal history by controlling a young girl, transforming everyday objects into narrative carriers, thereby constructing a horror aesthetic of fearful realism (Luo 2024). In Chinese indie games, the intrusion of female ghosts into the present not only symbolizes the return of historical trauma but also prompts players, through the act of saving individuals who have lost their sense of time, to indirectly reflect on structural social oppression and historical responsibility. (Zhang 2025) On the other hand, autobiographical games invite players to acknowledge individual tragedies resulting from economic crisis which have varieties political reasons. In A Perfect Day (2022), the decline of northern industrial regions and the loss from the guarantee promised by the institutional power experienced by individuals are conveyed through depictions of a child protagonist’s everyday life. Cyclical temporality functions as an operable event mechanism, allowing players, in exploring the multiple potentials of the present, to experience the child protagonist’s longing for a better future being constrained by the temporalities of present. This gameplay design enable players, through game mechanics, to perceive and participate in the generation of tragic experience, thereby achieving an indirect acknowledgment of individual histories and epochal affect. If the expressions of anachronism in the first two autobiographical games still reflect a strongly anthropocentric construction of subjectivity, I propose to consider Hymer 2000 (2025) and Minds Beneath Under (2024)as a distinct mode of ludobiography, exploring the autobiographical generation of posthuman subjectivity in games through an analytical lens different from ethnographic (Wild 2023) or phenomenological approaches (Keogh 2018). Hymer 2000 primarily employs gameplay involving interaction with artificial intelligence to explore contemporary reflections on cyborg subjectivity(Milesi 2022). While in the near-future cyberpunk visual novel Minds Beneath Under, a meta-narrative structure is used to reflect on human life under technological conditions. Both games investigate how players must engage with a posthuman mode of embodiment existence to navigate ethical choices and enact a ludobiographical exploration of posthuman thinking. Only when the player shifts from performing another’s autobiography to intra-acting with their avatar can they reconstruct the self within experiences of multiple temporalities, rather than becoming a ghost attached to the suffering narratives in the game.

ABSTRACT. EXTENDED ABSTRACT INTRODUCTION The concept of game diaspora is not new to game studies, and it often appears when a game world ends or is shut down (Pearce 2009). The shutdown of mainland China’s World of Warcraft (WoW) (Blizzard 2004) servers makes this concrete. WoW entered mainland China in 2005. Chinese players then built their own game culture, developed unique characters, and immersed themselves in the world of Azeroth (the game’s fantasy world) for the next eighteen years. Yet in January 2023, Blizzard abruptly terminated its operations in mainland China, shutting down all servers. Overnight, countless players lost their virtual homes, and their long-standing digital lives were erased. Many were pushed to migrate to the nearest alternative—the Taiwanese server. The Taiwanese server seems like a reasonable alternative: a similar ethnic and linguistic environment, and the destination for earlier mass migrations during previous expansion delays (Lin and Sun 2005; Lin and Sun 2011). But the two regions are also marked by political tensions, different cultural norms, and distinct writing systems (traditional vs. simplified) (Shi 2015). These differences have shaped divergent gaming ecosystems and emergent play practices. Thus, this paper asks: How do Chinese players experience diaspora identities on Taiwanese servers through a digital ethnographic perspective? LITERATURE Players from the same region usually connect to the same servers, and over time these servers foster a shared regional or national identity layered onto the broader game culture (Lin and Sun 2011). Within each regional server, players develop their own ways of interacting, playing, and creating content, so a distinct play ecosystem emerges from their shared routines and practices grounded in that regional culture (Chen 2012; Pearce 2009). When regional servers shut down, members of these game communities become game diasporas (Pearce 2011). Similar to offline diasporas who experience grief, loss, and dislocation (Safran 1991; Pearce 2009), Salazar (2013) suggests that virtual diasporas also feel forms of nostalgia and a strong attachment to their original ethnic or regional communities, even when they are dispersed from their “homeland” server. Through the case of the game Uru, Pearce (2009) shows that when the game closed, players began to see themselves as refugees who had lost their homeland. She suggests that Uru players constructed a new form of discretionary ethnicity, grounded in an imagined homeland, shared values, and a collective identity that is partly detached from conventional cultural categories. This means that, after a server’s/game’s shutdown, players cultivated a strong diaspora identity, tied to their former community and shaped by their refugee-like experience (Pearce 2011). Thus, this paper explores what it means to live as a digital diaspora after losing a homeland. Earlier work has already traced Chinese “cyber diaspora” on Taiwanese WoW servers during expansion-delay migrations (Lin and Sun 2005; Lin and Sun 2011). But these studies are largely from Taiwanese players’ perspectives and focus on othering and political identity. In contrast, this paper centers Chinese players’ lived experiences of forced migration and their sense of a temporary yet prolonged “refuge.” METHOD This research employs digital ethnography, conducted over three months from February to April 2023, the year of the shutdown. A multisited approach is used given the emergent nature of the field. Multisited participant observation covered the main spaces inhabited by these players: the WoW game itself (Arathi Basin server on the Taiwanese WLK servers), the National Geographic of Azeroth (NGA) forum, Bilibili, TikTok, media articles, and private WeChat groups. Salazar (2013) suggests that a group must exhibit a diasporic consciousness to be classified as a diaspora, involving a shared recognition of dispersion and the formation of a hybrid identity as part of their self-image. Following this, players must show long-term devotion and attachment to the Chinese servers to regard them as their homeland and to self-identify as game diasporas. The data then focuses only on players’ own expressions when they actively describe the differences/difficulties they encountered after moving from their original playing homeland. Ambiguous and hard-to-interpret communications were followed up either by asking players for brief clarifications or by checking related discussions across platforms to contextualize their meaning. DISCUSSION Through an iterative and inductive thematic analysis, the research reveals three major perspectives. Firstly, the shutdown generates a complex, unstable form of digital diaspora. The uncertainty surrounding the reopening of Chinese servers produces an ongoing sense of suspended life: players hesitate to invest time, money, and emotional energy into a server (Taiwanese) they still view as temporary. This ambivalent attachment echoes traditional diaspora conditions, where the homeland remains central even as displacement stretches on, making it difficult for diaspora to fully commit to the new environment. Secondly, the shutdown also ruptures long-standing social ties. Former guild networks scatter, and many players arrive in Taiwanese server alone. The loss of familiar partners reshapes the game’s everyday rhythms, forcing migrants to seek new teammates through social media or rely on raiding services. This introduces money-driven dynamics that contrast sharply with their previous norms, creating an environment where financial transactions overshadow leisure (Mandryk et al. 2020). Chinese players feel trapped in a system where everything must be paid for. Lastly, cultural clashes deepen these tensions. Despite sharing a language, differences in writing, abbreviations, and long-standing political frictions resurface in game chat. Earlier migration waves had already established a template for anti-Chinese resentment (Lin and Sun 2016), and the 2023 influx reactivates those memories. Migrants initially attempt politeness and assimilation, but as their numbers grow, they have more power to resist accommodating to Taiwanese norms. This demographic shift ultimately reinforces separate identities on both sides rather than fostering integration. CONCLUSION This study shows that the Chinese WoW shutdown produced a digital diaspora marked by uncertainty, fractured social worlds, and cultural friction. At a broader level, this case highlights how regional identities, linguistic norms, and political histories travel with players across servers. The findings also point to the influential role of game companies. As online worlds continue to fragment and migrate, understanding these diasporic processes becomes essential for both game studies and developers managing cross-regional player communities.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines Let’s Play (LP) videos as a form of game retelling, focusing on how players narrativise their gameplay experiences by filling in the “narrative gaps” that lie beyond designed game content. The research aims to highlight distinctive narrative techniques and patterns that emerge from this performative, player-driven discourse. It also seeks to address the question of what makes retellings effective forms of game critique.

ABSTRACT. Competitive play in video games is commonly understood as reproducing meritocratic discourses that emphasize individual ability and ignore structural conditions. Based on ethnographic research on everyday Super Smash Bros. Ultimate play in Santiago, Chile, this paper identifies alternative forms of competitiveness—social, egalitarian, and educational—that challenge meritocratic norms even within commercial games. Drawing on Latin American cultural theory, particularly Martín-Barbero’s mediations, the paper conceptualizes these modes of play as situated appropriations shaped by sociality and rituality. I argue that these practices possess transformative potential, suggesting that resistance in video game culture can emerge not only from critical design, but also from everyday competitive play.

ABSTRACT. Trolling is one of the most frequently observed forms of disruptive behavior in online multiplayer games, yet existing research has traditionally interpreted it as behavior driven primarily by malicious intent. Prior studies describe trolling as an intentional attempt to provoke, disrupt, or violate normative expectations within play environments, emphasizing hostility as its dominant motivational basis (Cook et al., 2018; Cook et al., 2019; Hilvert-Bruce & Neill, 2020; De Mesquita Neto & Becker, 2018). However, recent qualitative work suggests that trolling is not always rooted in malice. Interview data reported by Choi & Lim (2021) indicate that some players intentionally perform trolling behaviors for strategic reasons—for example, accelerating an inevitable loss or conserving time for subsequent matches—revealing that trolling may reflect heterogeneous motivations rather than a single toxic impulse. This study constructs predictive models of trolling behaviors using large-scale log data from the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) game League of Legends and demonstrates that different trolling behaviors may emerge from distinct underlying mechanisms. Through this approach, the results show divergent contagion dynamics between vs dominance and adv dominance, suggesting that relational exposure at the lane level may operate differently from aggregate team advantage pathways.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores shared nostalgia across intersectional identities, through a duoethnographic 'walkthrough' of a game fair.

ABSTRACT. INTRODUCTION

In a 2017 interview with Andrew Nusca, Nvidia Ceo Jensen Huang was asked about the origins of the Fortune 500 company that business journalists and investors are describing as the leader of a new ‘industrial revolution’. In response, Huang cited Nvidia’s origins in two predictions about the gaming industry:

[we] “observed that video games were simultaneously one of the most computationally challenging problems and would have incredibly high sales volume. Those two conditions don’t happen very often. Video games was our killer app—a flywheel to reach large markets funding huge R&D to solve massive computational problems (para. 16).

By bringing Huang’s flywheel metaphor into conversation with critical game studies research on platforms (Young et. al 2025; Nicoll & Keogh, 2019), personal computers (Consalvo & Paul, 2019, 70; Keogh, 2016; Dovey & Kennedy, 2006), and post-fordist production (Kline et. al, 2003) this paper will provide a political economic analysis (Kerr, 2017) of Nvidia and its relationship with a material and discursive shift in ludo-economics. Ludo-economics, according to Giddings & Harvey (2018), can be understood as a ‘primary heuristic’ for understanding the cultural economy of neoliberal late capitalism – a cultural economy that is reimagining gaming industries as an integral component of a larger ‘flywheel’ driving the development of Artificial Intelligence data infrastructure.

This paper will begin by describing the theories and methods being used. Then it will trace the development of the flywheel metaphor through the company’s corporate communications history, which is interwoven with the development and marketing of high-end PC hardware. Nvidia coins the term ‘graphics-processing unit’ in 1999 (Witt, 2025, 69-70), for example, as a way of differentiating their products from ‘graphics accelerators’, like the 3Dfx Voodoo card. This shift in marketing, which was initially done to appeal to hardware reviewers writing for PC magazines and websites, introduced the concept of the GPU to the broader public. By 2017 GPUs were beginning to supersede gaming as a central focus of Nvidia’s marketing, transforming the chip into a metaphorical ‘shovel’ for investors seeking to capitalize on the ‘Artificial Intelligence gold rush’. Finally, the paper will connect the flywheel metaphor to critical game studies research on capitalism, sustainability and masculine modes of technicity prevalent in high-end PC gaming cultures (Dovey & Kennedy, 2006, 15; Keogh, 2016; Paul & Consalvo, 2019, 70).

METHODOOLOGY

Critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2023) will be used to examine press releases, earnings reports, interviews, podcasts and YouTube videos released by the company between 1999 and 2025. Specific attention will be placed on a shift in branding that begins to take shape in 2015, which involves a transition from gaming to Artificial Intelligence infrastructure, on the one hand, and an increased focus on Jensen Huang’s cult of personality, on the other. This cult of personality is exemplified by the discursive rise of Huang’s Law, which is a new paradigm for measuring the exponential growth of Artificial Intelligence using GPUs (Witt, 2025: 69), and a string of interviews with high profile podcasters, like Cleo Abram (2025) and Joe Rogan (2025).

CONTRIBUTIONS TO GAME STUDIES SCHOLARSHIP

By bringing the flywheel metaphor into conversation with critical game studies research on platforms, personal computers, and post-fordist production, this paper will make several contributions to interdisciplinary scholarship. On a cultural studies level, it will connect the discursive pleasure that the metaphor invokes to masculine modes of technicity prevalent in high-end PC gaming cultures (Dovey & Kennedy, 2006, 15; Paul & Consalvo, 2019, 70). On a political economic level, it will bring the metaphor into conversation with research on ludo-economics for the purposes of conceptualizing Nvidia’s approach to the manipulation of investor sentiment as playful means of ‘overclocking’ late capitalism. And on a theoretical level, it will outline material and immaterial contradictions implicit in the flywheel metaphor as a means of opening avenues for critical game studies research on masculinity, machine learning and sustainability. In other words, this presentation will present Nvidia as a vital case study for scholars interested in the critical, historical study of game hardware.

REFERENCES

Abram, C. (2025, January). Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Vision for the future. Huge conversations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ARBJQn6QkM.

Consalvo, M., & Paul, C. A. (2019). Real games: What's legitimate and what's not in contemporary videogames. MIT Press.

Dovey, J., & Kennedy, H. W. (2006). Game cultures: Computer games as new media: computer games as new media. Open University Press: Glasgow.

Fairclough, N. (2023). "Critical discourse analysis." In The Routledge handbook of discourse analysis, pp. 11-22. Routledge.

Giddings, S., & Harvey, A. (2018). Introduction to special issue ludic economies: Ludic economics 101. Games & Culture, 13(7), 647-651.

Kerr, A. (2017). Global games: Production, circulation and policy in the networked era. Routledge: New York.

Keogh, B. (2016). Hackers and cyborgs: Binary Domain and two formative videogame technicities. Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association, 2(3).

Kline, S., Dyer-Witheford, N., & De Peuter, G. (2003). Digital play: The interaction of technology, culture, and marketing. McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP.

Nicoll, B., & Keogh, B. (2019). The Unity game engine and the circuits of cultural software. In The Unity game engine and the circuits of cultural software (pp. 1-21). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Nusca, A. (2017). “This man is leading an AI revolution in Silicon Valley – And he’s just getting started.” Fortune. https://fortune.com/2017/11/16/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang/

Rogan, J. (2025, December) Jensen Huang. Joe Rogan experience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hptKYix4X8

Witt, S. (2025). The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip. Penguin Group: New York.

Young, C., Joseph, D.J., & Nieborg, D.B. (2025). Workflow Monopolies: A platform historiography of Unity in the immersive app economy. Platforms & Society, 2. https://doi.org/10.1177/29768624251376562

ABSTRACT. This paper explores experiences of age and gender in the early UK tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) scene, as recorded in a selection of UK-based TTRPG magazines published during the 1970s and 1980s. We examined issues of White Dwarf, Imagine, Warlock, and Adventurer magazines, focusing on letters pages, and the interaction between letters and other magazine elements, including editorials, articles, advertisements and art. Our analysis identified trends in conversations between players, and between players and game designers, which centred or otherwise engaged with issues of age, gender, and their relationship to and impact on player experiences. In this paper, we discuss how the intersection of subjectivities is visible in these historical sources, providing evidence for how players negotiate an environment often understood as youth-oriented and male-coded. These magazines include frequent, explicit engagements with themes of age and gender, reflecting complex discourses about access and exclusion. Our paper will interest researchers concerned with analogue games and TTRPG communities, and researchers exploring themes of age and gender in game culture.

ABSTRACT. Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, 2018; RDR2) provides a useful lens for analyzing how contemporary players encounter historical narratives of American identity, imperial expansion, and political conflict. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, after the Spanish-American War and amid the United States’ expanding global ambitions, the game presents a nation shaped by racial violence, rapid industrialization, and anxieties surrounding national progress. Rockstar is widely known for its sharp satirical critique of American culture, capitalism, and political hypocrisy. In RDR2, that satirical edge remains, but is channeled through a more muted and melancholic reflection on the end of the frontier and the contradictions of American exceptionalism. This paper builds on discussions of RDR2’s mechanics (Vanderhoef and Payne 2022), parody (Bello 2024) and progressivism (Locke and Mackay 2020; Wright 2021).

ABSTRACT. This talk explores a rising convergence between two fields - historical video games and digitised heritage. The professionalisation of the field is taking place at the intersection of game design, historical research, and curated heritage practices. Referring to the concepts of historiographical games, digital twins and memory twins, I explain how this methodological mix facilitates the creation of games that offer meaningful heritage experiences while maintaining a historiographical value.

ABSTRACT. Crunch (defined as a production period during which video game creators work between 60 and 90 hours per week, typically without additional compensation) has been a pervasive practice in the industry for decades (Edholm et al., 2017). For many developers, crunch is perceived as both “natural” and inevitable, supposedly arising from the very “nature” of the video game industry (Cote & Harris, 2020). The most common explanations highlight material conditions and production logics specific to the field: the high competitiveness of the market, which imposes extremely compressed schedules (Potterger, 2020); the control exerted by publishers; the challenges inherent in planning creative processes (Cote & Harris, 2020); and the resulting shortcomings in time management (Edholm et al., 2017).

Cote and Harris (2020) argue that, due to its sustained repetition, crunch has ceased to function as an occasional response to structural problems and has instead solidified into a shared habitus among video game creators. According to Bourdieu (1990), the material and structural conditions associated with a given social position, when reproduced over time, generate a habitus (a system of durable dispositions that orient individuals to act, feel, and think in particular ways). Within the field of video game production, crunch has thus become a normalized and expected response to the pressures of development. This disposition is even valorized as a desirable trait for those seeking to enter the industry, closely tied to the narrative of “passion” for games (Consalvo, 2008).

ABSTRACT. This paper contributes to the discourse on human-AI co-creation through art-based gaming, drawing insights from a case study: the "Ludic PSY AI-Game-Engine" research project at xxx. The central output of the project is an "AI-Game-Engine" for experimental gameplay, tested in a public exhibition in Vienna in 2025, with 527 participants. Following the conceptualization of the "Ludic method" developed by xxx (2021), gameplay can be understood as a transformative experience that helps participants become ludic citizen researchers. By interacting with the AI-GameEngine, programmed using the open-source Godot Engine and the Wave Function Collapse, participants envision their utopias in collaboration with AI. The gameplay is designed not only for the pleasures of gaming but also to allow participant-researchers to reflect ethically on narratives within the game, such as the risks of user profiling and implications for technological freedom, as well as the emancipatory potential of AI, particularly regarding climate change.

ABSTRACT. Deceptive design as laid out by Gualeni and de Mosselaer (2021) refers to the intentional construction of false player expectations with the goal of providing them with more surprising and pleasurable experiences. Game elements are positioned in ways that leverage a player’s prior gaming experiences to suggest certain behaviors and outcomes, whilst deceptively hiding their true nature.

Whilst there is existing literature analysing a variety of deceptive design patterns in digital and research on the application of dark patterns to VR applications, no research has been done on how deceptive designs are implemented in VR titles. As such, this paper is an analysis of deceptive design patterns in a multitude of existing VR titles and an investigation of if and how the unique affordances of VR hardware and software, as well as associated player expectations and habits, alter the ways in which deceptive design patterns are implemented in VR to maintain their emotional impacts on players.

Through this ongoing analysis, three trends have emerged relating to deceptions that are heavily altered for or native to the medium of VR i.e. deceptions with a high or mixed level of VR dependence. The first trend is deceptive design patterns that use data from VR technology to facilitate player intentions and covertly create more pleasurable player experiences. The second trend is deceptive design patterns that bring player attention to the technological nature of a VR experience. The third trend that emerged is deceptive design patterns that leverage and subvert tropes that are exclusive to VR games.

Aside from establishing a taxonomy of existing VR deceptions, this research also aims to examine deceptive patterns found in traditional digital games that were absent when analysing VR titles, and promote potential future deceptive design patterns that are emerging through newer and upcoming VR technologies.

ABSTRACT. In the transformation from a dominant immersive tradition to an interactive postmodern approach in literature, novelists explore new possibilities of interactivity, which brings a self-reflection on the dualistic relation between the author and the reader. This paper uses Cortázar’s gamified fiction, Hopscotch, as the main case study. By providing an analysis of the infrastructure and game rules of Hopscotch, this paper examines the limitation of interactivity in Hopscotch, from a post-structuralistic context. Cortázar’s concerns for the structuralist dilemma of interactivity also applies to digital games. The analysis of interactive digital narratives (IDN) suggests a progressive post-structuralistic turn. Although the dilemma of interactivity persists in various media, from traditional novels to digital games, the pleasure and possibility of interactivity has been continuously enriched in the designer’s self-reflective practice and dynamic cooperation with the player.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract examines how symbolic ambiguity in digital games shapes processes of interpretation and meaning-making. It argues that games mobilize semiotic systems differently depending on the stability of symbols and the familiarity of the contexts they appear within. By analyzing four combinations of conventional and unconventional symbols and contexts, it shows how players infer meaning through cultural codes, functional inference, or exploratory experimentation. The work highlights the role of system behaviour, representation, and context in structuring interpretive labour, and suggests that symbolic ambiguity can be designed to support diverse forms of engagement, agency, and expression in digital play.

ABSTRACT. Work on time in digital games has expanded across disciplines, and this diversity now offers opportunities for direct comparison and synthesis. This paper presents a comparative map of twenty-two temporal constructs published between 2003 and 2025 to illustrate this opportunity. We use the term temporal construct to identify named, reusable conceptual tools – typologies, frameworks, categories, etc. – that researchers use to theorise how time is structured in and around digital play. Each construct is positioned along two axes, derived from patterns in the analysed literature: temporal control (from player-controlled to system-controlled) and temporal scale (from moment play to lifestyle play). This visualisation identifies where constructs cluster, where gaps remain, and how constructs can be read alongside one another without flattening disciplinary differences. A companion web prototype (withheld for anonymous review) provides author-level plots alongside the composite map, supporting closer inspection and laying groundwork for an evolving resource.

ABSTRACT. This paper proposes a phenomenological and cosmological framework for understanding digital play through the metaphor of Aiōn, drawn from Heraclitus and revisited by Fink. By connecting phenomenology and contemporary game studies, we argue that gameplay constitutes a mode of being-in-the-world structured by rhythmic attunement, sensory engagement, imagination, and a non-linear lived temporality. The contribution lies in articulating Aiōn as a conceptual operator that clarifies how players inhabit, perceive, and co-create game worlds. This approach expands existing theoretical models and provides a foundation for future research into the distinct temporal experience of play.

ABSTRACT. The Nokia N-Gage was mobile phone developer Nokia’s unsuccessful bid to enter the handheld gaming market in the mid-2000s. Developed mainly in Finland, it has been regarded as a commercial failure, a “Finnish console,” and the starting point for the widely successful Finnish mobile game industry. This article explores how these conflicting discourses were turned into an exhibition for [removed for review]. It examines how a (failed) gaming and telecommunications product such as the N-Gage becomes cultural heritage and what kinds of views are highlighted in its institutionalization. In a shift from brand heritage and corporate interests toward a broader cultural understanding of the N-Gage as national heritage, we recognize a critical need for distance and reflexivity. Frameworks sensitive to institutional power help make the polyphonic and contradictory voices of relevant stakeholders heard. The research thus provides critical frameworks for museum practice and shows how corporate brand heritage is only one starting point when the past becomes heritage.

ABSTRACT. Regional, cultural, and structural specificities across game cultural sectors are integral to impactful, intersectional initiatives. In our workshop-based participatory study, we invited diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) experts from key Finnish game cultural organizations to examine the state of DEI in digital game cultural environments. The data was collected from two online co-design workshops with eight participants and analyzed using qualitative content analysis. We noted that while Finnish DEI initiatives have developed significantly, diversity efforts are primarily focused on gender equality over other types of diversity. Organizations rely on collective action and sharing information on best practices through events, training, and game literacy education. Initiatives are heavily affected by the policies and subsidies of public agencies. Proposed solutions suggest increasing structured activity, pooling resources, and the creation of a national game cultural strategy supporting sustainable development across sector divides.

ABSTRACT. An extended abstract proposing an archaeologically-informed history of the MMO Final Fantasy XIV.

ABSTRACT. INTRODUCTION: HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND XBAND AS A “MINOR PLATFORM”? Late-20th-century console networking systems are often framed as failed preludes to platform infrastructures such as Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. Yet such teleological narratives flatten the diversity and experimentalism of the pre-platform era. Drawing on media archaeology, particularly Nicoll’s (2019) concept of “minor platforms” and Guins’s (2014) account of the social lives of game hardware—this paper revisits XBAND (1994, stylized as XBⱯND), a short-lived but ambitious third-party modem peripheral for the SNES and Sega Genesis, and foregrounds the forms of player experience it enabled. I argue that marginalized devices reveal emotional structures obscured by dominant game-historical narratives, namely player-driven infrastructural agency and the forms of technical pleasure that exceed the game interface. Rather than dismissing XBAND as a historical dead end, the paper frames it as a “vernacular networking imaginary” co-constructed by developers, players, and hardware. Released in November 1994, XBAND attempted to construct a cross-regional dial-up multiplayer network spanning North America, South America, and Japan. Although its developer, Catapult Entertainment, collapsed within a year and services finally ended in 1997, the system’s peak of more than 15,000 subscribers testifies to the appeal of its technological vision. A key question follows: why did players embrace such an experimental system at a time when multiplayer online console was neither mainstream nor technically mature? Even if XBAND has largely vanished from mainstream game history, player practices have persisted as faint imprints within later technological developments. SPLICING AND ILLICIT ENGINEERING AS TECHNICAL PLEASURE XBAND’s pleasures emerged first through a spliced and sometimes destructive technical experience. Its engineering team, composed of geeks from 3DO, Apple, Sony, and THQ, embodied a culture of cross-boundary technological experimentation. Rather than modifying console hardware, XBAND intercepted memory states through its onboard modem, hijacked local multiplayer routines (e.g., Super Mario Kart), or inserted new networking modes via reverse engineering (e.g., Doom). This hybrid, prosthetic configuration echoes Hertz and Parikka’s (2012) concept of “zombie media,” in which closed systems gain new extensibility through creative transgression. From Russell’s (2020) perspective on “glitch feminism,” such illicit remaking operates as a queer refusal aligned with the improvisational and experimental ethos of early Internet cultures. AN UNFINISHED INFRASTRUCTURE: AN ALTERNATIVE TOPOLOGY FOR PLAYERS AND DEVICES XBAND’s second major innovation was its attempt to build an alternative network topology before widespread consumer Internet access. Instead of a centralized server architecture, XBAND enabled direct device-to-device dialing, forming a distributed physical network for cross-regional matches. Designers claimed that even U.S. coast-to-coast connections could maintain latency below 50 milliseconds (Ashley ,2005). To expand network coverage and invite as many players as possible to participate in its construction, the system adopted low-cost rather than high-performance modems. In alignment with this hardware configuration, XBAND introduced identity features, avatar customization, ranking systems, and cross-regional matchmaking into its player network. This integrated hardware–software approach foreshadowed the platformized gaming infrastructures that would emerge later. Yet its infrastructural vision lacked industrial support. Following Gillespie (2010) and Helmond (2015), XBAND can be understood as an “unfinished platform”: it exhibited the gestures of platformization without the integrated industrial ecosystem required for long-term sustainability. Paradoxically, this incompleteness highlights XBAND’s value as a technological test site. AFFECTIVE AGENCY AND THE FRAGILE FUTURES OF PLAYER PARTICIPATION To understand XBAND, one must account for the infrastructural agency it granted to players. Despite latency, telephone line noise, and unstable regional connectivity, retrospective accounts and player ethnographies often describe the experience as “magical” or “deeply nostalgic.” This suggests that videogame engagement, as a technical practice, aligns with Berlant’s (2011) notion of “cruel optimism”: beyond immersion and frictionless play, players are drawn to fragile anticipations of future possibility. CONCLUSION: RECONSTRUCTING A PRE-PLATFORM POSSIBILITY HORIZON Revisiting XBAND and later systems such as Sega NetLink (1996), which extended its logic, offers a nonlinear history of multiplayer infrastructures. Early home consoles routinely invited players into infrastructural labor; before platformization reconfigured users into passive endpoints, players and devices interacted through improvisation, friction, and creative negotiation. XBAND’s pre-platform experiments thus reveal a lost but once-real horizon of technological possibility. Recovering this horizon offers new insights into subjectivity, attachment, and technical pleasure within contemporary platformized environments.

ABSTRACT. This study examines how self-identified “Real gamers” in South Korea negotiate authenticity, identity, and cultural status in the rapidly transforming post-pandemic gaming landscape. While traditional definitions of hardcore gamers emphasize intensive play and expertise, this research highlights a distinct group that consciously asserts moral and cultural authority within gaming communities. Drawing on thirty-two in-depth interviews, the study explores how Real gamers construct and sustain their identity, how they engage in activism and boundary-making within online communities, and how they interpret the broader democratization of gaming. Findings reveal a paradoxical self-positioning: although their symbolic centrality has diminished amid mobile gaming, diverse demographics, and declining PC bangs, their insistence on authenticity has intensified. The study illustrates how Real gamers’ defensive cultural stance reflects deeper tensions over legitimacy, distinction, and cultural capital in contemporary digital game culture.

ABSTRACT. Games and gambling have always prompted ‘superstitious’ beliefs concerning how to influence the outcome, such as how a die will roll. We examine what may be a contemporary instantiation of this, where Marvel Rivals (NetEase Games, 2024)(hereafter MR) players believe they can influence the AI-driven matchmaking algorithm to assign them more competent teammates and thus increase the likelihood of victory. The exact details of how the matchmaking algorithm functions is the subject of much speculation, which can be understood as a form of folk theory that are spread by content creators. However, we will ask whether these practices, despite it being impossible to definitely ascertain their veracity, can be understood not to be groundless superstition but to be demonstrative of algorithmic literacy. In an increasingly algorithmic world, new ways of understanding and navigating algorithms emerge. Eslami et. al (2016, 2372) define “folk theories” as “those non-authoritative conceptions of the world that develop among non-professionals and circulate informally”. Folk theories on algorithms function as attempts to understand the algorithms operative on a platform and to inform subsequent behaviors. Current research on folk theories has largely focused on social media use and how users navigate algorithms (Eslami et al. 2016, Lin 2025, Karizat et al. 2021) or how content creators seek to optimize their visibility through their (folk theoretical) understandings of algorithms (DeVito 2022). Players’ folk theories about game processes, especially matchmaking in competitive games, are under-researched. We address this gap by examining theories about matchmaking in the team-based hero shooter Marvel Rivals. MR has been thought to employ more sophistication in its matchmaking than previous team hero-shooters. Its use of AI has been widely discussed, particularly since the publication of a paper authored by the Fuxi AI Lab and NetEase (Wang et al. 2024), which introduced a novel engagement optimizing matchmaking system called EnMatch. The move to engagement optimizing matchmaking systems is aimed at minimizing players’ chance of logging off after any match (Chen et al. 2017). It arguably sacrifices skill-based considerations for engagement-based ones. As such, critics have complained about games becoming one-sided and unfair in order to keep certain players ‘engaged’. Importantly, NetEase have explicitly declared that they do not use EOMM (engagement optimizing matchmaking)(Rivals 2025). This statement has, however, been subject to various interpretations. Against this backdrop, we examine how players engage in various practices under the belief that their chances of winning the next match will be improved. We focus on the way YouTube content creators circulated folk theories about the MR matchmaking system, which then informed player practices. Content creators play a prominent role in shaping player practices – they are the “algorithmic experts” (Bishop 2020) and their content is a way for “algorithmic gossip” (Bishop 2019) to be shared. Our data selection for the videos has been informed by an extensive netnography (Nascimento, Suarez, and Campos 2022) of MR, which has included spending around 800 hours watching videos from content creators discussing gameplay and matchmaking. In total, our data consists of 14 videos; top-rated comments from these videos; and NetEase papers on matchmaking. After the selection, all the videos were transcribed, and we conducted thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2021) of the data. Our preliminary results reveal a number of folk of theories present in the data and show how the YouTube videos, together with the space for viewers’ comments below, constitutes a “collective resource for knowledge production” as well as a “subversive” response to uneven power relationships (Bishop 2019, 2593) – the opacity of the matchmaking process for players in this case. However, unlike the “algorithmic experts” identified by Bishop (2020), who do not critique the business model of the platform and who ultimately teach others to be complicit with it, the MR content creators tend to be intensely critical of the matchmaking. They decry such matchmaking as inimical to good, fair, games and as exploitative of players. The most frequent among the folk theories given to players is to temporarily stop playing the game under certain conditions – a strategic refusal of the given conditions of play (cf. “demotivational folk theory” (DeVito 2022)). Content creators also advocated myriad different strategies to navigate and “beat” the algorithm, a way of navigating algorithms also known as “actionable folk theory” (DeVito, 2022). We will outline some of the most common strategies and explain the reasonings behind them. This critical position towards matchmaking was by no means universal. It has met with pushback from those who believe in the official NetEase statements and who regard the folk theories as ‘conspiracy theories’, casting adherents as making excuses for their own poor play. The “git gud” discourse (Felczak 2025) looms large here, arguably revealing tensions between meritocratic beliefs in competitive play (Paul 2018) and the masculine ‘hacker’ ethos that attempts to decipher complex systems or form folk theories on algorithms. Overall, our results highlight competitive gaming in MR as a sphere in which practices in response to black-boxed systems are contested and where certain practices take on a distinctive form. Players and content creators are keenly aware that the effectiveness of their practices cannot be definitively ascertained but that the alternative of dismissing them as mere superstition is to sanction the official NetEase position, which is associated with the clear financial interests of player retention. In this sense, the complex sense-making at stake is demonstrative of an emerging form of cynical “algorithmic literacy” (Oeldorf-Hirsch and Neubaum 2025) that employs strategic refusals based on personal experience and advice from algorithmic experts. Most content creators navigated a position that saw them praising the game whilst criticizing the matchmaking; showing themselves as informed experts whilst acknowledging uncertainties; and creating content that was seen as authentic yet which also was designed to garner attention and even outrage.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TBA REFERENCES Bishop, S. 2019. "Managing visibility on YouTube through algorithmic gossip." New media & society 21 (11-12):2589-2606. Bishop, S. 2020. "Algorithmic experts: Selling algorithmic lore on YouTube." Social Media+ Society 6 (1):2-11. Braun, V., and V. Clarke. 2021. Thematic analysis: a practical guide. London: Sage. Chen, Z., S. Xue, J. Kolen, N. Aghdaie, K.A. Zaman, Y. Sun, and M. Seif El-Nasr. 2017. "EOMM: An engagement optimized matchmaking framework." Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web. DeVito, M.A. 2022. "How transfeminine TikTok creators navigate the algorithmic trap of visibility via folk theorization." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 6 (CSCW2):1-31. Eslami, M., K. Karahalios, C. Sandvig, K. Vaccaro, A. Rickman, K. Hamilton, and A. Kirlik. 2016. "First I" like" it, then I hide it: Folk Theories of Social Feeds." Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, San Jose, CA. Felczak, M. 2025. "The “Git Gud” Fallacy: Challenge and Difficulty in Elden Ring." Game Studies 25 (1). Karizat, N., D. Delmonaco, M. Eslami, and N. Andalibi. 2021. "Algorithmic folk theories and identity: How TikTok users co-produce knowledge of identity and engage in algorithmic resistance." Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction 5 (CSCW2):1-44. Lin, H. 2025. "Oscillation between resist and to not? Users’ folk theories and resistance to algorithmic curation on douyin." Social Media+ Society 11 (1):1-13. Nascimento, T., M.C. Suarez, and R.D. Campos. 2022. "An integrative review on online ethnography methods: differentiating theoretical bases, potentialities and limitations." Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal 25 (4):492-510. NetEase Games. 2024. Marvel Rivals. PC. Oeldorf-Hirsch, A., and G. Neubaum. 2025. "What do we know about algorithmic literacy? The status quo and a research agenda for a growing field." New Media & Society 27 (2):681-701. Paul, C.A. 2018. The toxic meritocracy of video games: Why gaming culture is the worst. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press. Rivals, M. 2025. "We’ve heard your feedback on matchmaking and ranking in Marvel Rivals, and your voices matter!". X.com, accessed Dec 5th. https://x.com/MarvelRivals/status/1958627668536311945?t=uCqk6RBlXoaytvFVHoYXJw&s=19. Wang, K., H. Liu, Z. Hu, X. Feng, M. Zhao, S. Zhao, R. Wu, X. Shen, T. Lv, and C. Fan. 2024. "EnMatch: Matchmaking for better player engagement via neural combinatorial optimization." Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

ABSTRACT. This study examines how accessibility frameworks intersect with disabled players’ evaluations and deployment. We mapped accessibility reviews from the “Can I Play That?” website written between 2019 and 2025 onto the Game Accessibility Guidelines through coding and scoring, then conducted a heuristic evaluation of Minecraft Education as a case study. The analysis showed that reviews foreground basic hearing, motor and visual provisions such as subtitles, remapping and legible text, while advanced guidelines remain largely absent. Minecraft Education satisfies basic and intermediate items across domains yet leaves gaps. Taken together, the study interrogates whose accessibility counts in contemporary game design and deployment. The annotation framework is replicable and open, in an effort to create a new practical resource for the gaming community.

ABSTRACT. The present paper proposes to analyse the role of transgender bodies in games, and trans embodiment beyond character customisation options or scripted characters. In doing so, we look at the ways in which transgender players perceive and employ their virtual bodies within video game worlds, from their avatars’ aesthetics to their movements.

The body is the site of change, transformation and transition, experiences and emotions (Burrill 2017). While it is important to tackle such a topic with care, as, a lot of instances of TGD representation have too much focus on unhealthy curiosity towards TGD bodies (McLaren 2023), its omission in queer games studies limits space for critique. Therefore, the primary goal of this paper is centering the importance of the body and the virtual body as a queer site of dis/identification, exploration, and transformation; and the second is to look at ways in which TGD players are engaging with their virtual bodies that represent how this site is explored.

To do so, we first situate the topic of the body and its omission in queer games studies. Second, this research arises from two different qualitative interventions on TGD players: a data set containing responses to several surveys on TGD players from different countries, and a series of semi-structured interviews in the UK.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how games that are “no-fun” can still be deeply meaningful and even pleasurable to play. Focusing on "you’re just imagining it" (2025), "That Dragon, Cancer" (2016), and "Before I Forget" (2020), I explore how chronic illness, terminal cancer, and dementia are represented through mechanics and storytelling that center on waiting, repetition, exhaustion, and slow, non-linear progress. Drawing on disability studies, crip theory, and feminist/queer critiques of “fun,” I argue that these games refuse cure- and mastery-driven models of play and instead create spaces where players sit with frustration, vulnerability, and care.

ABSTRACT. The MuMoDeTox project develops a prototype pipeline that automatically extracts and synchronizes visual, textual and spatial data from gameplay recordings, including on-screen chat, pings, UI elements, champion positions and match metadata. This enables the identification of temporally and spatially clustered “toxic episodes,” such as ping spam and ironic lane-taking following a player’s death, which cannot be captured through chat logs alone. By rendering these situated multimodal practices analytically visible, the project offers methodological and conceptual tools for understanding how communication norms, competitive pressure and uneven distributions of “fun” shape experiences of toxicity and contested enjoyment in League of Legends.

ABSTRACT. This communication intends to analyze the use of dreams as affective devices in two recent games about Irish history: Benign Land (Ntolas, 2025) and The Séance of Blake Manor (Spooky Doorway, 2025) from the point of view of historical game studies (HGS). Both games deal with the themes of colonialism, absent heritage, and historical trauma in the context of modern Irish history. Both are inspired by oíche shamhna – the traditional Irish festival on which Halloween was modeled – and incorporate dreamlike experiences to represent the air of liminality and otherworldliness associated with the date. Yet, while The Séance of Blake Manor follows narrative and historical conventions, supported by a wealth of internal paratexts and references to historical sources, Benign Land’s uncompromisingly oneiric character challenges HGS’ analytical toolkit, which tends to categorize games according to historiographical criteria. This presentation will propose a methodology to investigate Benign Land’s historical content in a way that embraces its sensorial and highly experimental structure alongside more commonplace historical signs. Subsequently, I will try to apply these principles to an analysis of The Séance of Blake Manor, to explore what effects an affective reading of the dreams featured in the game potentially have over its otherwise logical and familiarly structured narrative and gameplay loop.

ABSTRACT. Excessive use of smartphones has prompted the development of digital detox and productivity apps that incorporate gamification affordances to encourage users to regulate their smartphone use. Similarly, certain smartphone games are explicitly designed to enhance productivity. This study analyzes three smartphone apps, Plantie, Hatch, and Habitica, to investigate their gamified affordances and their ontological characteristics as technology that draws on elements from games and productivity tools. The analysis employs the walkthrough method and utilizes theoretical frameworks from disconnection studies, gamification research, and game studies. It focuses on affordances and discusses the dilemmas inherent in technologies that enhances both productivity and playfulness; technologies that simultaneously aim to reduce and encourage smartphone use, combining rewarding and punishing affordances.

ABSTRACT. Livestreaming through the platform Twitch has become increasingly widespread in the academic world. For experimentation with knowledge dissemination (Boom et al. 2018), outreach (Boom et al. 2018), and the creation of participatory communities (Malone and Mueller 2025), many historical video games have been recognized as valuable for streams, engaging online audiences in discussions about the past (Bierstedt 2022). Therefore, Twitch has been used to explore how researchers “can share knowledge about the past” through this “unique form of science communication” (Leiden University 2021). While it has been suggested that watching Twitch livestreams is an inactive form of media consumption, Brown and Moberly point out that Twitch affords different modes of interactivity (2021). This paper expands current understandings of “interactivity” by examining what occurs when one host actively plays a historical video game while co-hosts participate remotely through Discord without playing themselves, and what affordances this livestreaming practice can offer for experiencing and constructing historical interpretations.

Historical game studies has moved away from merely studying the ‘accuracy’ of historical video games and has become diversely interested in the way that games make history (Chapman 2016), the ways that players engage with the past (Kappell and Elliott 2013), and the nebulous role of counterfactual history in games (Grufstedt 2022). Through interaction with digital games, historical game scholars critically engage with the games for research. This process also holds potential for outreach purposes as Bierstedt (2022) conceptualizes in his understanding of the “streamer-historian”. He poses that streaming holds effective modes of outreach around historical games, as streamer-historians can “provide a commentary through which to interpret a game’s arguments” that can help to “bridge the gap between the simplification of the game and the complexities of historical discourse” (Bierstedt 2022, 880). Our contribution recognizes the potential of streaming for educational intent, and acknowledges the potential for extending Bierstedt’s notion of the streamer-historian, as the performance of history through spectating constitutes a distinct mode of participatory history (Pennington 2022).

To investigate how interactivity unfolds within collaborative livestreaming practices, we conducted two two-hour Twitch streams of the recently released Ghost of Yōtei (Sucker Punch Productions 2025), an action-adventure game set in Hokkaido in 1603.1 In order to examine interactivity under conditions of first-encounter play, we did not engage with the game prior to streaming, which took place one day after release, and once again two weeks later. During each session, one streamer played while two others participated as remote co-hosts via Discord, observing, commenting, and performing interpretation. We simultaneously recorded these streams and uploaded them to YouTube, in recognition of the growing importance of preserving early-stage gameplay as part of the broader documentation and study of historical representation in games (Newman 2011).

This set-up allows for an examination of different roles in streaming and creating public content around history. While prior research has already pointed out that the role of the spectator of digital game play, such as a Twitch audience, cannot be mapped neatly onto binary active and passive forms of media consumption (Taylor 2016), the co-hosts in this setting can be seen as in the middle of the scale; neither player nor spectator. They take on the roles of Newman’s (2002) secondary player; during the stream they provide counsel on actions and offer encouragement, but simultaneously, they are creating a performance for the audience. This unscripted encounter with the game produced a performative dimension extending beyond gameplay or the historical elements of the game, resulting in a mode of improvisational historical interpretation. In this configuration, the co-hosts’ interpretive interventions enabled a form of collaborative, participatory, “doing history” that unfolded alongside the gameplay. What resulted was emerging moments of historical meaning-making generated through the interplay between performance and spectating.

This study contributes to game studies by highlighting the understudied role of non-playing co-hosts and the role of spectating as a form of doing history. Additionally, this work broadens the scope of the streamer-historian beyond education or outreach merits, by focusing on the interaction between performance, spectating and improvisational history-making. By centering the role of non-playing participants, it shows how spectatorship itself can be a form of historical and preservation practice. Despite a typical degree of separation from direct play, through streams, this work has found that spectators are given significant opportunities to be involved in historical meaning-making and understanding.

ABSTRACT. Video games are often described as ‘just games,’ implying experiences framed around play, entertainment, and escapism. Yet some titles operate across additional layers of meaning, positioning players within broader systems of cultural, ethical, and interpretive significance. This paper examines the design mechanisms through which such positioning occurs, introducing the concept of metanarrative integration tools. Drawing on Lyotard’s conceptualization of metanarratives as legitimizing ideological frameworks, we define these tools as devices that mediate transitions between a game’s narrative layer and a higher-level metanarrative perspective, shaping how meaning is constructed through gameplay.

Rather than being predefined, these tools were identified inductively through the analysis of autoethnographic data on contemporary games, which revealed patterns of recurrence across cases. Instead of treating interpretive depth as a thematic byproduct, we foreground how specific design choices actively integrate metanarrative meaning, offering a foundation to understand how a game can become, sometimes, more than ‘just a game.’

ABSTRACT. This paper explores the use of cuteness in videogames, specifically drawing on a textual analysis of the Turnip Boy series, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (Snoozy Kazoo 2021) and its sequel Turnip Boy Robs a Bank (Snoozy Kazoo 2024). It asks how the affective qualities of cuteness trouble subject/object relations through a posthuman lens. In its rejection of hierarchical binaries and instead offering an instrumentalised emotive form, cuteness, or more specifically cute “things”, defy the subordinate position of “objects” by becoming agentic subjects. The paper will be of interest to games scholars interested in the affective potentials of videogames and the negotiation of affect between avatar and gamer. For those interested in posthuman game studies, the paper offers a nuanced consideration of how cuteness-as-affect can be seen as demonstrative of the borders of collapse between self-other, subject-object, and hierarchical power dynamics. The paper specifically focuses on notions of cuteness rather than cosiness - many things that are cute are not also cosy, and vice versa. However, given the utilisation of cuteness in some cosy games, the framework will have overlapping areas of exploration for cosy game scholars.

ABSTRACT. Challenging the paradigm that small, noncompetitive, softly themed games can’t be ‘real,’ i.e. legitimate (Consalvo and Paul, 2019), cozy games have exploded in popularity in the last several years. But even though many such games feature a main character/avatar that the player controls and exerts agency through, there has not (yet) been any systematic study of the role of the hero in cozy games, and how such games could potentially subvert – or rewrite – the traditional hero paradigm for videogames.

ABSTRACT. In all endeavors or practices where individuals strive to improve, there will be a form of self-reflexivity directed towards their own practice. When computer gamers engage self-reflexively towards their own gameplay, they bring to conscious awareness practices that have already been naturalized, which have become “techniques of the body” (Mauss 1973), occurring without prompting (see: (Parisi 2011, Pias 2011, Keogh 2018, Kirkpatrick 2012). A great deal of labour may needed to ‘unlearn’ them and relearn them anew differently (Toner 2017), calling for dedicated practice.

This study investigates the self-reflexivity that players display towards their own play in team hero shooter games. We consider whether, as a mode of attention directed to the self, it can be understood to be a practice that cultivates a relationship to self (Foucault 2001) or “technology of the self” (DeNora 1999, Foucault 1988) that has applicability beyond the immediate context of playing well in a specific game.

This applicability or transposability is key, as is a potentially changed relation to self. It goes beyond fields of discussion that have explored capacitation through gaming as discrete competences that are acquired. The gaming literacy (Zimmerman 2009, Gee 2003) literature, for example, has been light on how a player’s relation to themselves may be transformed through practicing self-reflexivity. The same applied to perspectives informed by neuroscientific findings (Bavelier, Bediou, and Green 2018, Green and Bavelier 2012) as well as to discussions of gaming skill: neither Sudnow (1993 [1978]) and Dreyfus (2004), in their influential accounts of skill progression, dwelt on how this may affect practices in other spheres.

Team hero shooter games, like Marvel Rivals (NetEase Games, 2024), occupy a noteworthy position with regard to player self-reflexivity. On the one hand, they are notorious for their toxicity, often initiated when players single out teammates for having not played well or in accordance with their expectations. In this way, blame for the failure of the team as a whole is assigned to an external scapegoat. What recedes into the background when this occurs is a dwelling upon how one’s own poor plays contributed to the failure. On the other hand, as many players are invested in climbing the competitive ladder, they actively search for ways to improve their own play, which means finding areas to problematize. Can players, for example, come to better recognize when they ‘tilt’ following a loss and come to work on an understanding of their own emotional dispositions?

This study will conduct a survey (n=50) amongst players of team hero-shooter games (Nov 25 – Jan 26). From the survey respondents, (n=10) who have the most total number of hours in this genre will be invited to participate in semi-structured interviews (Feb 26 – Apr 26). These will be done using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Pietkiewicz and Smith 2014) to capture the experience of the participants. The gameplay-elicited interviews (Graham 2025), using gameplay recordings, will feature interviewees recalling specific moments of gameplay and techniques of self-reflexivity. Participants will be asked whether they believe any of the competences that they have learned from their extended play, including their capacity to self-reflect on their play, is transposable to other contexts. In particular, they will be questioned on possible shifts in their self-understanding. We will then conduct a thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2021) of the data (May 26).

If consciousness has always been exteriorized (Stiegler 1998) into its material technical supports, then form of self-reflexivity may be highly specific depending on the technical artefacts and techniques employed. It may thus be difficult to apply outside of that techno-social context or “field” (Thomson 2008). Video recordings, HUDs, coaching, etc, are all ways in which players bring practices to awareness. Players may see the information obtained from these are only informing the specific practice in question, with limited transposability to non-game contexts. If so, this study will nevertheless lead to insights about how players use technologies to illuminate their gameplay.

There may, however, be certain ‘mental’ techniques learned and applied across differing contexts. Competitive gaming may teach a generalized “brutal self analysis” (Karhulahti 2020, 153), as well as emotional self-awareness, particularly how one responds to various situations. As Kasparov (2008, 11) declared, “It’s not enough to be talented. It’s not enough to work hard …You must also become intimately aware of the methods you use to reach your decisions.” Brock (2021) has discussed Dota 2 (Valve, 2013) professional player Jenkins’ strategies for emotional regulation, becoming ‘un-tilt-able’. Gallwey’s (1997) hugely successful The Inner Game of Tennis teaches the mindset of how to “let go” and how to play so as to invite (not force) being in “the zone”, echoing insights from Zen in the Art of Archery (Herrigel 2004 [1953]). His taxonomy of parts of the self holds that performance is hampered if “Self 1” and “Self 2” are at odds. He went on to write a series of ‘inner game’ books in other areas, believing in the applicability of the same principles.

We aim to shed light on both the specifics of how players use technologies to illuminate their gameplay in team hero shooter games as well as the prospect for there to be a more generalized self-reflexivity acquired through this, potentially understood as a “technology of the self” (DeNora 1999, Foucault 1988) or as an “agency” that is acquired (Nguyen 2020).

In addition, we aim to review the relevance of the wider reflexivity literature to this area – how it may be complicated or extended through a study of player self-reflexivity. Bourdieu (1990, 108), for example, has contended that reflexivity only emerges “in situations of crisis which disrupt the immediate adjustment of habitus to field”, a position that does not account for the abundance of crises in gameplay despite his use of games as metaphors for understanding social patterns and order. Noble and Watkins (2003) have argued that there are various levels of awareness – reflection, attention and practical sense, in analytic and synthetic modes – that are mobilized in the development of bodily capacities and their sedimentation into habitus. Archer (2007) has distinguished between four “modes of reflexivity”: “communicative”, “autonomous”, “meta”, and “fractured”. These categories can be reviewed in the thematic analysis. Developments in technologies and forms of communication have been tied to transformations in reflexivity and identity (Adams 2006); reflexivity now is arguably intertwined with habitus (Bourdieu 1990 [1980]) rather than unsettling it, incorporated into the reproduction of structures rather than transcending them (Adkins 2004, Sweetman 2003). We aim to explore how our data on gameplay self-reflexivity may speak to the wider transformations that have been theorized.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS TBA REFERENCES Adams, M. 2006. "Hybridizing habitus and reflexivity: Towards an understanding of contemporary identity?" Sociology 40 (3):511-528. Adkins, L. 2004. "Reflexivity: Freedom or habit of gender?" The Sociological Review 52 (2_suppl):191-210. Archer, M.S. 2007. Making our way through the world: Human reflexivity and social mobility: Cambridge University Press. Bavelier, D., B. Bediou, and C.S. Green. 2018. "Expertise and generalization: lessons from action video games." Current opinion in behavioral sciences 20:169-173. Bourdieu, P. 1990. In other words: essays towards a reflexive sociology. Translated by M. Adamson. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. 1990 [1980]. The logic of practice. Translated by R. Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Braun, V., and V. Clarke. 2021. Thematic analysis: a practical guide. London: Sage. Brock, T. 2021. "Counting Clicks: Esports, Neoliberalism and the Affective Power of Gameplay Metrics." In Global eSports Transformation of Cultural Perceptions of Competitive Gaming, edited by D.Y. Jin. London: Bloomsbury. DeNora, T. 1999. "Music as a technology of the self." Poetics 27 (1):31-56. Dreyfus, S.E. 2004. "The five-stage model of adult skill acquisition." Bulletin of science, technology & society 24 (3):177-181. Foucault, M. 1988. "Technologies of the Self." In Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by L.H. Martin, H. Gutman and P.H. Hutton, 16-49. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. Foucault, M. 2001. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982. Translated by G. Burchell. Edited by F. Ewald and A. Fontana. New York: Picador. Gallwey, T.W. 1997. The inner game of tennis: the classic guide to the mental side of peak performance. New York: Random House. Gee, J.P. 2003. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Graham, M.H. 2025. "Gameplay-Elicited interviews: Exploring Worldness and the Processes of Play." Abstract Proceedings of DiGRA 2025: Games at the Crossroads. Green, C.S., and D. Bavelier. 2012. "Learning, attentional control, and action video games." Current biology 22 (6):R197-R206. Herrigel, E. 2004 [1953]. Zen in the Art of Archery. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. London: Penguin Books. Karhulahti, V.-M. 2020. Esport play: Anticipation, attachment, and addiction in psycholudic development. New York & London: Bloomsbury Academic. Kasparov, G. 2008. How life imitates chess: Bloomsbury. Keogh, B. 2018. A play of bodies: How we perceive videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kirkpatrick, G. 2012. "Constitutive Tensions of Gaming’s Field: UK gaming magazines and the formation of gaming culture 1981-1995." Game Studies 12 (1). Mauss, M. 1973. "Techniques of the Body." Economy and society 2 (1):70-88. NetEase Games. 2024. Marvel Rivals. PC. Nguyen, C.T. 2020. Games: Agency as Art. New York: Oxford University Press. Parisi, D. 2011. "Game interfaces as bodily techniques." In Gaming and simulations: Concepts, methodologies, tools and applications, 1033-1047. IGI Global. Pias, C. 2011. "The game player’s duty: the user as the gestalt of the ports." In Media archaeology: approaches, applications, and implications, edited by E. Huhtamo and J. Parikka, 164-183. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pietkiewicz, I., and J.A. Smith. 2014. "A practical guide to using interpretative phenomenological analysis in qualitative research psychology." Psychological journal 20 (1):7-14. Stiegler, B. 1998. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Sudnow, D. 1993 [1978]. Ways of the hand: The organization of improvised conduct. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sweetman, P. 2003. "Twenty-first century dis-ease? Habitual reflexivity or the reflexive habitus." The sociological review 51 (4):528-549. Thomson, P. 2008. "Field." In Pierre Bourdieu, edited by M. Grenfell, 67-81. Stocksfield: Acumen. Toner, J. 2017. "Habitual reflexivity and skilled action." Body & Society 23 (4):3-26. Valve. 2013. Dota 2. PC. Zimmerman, E. 2009. "Gaming literacy: Game design as a model for literacy in the twenty-first century." In The video game theory reader 2, edited by B. Perron and M.J.P. Wolf, 23-31. New York & Oxon: Routledge.

ABSTRACT. This paper considers players in the role of game developers in the context of what might be called, ‘mod choreography’. This is the practice of curating, balancing and deploying arrangements or collections of mods or modpacks for a specific game (for example Minecraft or Skyrim). An extension of modding, skinning and other forms of content creation (Sotamaa 2005, 2010; Postigo 2010; Beggs 2012; Champion 2013; Smith et al. 2025), mod choreography is a practice that lies somewhere between mod development and gameplay with mods. In part due to the rise in the number of mods available, and in part due to a cultural desire for more diverse game experiences, mod choreography has evolved as a significant domain of modded play as players become “experience designers” experimenting with the contexts of gameplay without modding themselves. Modpack design and development is fulfilling in its own right and becomes a site of intense interaction amongst players who discuss, build and distribute them

extended abstract is attached

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract corresponds to a soon-to-be-finished article about the masculinities visually represented in the Mexican gaymer group Gaymer Nights' Instagram presence.

ABSTRACT. Introduction

The circulation of online memes sits at the intersection of politics and play (Mortensen and Neumayer 2023), particularly in online gaming cultures. This paper explores how memes often arise from moments of discontent in esports communities, where creating and referencing memes is a playful and culturally unifying activity in the culture. Politically though, playing with memes obscures the original source of discontent and furthers existing power relations. Through framing the obscuring of discontent via memes as part of a ‘domestication’ of fan resistance (Stanfill 2019; Bollmer and Tillerson 2025), a process that does not challenge the power relations of these long-standing games as a service models, this paper posits that memes serve a governing role in the games industry that upholds the status quo. Utilising examples of discontent turned memes from three prominent esports titles, context is provided for the transitions discontent undergoes as it is played with by a community and the political role these fan expressions play.

Methods

As our method of analysis, we are using multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA). Critical discourse analysis (CDA) allows us to examine the way social relations, identities, institutions, ideologies, and power are realized and made visible through communicative modes (Fairclough 2023). Multimodality facilitates extending the analysis to other semiotic resources beyond text and language (Machin and Mayr 2012) and recognizing the multiple “semiotic modalities” (Fairclough 2023) discourses are made of, including visual modality which is common in memes. The following MCDA explores three distinctive case studies, from three different esports games and publishers, occurring in 2016 – 17, 2019 and 2025 respectively.

Riot Games: ‘Love me some Regi’

Our first case study is taken from the /r/leagueoflegends subreddit, where it is common to see Riot Games employees interact with the culture. In 2016, professional players and team owners criticised Riot Games' timing of patches before major tournaments due to their disastrous impact on player expertise and well-being (Švelch, 2019), sparking a vibrant discussion surrounding the political economy of esports ownership in League of Legends. The co-founder of Riot Games, Marc Merrill, entered the debate to defend Riot Games’ position and point out that these players and teams are free to play and invest in other games. The tone of the post was seen as condescending, and comments within the post such as ‘Love me some Regi’ (a team owner who was critical of Riot Games), ‘good guy owner’, ‘sub-optimal’, ‘delta’, along with Marc Merrill himself, would all become humorous memes. The following year on April Fool’s Day, players evoked these now infamous terms and signifiers in the name of Reddit threads, forming some of Merrill’s original quotes on the /r/leagueoflegends homepage. The case study stands as a prominent example of how quickly genuine discontent and critical discourse in an esports community can turn into play, humour and depoliticisation.

BLizzard Entertainment: #Freehongkong

In our second case study, we examine how #freehongkong and its variations were used in the Twitch chat of the Overwatch World Cup (OWWC) 2019, taking place in the BlizzCon 2019. #freehongkong was a protest movement against Blizzard Entertainment’s decision to ban Heartstone player Blitzchung and take away his tournament winnings after he voiced his support for Hong Kong protests in a postmatch interview. Support towards Blitzchung spread to the Overwatch community, leading to the Chinese Overwatch character Mei being used as the symbol of resistance (Wirman & Rhys 2022). While Blizzard Entertainment reinstated Blitzchung’s winnings five days after the event and reduced his ban to six months, the protests against Blizzard Entertainment continued in Blizzcon 2019, which also hosted the yearly OWWC. During the OWWC matches, viewers were actively typing messages supporting Hong Kong in the chat, including messages like “free Hong Kong” (Siitonen & Ruotsalainen 2025). However, in addition to these serious messages supporting Hong Kong and criticising Blizzard Entertainment’s perceived complicity, the chat would have different variations of this message - including “Free King Kong” and “free Willy”. These messages demonstrate how the protest turns to a meme and how the political message becomes played with and carnivalised.

Valve Corporation: Counter-Strike 2 skin market crash

Our third case study focuses on the Counter-Strike 2 skin market crash in October 2025. The market crash occurred following a Valve update that allowed players to trade in five lower-tier skins for a chance at gaining a Knife or Gloves, which are much rarer in-game items with considerable monetary worth (ranging from $150 - $15000). In the span of one night, the supply of Knives and Gloves dramatically increased, and as a result, $2 billion was lost from the Counter-Strike 2 skin market cap (Harbinson, 2025). For players who were treating Counter-Strike 2 as a financial investment space, a practice common across Steam (Thorhauge, 2023: 92), staggering amounts of money were lost. The reasons given for Valve’s decision were as a way to diminish the value of items typically traded on sites external to Valve, which they cannot monetise. Regardless, players / potential skin investors' criticism of Valve Corporation's governing role immediately followed, with players upset that there was no wider consultation. Running parallel to these critiques were memes, focusing on Valve Corporation’s co-founder Gabe Newell who is the long-standing object blame and appreciation for any governance decision impacting Valve Corporation (Di Placido, 2025).

Summary Our three case studies demonstrate how memes function as affective outlets in esports cultures. They enable expressions of discontent which, while appearing initially as a form of resistance, tend to slide into playful circulations that maintain the status quo of power and the practices related to it. Thus, while memes have politically subversive potential (Moussa, Benmessaoud, and Douai 2020), the case studies presented in this paper suggest that this potential is displaced with playful circulation and humour, possibly due to extensive control esports game developers have over their titles and players’ investment to these games.

Bibliography

Bollmer, G., & Tillerson, B. (2025). Platform Fandom: Weverse and the Technological Domestication of Fan Community. Social Media + Society, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251326689 Di Placido, D. (2025) The ‘Counter-Strike 2’ Skins Market Crash, Explained, Forbes, October 23rd 2025. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2025/10/23/the-counter-strike-2-skins-market-crash-explained/ Fairclough, N. (2023). Critical discourse analysis. In Handford, M., & Gee, J. P. (Eds.) The Routledge handbook of discourse analysis (pp. 11-22). Routledge. Harbinson, D. (2025) Counter-Strike skins crash has exposed the unspoken truth of the skins economy, Esports News UK, 3rd November, 2025. Available at: https://esports-news.co.uk/2025/10/24/counter-strike-skins-crash-has-exposed-the-unspoken-truth-of-the-skins-economy/ Machin D, Mayr A. (2012). How to do critical discourse analysis: A multimodal introduction. Sage. Mortensen, M., & Neumayer, C. (2023). The playful politics of memes. In The playful politics of memes (pp. 1-11). Routledge. Moussa, M. B., Benmessaoud, S., & Douai, A. (2020). Internet memes as “tactical” social action: A multimodal critical discourse analysis approach. International Journal of Communication, 14, 21.

Siitonen, M., & Ruotsalainen, M. (2022). “KKona where’s your sense of patriotism?”: Positioning Nationality in the Spectatorship of Competitive Overwatch Play. In Ruotsalainen, M., Törhönen, M. & Karhulahti, V-M. (Eds.) Modes of Esports Engagement in Overwatch (pp. 89-112). Cham: Springer International Publishing. Stanfill, M. (2019). Exploiting fandom: How the media industry seeks to manipulate fans. University of Iowa Press. Švelch, J. (2019). Resisting the perpetual update: Struggles against protocological power in video games. New Media & Society, 21(7), 1594-1612. Thorhauge A. M. (2023). Games in the platform economy: Steam’s tangled markets. Bristol University Press. Wirman, H., & Jones, R. (2022). Overwatch fandom and the range of corporate responses. In Ruotsalainen, M., Törhönen, M. & Karhulahti, V-M. (Eds.) Modes of esports engagement in Overwatch (pp. 157-177). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

ABSTRACT. This study examines why some highly engaged esports fans choose not to participate in offline esports consumption, even when they strongly identify with teams or players. Based on social identity theory and leisure constraints theory, this study focuses on fan identity, overall satisfaction with esports consumption, and two types of constraints—psychosocial and external. Using survey data from 297 adult esports consumers in China, this study found that fan identity strongly predicts both satisfaction and offline consumption intention, but satisfaction itself has only a marginal effect on offline participation. Psychosocial constraints, rather than structural or logistical barriers, emerge as the strongest negative predictor. We argues that non-attendance is a meaningful analytical category and discusses implications for theories of esports spectatorship and for strategies to promote offline esports participation.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores how pleasure in and through games becomes a political terrain in contemporary Italy, where moral panic, demographic anxiety, and hetero-cisnormative discourses restrict non-normative desires. Drawing on feminist, queer, and transfeminist theory, it introduces the concept of intersectional pleasure as a collective, embodied practice shaped by regimes of normativity yet capable of resisting them. The paper examines ANONYMOUS, a grassroots transfeminist and queer convention, showing how its 2025 edition—centred on Bodies, Sex, and Consent—aims to reimagine play as a relational, accessible, and community-based practice grounded in care and iterative consent. The paper argues that intersectionality is a precondition for shared pleasure and proposes that designing for collective pleasure constitutes a form of cultural and political emancipation.

ABSTRACT. INTRODUCTION Livestreaming platforms such as Twitch have become central media environments for young adults, yet their political relevance remains empirically neglected. Explicit political communication on the platform is rare; instead, politics is embedded in affective closeness between viewers and streamers and dynamic community interactions (Roca-Trenchs et al., 2023). This study examines how young users perceive political content on Twitch, how they evaluate misinformation, and which political role they attribute to streamers. Drawing on 60 semi-structured interviews and a grounded theory approach, the study develops the framework of parasocial incidental politics to explain how political meaning emerges unintentionally within parasocially shaped livestreaming environments. THEORETICAL FOUNDATION Twitch exemplifies a hybrid media system in which entertainment, interpersonal communication, spontaneous reactions, and algorithmically amplified visibility intersect (Chadwick, 2017; Chadwick et al., 2015). Political meaning often arises unintentionally through everyday commentary, humor, or moral positioning encountered during real-time interactions. Livestreams are marked by strong perceptions of authenticity: spontaneous statements appear particularly “real,” making them central cues for political interpretation (Woodcock & Johnson, 2021). At the same time, platform affordances such as synchronicity, and dense chat activity intensify the spread of misinformation by fostering emotional reactions and hindering verification (Guess et al., 2020). Although political influencers increasingly function as new opinion leaders (Rothut, 2025), it remains unclear how Twitch streamers become politically meaningful within the interplay of entertainment and authenticity. This study addresses this gap through three research questions: RQ1: How is Twitch embedded in the everyday media practices of young adults? RQ2: How do Twitch users evaluate political content and misinformation? RQ3: What political role do users attribute to streamers? METHOD The analysis draws on 60 problem-centered interviews with Twitch users aged 16 to 29, including heavy users and casual users. The interview guide covered media biographies, everyday usage, perceptions of political content, experiences with misinformation, and assessments of streamer influence. Following grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2015), coding proceeded through open, focused, and axial stages, accompanied by ongoing theoretical elaboration. Twelve categories were developed and integrated into four core dimensions. FINDINGS Participants describe Twitch as an ambient companion (RQ1): constantly present but not continuously in focus. Streams accompany everyday routines, creating emotional stability and a sense of co-presence. Twitch is framed as a calmer “safe space” compared to overstimulating platforms such as TikTok. It is embedded in a cross-platform ecosystem: many users first encounter streamers through YouTube; curated clips and algorithmic recommendations maintain a sense of continuity across platforms. This cross-platform circulation enables persistent parasocial relationships and a near-daily presence of favored streamers. Participants diverge on the prevalence of politics on Twitch (RQ2): some perceive politics as increasingly visible, while others rarely encounter it. Politics is primarily understood as event-driven, for example international conflicts or campaign appearances. More decisive than frequency, however, are the interactional conditions under which politics emerges. Chats are described as emotionally charged environments in which political topics escalate rapidly and require active moderation. Interviewees report “war-like atmospheres” when political debates unfold in chat. Political meaning arises less from intentional communication than from spontaneous moral cues, expressions of solidarity, humor, or judgments of fairness. Even when streamers avoid explicit politics, these cues are interpreted politically. Consequently, political content emerges atmospherically embedded in reactions and micro-commentaries rather than through structured political messaging. Interviewees distinguish between everyday misinformation, for example exaggerations or interpersonal drama, perceived as relatively harmless and political disinformation, which is considered a structural issue on the platform. The speed and social density of livestreaming allow half-knowledge to circulate rapidly and become “stamped as fact.” Emotional arousal increases susceptibility to unverified claims. While viewers generally expect streamers to issue corrections, they also acknowledge that real-time fact-checking is nearly impossible amid ongoing gameplay and technical multitasking. Individual verification strategies occur but inevitably lag behind the pace of livestreams, leaving political claims temporarily unchallenged. From the viewer perspective, streamers intentionally avoid political topics to prevent community division or reputational risk (RQ3). Nevertheless, users attribute political influence to them based on parasocial intimacy and perceived authenticity rather than explicit persuasion. Spontaneous reactions during livestreams are seen as especially revealing and trustworthy. These reactions influence viewers’ political perceptions more strongly than curated content on other social platforms. Community norms and dominant chat voices mediate how political cues are interpreted. Streamers act as symbolic anchors: even without explicit positions, viewers infer political orientations from “values between the lines.” Explicit endorsements, however, are seen as disruptive to the entertainment setting. Thus, political influence becomes subtle and embedded in routines of shared presence. DISCUSSION The study introduces parasocial incidental politics (see figure 1) as a framework for understanding political sense-making in livestreaming environments. The concept describes how political sense-making emerges unintentionally through the interplay of real-time communication, perceived closeness, and hybrid media dynamics. Rather than stemming from planned political messaging, political influence develops through spontaneous cues and continuous parasocial engagement. Our framework illustrates three mechanisms: (1) Relational intimacy, referring to familiarity, emotional closeness, and ongoing co-presence between streamers and viewers. (2) Incidental exposure, capturing the situational, unintended appearance of political cues within entertainment-oriented contexts. (3) Hybrid media dynamics, highlighting the entanglement of interpersonal interaction, entertainment, and public commentary across platforms. These mechanisms operate through the dimensions of: Platform, Streamer, Audience, which structure visibility, relational anchoring, and interpretative circulation. Together, they generate parasocial incidental politics: a form of political sense-making shaped not by persuasion but by spontaneous and affective cues embedded in everyday streamer–viewer interactions. The study concludes that Twitch is not a political medium in the conventional sense, yet it is politically significant precisely because politics arises subtly and often unintentionally. Livestreaming fosters trust-based navigation of political cues while simultaneously enabling the rapid spread of misinformation. For research and regulatory debates, these findings highlight the importance of temporal and relational dynamics when analyzing political communication in entertainment-oriented media environments. REFERENCES Chadwick, A. (2017). The hybrid media system: Politics and power. Oxford University Press. Chadwick, A., Dennis, J., & Smith, A. P. (2015). Politics in the age of hybrid media: Power, systems, and media logics. In The Routledge companion to social media and politics (pp. 7–22). Routledge. Charmaz, K. (2015). Teaching theory construction with initial grounded theory tools: A reflection on lessons and learning. Qualitative Health Research, 25(12), 1610–1622. Guess, A. M., & Lyons, B. A. (2020). Misinformation, disinformation, and online propaganda. Social media and democracy: The state of the field, prospects for reform, 10, 10-33. Roca-Trenchs, N., López-Borrull, A., & Lalueza, F. (2023). Twitch as a Political Communication Tool. Comunicación y Medios, 57, 25–40. Rothut, S. (2025). Promoting Politics: Political Social Media Influencers. American Behavioral Scientist. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642251344206 Woodcock, J., & Johnson, M. R. (2021). Live streamers on Twitch. tv as social media influencers: Chances and challenges for strategic communication. In Social media influencers in strategic communication (pp. 88–102). Routledge.

ABSTRACT. Videogame live streaming has become a significant cultural phenomenon within the online gaming community; however, women’s participation remains shaped by structural inequalities and discrimination. This scoping review of the DiGRA library (2020–2025) examined 471 records and identified 5 articles that directly addressed female representation in live videogame streaming, with relevance to inclusion, representation, and women’s empowerment in this sector. This scarcity may reflect the recent emergence of streaming as a central research topic in game studies conferences, such as DiGRA, rather than broader institutional disengagement. The core studies discuss the emotional labor of female streamers, platform materialities, affective economies, queer conviviality, and gender performativity. The findings reveal a concerning gap between the social magnitude of the phenomenon and the academic attention devoted to it. This study proposes future research directions structured around five priority axes, underscoring the urgency of centering social justice, digital equity, and intersectional perspectives in contemporary game studies.

ABSTRACT. The first game released in Nintendo’s Warioware series received a different title for each regional market: Made in Wario (Nintendo R&D1 2003) in Japan, Warioware, Inc.: Minigame Mania in Europe and Australia, and Warioware, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ in the USA. The American release’s adoption of the term “microgame” to describe the short, simple and referential collection of minigames neatly codified a mode of intentionally small-scale game design that persists throughout a range of videogame contexts today (Wardrip-Fruin 2020; Goldberg 2025). When read across different areas of videogame history, the microgame also appears to be a remarkably permeable term, imbued with conflicting expectations and ideologies about value, form and the cultural pleasures of digital play. This paper explores this pervasive, yet little-examined term over nearly fifty years of commercial games marketing, serious games research and game development funding. Accounting for this variety of meanings and historical contexts, I position the microgame as an exemplary way to understand the aesthetic aims, operational logics and material limits of commercial game production and distribution within contemporary technoculture.

I first track the term’s history across 1970s tabletop gaming, the serious games of the early 1980s and the term’s use in commercial videogame criticism. Prior scholarship on microgames is concentrated within the field of serious games and has largely sought to demonstrate the import and efficacy of microgames as a training tool for students and workers (Semmel et al. 1981; Lukosch et al. 2016; Rahmadi et al. 2021). While this offers a valuable working definition for microgames within the long use of videogames in professional settings, little has been done to track the cultural function of the term itself, or how such an understanding may also relate to other efforts to define, develop and sell microgames (Gredler 1996). This preliminary intervention thus seeks to address the term’s different definitions and use cases in marketing materials, its role as design terminology, as well as the entanglements and distinctions between microgames and the broader term “minigame”. I argue that such disparate attempts to conceptualise and sell microgames converge in their shared preoccupation with the management and presentation of strictly limited spatial, technological, financial and temporal resources. By discussing how real-world processes of game production and play may problematise a microgame’s intended function, I show how this discursive focus may offer a rich historical intersection between games production studies and the study of gaming culture.

To understand the affordances and limits of explicitly small-scale game-making, I read these entangled histories alongside interdisciplinary scholarship on knowledge production, new media and contemporary capitalism. This is achieved via Clifford Siskin’s (2016, p.1) understanding of the system as the dominant “genre” of modern knowledge and Zachary Horton’s (2023) positioning of scale as crucial mediator of disciplinary thought. Such conceptual vantages offer a novel vantage to consider how cultural efforts to stabilise games at the “micro” scale may be underpinned by the same cultural logics and material constraints of contemporary capitalism that have long been interrogated within game studies (Dyer-Witheford & De Peuter 2009; Bodi 2024). By attending to the conceptual language of videogame form via the economic conditions of contemporary technoculture, I further seek to consider how videogames fit within broader platform contexts (Hanna & Park 2020). This may be particularly useful as games researchers begin to interrogate the surge in popularity of games hosted as “mini-apps” within social media platform WeChat (Zhang et al. 2021; Wang et al. 2023).

I finally offer a preliminary discussion of the microgame’s discursive role in Australian games funding. I use the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI)’s 2025 callout for microgames to be developed for exhibition in their Game Worlds exhibition as an invaluable local case study to track the formal commonalities, technical differences, and cultural afterlives of non-educational titles that have been commissioned and framed explicitly as microgames.

Through tracing the microgame’s complicated history and future, this paper explores how various interdisciplinary conceptions of scale are already embedded in the ways we have come to understand videogame production and play, and their importance to the videogame medium’s entangled commercial and aesthetic contexts. In turn, it argues that the language of scale offers a crucial, yet underexamined way of further understanding how videogames became culturally legible against the ideological backdrop of neoliberalism (Woodcock 2019). Drawing from contemporary theory about scale, systems and software to attend to this widespread, yet definitionally unstable terminology, it revisits the common-sense conceptual terms of digital gaming to further contribute to game studies’ ongoing cultural and material turns (Jayemane 2012; Germaine 2022; Hondroudakis 2024).

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract examines how cloning and piracy practices shaped the emergence of Brazil’s video game culture during the 1980s Market Reserve period. Drawing on decolonial theory, it argues that unauthorized reproductions of consoles, computers, and software constituted adaptive technological practices that challenged Global North-centric histories of games. By tracing informal circuits of production, circulation, and play, the study highlights how these practices fostered early gaming communities and contributed to the formation of a distinct national game ecosystem.

ABSTRACT. Following the emergence of queer game studies as a field in its own right, we argue that it stands to benefit from a more regionally specific approach than has typically been seen up to this point. We firstly provide an overview of the reasons behind expanding queer game studies to include matters of regionality and secondly, we present the case study of the UK in relation to queer games and games studies.

ABSTRACT. This research examines 1990s virtual pets as sites of gendered affective economies, in which care, attachment, and competition were assigned different cultural values through design and marketing. By comparing standalone caregiving pets such as Tamagotchi and GigaPets with embedded creatures in franchises like Pokémon, Digimon, and Final Fantasy, the paper shows how nurturing play was feminised and constrained, while combat- and progression-driven play was framed as neutral or masculine. It argues that virtual pets were not trivial toys but cultural texts that shaped enduring hierarchies of emotional labour and value in game culture, and the enduring split between “cozy” and “hardcore” gaming cultures.

ABSTRACT. M.D. Schmalzer's definition of jank is "a player’s perception that a videogame does not behave in the ways that it should" (Schmalzer, n.d.). Schmalzer also outlines how jank is most often experienced when a game either does not adhere to commonly held literacies and/or the player's personal prior literacies. This definition is excellent for identifying how/when a player would come to know they are experiencing jank, but not necessarily how jank will influence their gameplay experience. Their definition of jank overlaps heavily with "glitch" and does not provide a method for differentiating the two.

Further, a glitch is not necessarily janky; a glitch occurs as a result of the system working as defined, but not as expected or intended. Glitch artists often develop methods for discovering new glitches through hardware and/or software modifications. The end result of glitch discovery is not janky, but the process of developing a methodology for discovering a glitch is. If a glitch or a bug causes a player to spontaneously recontextualize the game they are playing within the system, that is janky. For instance, in ULTRAKILL, players discovered early on in development that the shotgun weapon spawned a bullet extremely close to the player character, and as a result they were able to parry it as if it were an enemy bullet. In ULTRAKILL, parrying a bullet reflects it as an explosive project with massively increased damage, which made the shotgun an incredibly powerful weapon. This damaging method became so popular with the community that the developer, Hakita, opted to make parrying the shotgun more consistent and permanently recontextualized the use of the weapon. The act of experiencing jank has many parallels to iterative game design, where a player will be forced to reevaluate the game they are playing, make adjustments to their playstyle, and assess how successful the new game is.

Khaled's Questions Over Answers: Reflective Game Design outlines a methodology for designing games that spark reflection in players, rather than a methodology for capturing the reflective process it inspires. She posits that the games designed with the intention of inspiring reflection should allow for a multitude of solutions, be clear in its design, be disruptive, and encourage self-reflection over immersion. In particular, they state that "games are highly appropriate vehicles for triggering and supporting reflection. Games support the representation of situations, problems and belief systems. When playing a game, we expect perplexity and surprise" (Khaled, 2018). This understanding of the affordances of games is very similar to the advantages of researching jank outlined in this paper - "perplexity and surprise" triggers the feeling of experiencing jank, and jank immediately prompts reflection.

That is to say that jank is often a spontaneous opportunity for a player to engage in reflective game design. By being pulled out of the gameplay circuit via jank, the player is extended an opportunity to recontextualize the game they are playing within the system, and their role shifts from player to co-designer. By noting these moments, players are able to further iterate on those games, creating new experiences within systems allowed by but not intended by the system in which they are designing. Some methodologies for critical play interrogate unexpected moments in gameplay, but are often followed with methods for correcting these moments: "In making anything, however, there tends to be a gap between what was intended and what actually is created. Here, a critical play perspective engages a diverse audience of testers to ensure that the particular aspects of the project that are informed by conceptual, thematic, and technological factors continue to “say the same thing” once the project is finished." (Flanagan, 2009)

By examining my play experience with Eternal Ring, I will demonstrate the impact of jank both on play and on design. I will analyze how the actions I took during casual play resulted in a play experience that parallels iterative game design. Through this analysis, I will demonstrate how the challenge and intrigue of the new game I had begun to design (as a result of softlocking myself) was far more appealing to explore.

ABSTRACT. The presence of People with Disabilities (PwD) impacts both the production and consumption of video games, highlighting the necessity of their inclusion in the industry workforce. Despite advancements, there remains a gap in the literature regarding the working conditions of PwD in game development. Therefore, this article examines occupational and demographic characteristics of video game industry professionals with disabilities in Brazil. Data were collected via a cross-sectional survey within the Brazilian video game industry. Key findings indicate a lower exposure of PwD to overtime crunch compared to non-disabled counterparts and reveal a divergence between objective crunch metrics and crunch experiences. Furthermore, the analysis shows a high prevalence of suspected common mental disorders and informal work arrangements among PwD. These findings advocate for the adoption of inclusive crunch metrics and the use of intersectional approaches to ensure the adequate and responsible inclusion of PwD in the video game industry.

ABSTRACT. GDC Talks are a highly valued source of knowledge about game design. In this paper I will investigate the gap between stories told about development over developer experiences by comparing a GDC Talk, Ghost in the Empathy Machine (Garriss & Zimmerman, 2022), with developer interviews I conducted around the central messaging within the game Life is Strange: True Colours (Deck Nine, 2021). I seek to answer, beyond commercial success, what do developers care about when making games? Through this comparison, I will show that while we may not be privy to the specific design decisions happening behind closed studio doors, we can reconstruct and materialise designer intentions and desires through analysis-informed interviews to better understand a game's development beyond pseudo-marketing materials.

ABSTRACT. This study investigates the aesthetic and political pleasures of reiteration in videogames, focusing on remakes and demakes as key forms of contemporary game seriality.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the relation of ‘pleasure’ to the circulation of cultural and political affect and its application to games that represent conflict in Israel-Palestine. I employ affect and post human theory to examine how pleasure and desire are related to narratives of security, territoriality, and exceptionalism in games. How might the shifts in cultural feeling change the production and availability of certain game subjects, designs, and objectives? I use 'cruel pleasure' to build on Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism (2011) in order to illustrate how pleasure intertwines with the pursuit of certain life fantasies, even when those fantasies are unstable or harmful. In part to examine how political affect circulates in game culture, I compare the landscape of available games related to Israel and Palestine in app stores and on game platforms in the year 2014 to those available in 2025.

ABSTRACT. Thrissur Pooram, an annual temple festival that takes place in the South Indian city of Thrissur, offers an example of the entanglement of rituals and play. For one day, the entire city pauses as two temples turn the central ground into a competitive space of sacred play. On one side, we have the Paramekkavu Devaswom, representing the eastern side of the Thrissur Vadakkunnathan Temple, and on the other is the Thiruvambady Devaswom, representing the western side. Paramekkavu is said to represent the embodiment of regal authority and grandeur, as it was historically aligned with the Maharaja of Cochin. Thiruvambady temple, on the other hand, represents the spirit of the devout common people. The festival is structured as a choreographed competition between these two groups, each seeking to outdo the other with more impressively adorned elephants, more elaborate decorations, and more spectacular fireworks. The ritualistic goal of each side is to please the deity Lord Vadakkunnathan (Shiva) and the gods of their respective temples by presenting the best possible performance. The ludic goal is simply to outperform the other group, not through a formal system based on scores, but through general applause and collective judgement. There is an element of play and competition here, within a ritualistic festival; clear opponents, clearly defined rules, and a time and space bounded arena. There is no official victory, just applause and recognition. All of this unfolds in a giant circular ground called Thekkinkadu Maidanam, which becomes the centre of the entire celebration, and in Huizinga’s sense, a materialised magic circle to function (Huizinga, 8-10, 1995). Within this circle, a whole new world unfolds. This paper seeks to explore how this specific blend of sacred and play emerges within ritual contexts.

Johan Huizinga, in Homoludens argues that rituals and play share a formal structure – they both happen in a marked off space, and time with clearly defined rules, the Magic Circle, separate from ordinary life (Huizinga, 8-10, 1995). People often perceive rituals as sacred and serious, often disregarding play as something that is ‘just for fun’, yet they overlap in the intersection of ritual games, where devotion and enjoyment coexist. On the day of the festival, the maidaan (ground) becomes a world within the world; a world set apart from the mundane and suspending everyday reality. Everyday routines become replaced by spoken and unspoken rules. The circular perimeter becomes a visible and practical boundary; traffic is rerouted, shops shut down, and barricades reorient the city towards this circle so that everyday life bends around this temporary centre.

In both rituals and games, objects and non-human entities have their own symbolic meaning beyond their literal sense. They both foster a sense of community and shared identity. In terms of Victor Turner’s definition of rituals, this 36-hour halt can be viewed as the ‘liminal space’, in which normal social structures are partially suspended, and a heightened sense of collective sense of community emerges (Turner, 359, 1969). In both rituals and games, objects and non-human entities are re-semanticised. The adjourned elephants become chariots of divine powers. Nettipattam, or the gold plated caparison worn by the elephants are believed to shield them from the enemy (Sahapedia). In Indian context, the concept of lila or ‘divine play’ is a concept which explains that the universe was created from a cosmic act of play (Lila: Divine Play). Reality is seen as an extension of this play. Bringing this lens to Thrissur Pooram, the element of competition and play can be seen as how participants mediate themselves within both sacred and ludic contexts.

Kudamaatam or Umbrella Exchange, is one of the major competitive events of the festival (Kerala Tourism). The two rival groups, present their elaborately dressed elephants, along with their handlers on top of them, exchanging heavily adorned umbrellas. The party that puts on the better show, wins. The audience, through their collective applause, decides the winner. Another manifestation of play and competition is Vedikettu, or the display of fireworks by each group, where there is no official winner. The victory is decided by word of mouth and audience reaction. These elements of competition and play are what sustains and strengthens the magic circle, crafting a distinct world within it.

The two seemingly disjointed, oftentimes contrasted social forms: ritualistic and the ludic forms enmesh into each other creating a form where one contains the other as content. The emergent practices can be seen as a ritualistic form with ludic content or, ludic forms containing the ritualistic content. Such an enmeshment can perhaps be seen as the materialised instance of Mukherjee's Lila (Mukherjee, 2023). Such an entanglement questions the agency of the player/devotee. Performers perform both sacred and ludic duties, almost simultaneously. Throughout the festival, there is a paradox of deep devotion and intense competition. Despite engaging in a highly choreographed contest, the participants are aware that they are performing on sacred grounds. What may look like pure play on the surface is also a part of a sacred religious festival. For most participants, the act is both a sacred offering as well as a public performance of competition. This research examines the lived experience of the participant who navigates this blend of devotion and play, of sacred duty and competitive strategy. Although there is substantial anthropological work on rituals and on play, these are usually treated as separate domains. The intersection of rituals and play, particularly the ludic element of rituals, is undertheorized. Rituals often overshadow the elements of play. This paper argues that Thrissur Pooram functions as a ritual game, constructing its own magic circle, sustaining a blend of sacredness and play.

ABSTRACT. INTRODUCTION The search for lost authenticity has emerged as a key motivation for nostalgic desires within the context of digital games (Srirachanikorn 2024). The 21st century saw games transition from largely static artifacts to dynamic, continuously updated live-service experiences (Dubois and Westar 2022). In the case of Team Fortress 2 (Valve Software 2007), the introduction of a vast quantity of customisable cosmetic items and weapons profoundly altered the game’s iconic art style and play experience (Manning 2012; Mitchell et al., 2007; Moore 2011) to a state which bears little resemblance to the original launch version. While many enjoy these additions, there exists a “post-object fandom” (Williams, 2016) of veteran players nostalgic for the launch version of TF2, which through 18 years of updates has been made inaccessible and superseded by what is perceived as an inauthentic substitution. These tensions were beginning to be felt even 10 years earlier, when in 2014 work began on a community-developed mod today known as Team Fortress 2 Classified (Eminoma, 2025) which attempts a “re-imagining of the 2008-2009 era of Team Fortress 2” (TF2 Classified, 2025). TF2 Classified’s approach to authenticity and nostalgia is notable, as rather than presenting a rolled-back version of TF2, the mod also incorporates new content aligned with TF2’s original aesthetic and game design philosophy.

METHOD This research presents a comparative case study (Bartlett and Varvus 2017) focusing on TF2 Classified and World of Warcraft Classic (Blizzard Entertainment, 2019) two key instances where the ‘lost’ authenticity of a game experience has sought to be restored. The comparative case study is specifically informed by notions of modernities in authenticity (Canavan and McCamley, 2021), with a focus on postmodern and post-postmodern perspectives. This allows the analysis to step beyond simply acknowledging the basis of authenticity in these restoration projects and instead begin probing how different interpretations and philosophies of authenticity inform nostalgic game design practices and play experiences.

MODERNITIES AND AUTHENTICITY Modernities have stood as useful perspectives to unpack notions of authenticity, with postmodern authenticity deployed to explore the deconstruction of truth and cynicism towards quests for the real (Thompson and Tambyah 1999). Games like World of Warcraft Classic (Blizzard Entertainment 2019) have previously acted as examples of nostalgic gaming practices and can be understood through postmodern authenticity. Presented as a recreation of the “Vanilla” World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment 2004) gameworld and gameplay mechanics as they were in September 2006, WoW Classic offers a long-awaited ‘homecoming’ for nostalgic veterans (Toft-Nielsen, 2019; Bowman and Wulf, 2023). The nostalgic authenticity in WoW Classic allows players to revel in a hyperreal simulation of 2006 Vanilla WoW that is based not on accuracy, but rather the sensual pleasures constructed from players’ subjective memories, recollections, lived experiences, expectations and fantasies of Vanilla WoW from their nostalgic present. WoW Classic is not an exact facsimile of 2006 Vanila WoW; it contains quality-of-life improvements imported from contemporary versions of WoW and an updated codebase which goes as far as to reimplement Vanilla-era bugs which no longer (mis)function (Gravelle, 2019). Nostalgic play in WoW Classic is therefore negotiated and idealised based on what Jenkins (2007) describes as “sentimental myth” and players’ selective memories of Vanilla WoW; it is the feigned appearance of Vanilla WoW tuned to generate delight for contemporary players’ nostalgic sensibilities (Firat and Dholakia, 2006).

ALTERREALITY IN TEAM FORTRESS 2 CLASSIFIED If WoW Classic can be considered a postmodern “genuine fake” (Brown, 1996), then TF2 Classified represents a type of post-postmodern authenticity as a “fake genuine” (Canavan and McCamley, 2021). TF2 Classified similarly offers players access to an experience of TF2’s early years, but diverges from WoW Classic by presenting no guises about the nature of its nostalgic offerings. Beside restoring TF2’s original art style and gameplay mechanics, TF2 Classified also implements a swathe of content cut during TF2’s development, characters and gamemodes from prior Team Fortress titles and new content updates aligned with TF2’s original development values. Postmodern hyperreality is less apt here, as TF2 Classified makes no claim to recreating the bygone experience of early TF2 as it originally was. A more applicable notion stands in what Canavan and McCamley (2021) term as “alterreality;” a state contingent on the acceptance of “the multiplicity of truths, interpretations of events, memories and so forth available in any given situation.” TF2 Classified draws not just from the memories, expectations and realities of TF2, but also from the game’s potentialities embodied in developer commentaries, cut content data-mined from game files, obscure concept art, fan art, fan theories and other paratexts (Consalvo, 2017) which speak to hypothetical versions of TF2 which never came to fruition. In contrast to post-modernism’s deconstruction, the post-postmodern era invites reconstruction and the remaking of reality (Doyle, 2018). For TF2 Classified, authenticity is not derived from an accurate replication of TF2’s launch experience or a tantalising alternative experience offered under the original’s label. It instead does so by granting access to a hypothetical version of what TF2 could have been if it had stayed true to its original philosophies, reconstructed from the collective imaginaries and realities of the TF2 community.

CONCLUSION As more digital games see their update histories measured in decades rather than years, modernities of authenticity provide an additional tool to understand the growing complexities surrounding nostalgia, recreation and restoration in game design and play. As the examples in this research demonstrate, modders and developers alike are tapping into players’ desires to access game experiences which were not necessarily lost suddenly, but rather eroded over time before many could even acknowledge their loss. What emerges is a plurality of approaches which do not just look to the past, but look forward and parallel to create authentic experiences of nostalgia for players’ contemporary sensibilities.

ABSTRACT. Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey is prevalent in videogame discourse. As a design tool it is advocated (e.g., Schell 2020) and criticized (e.g., Nicklin 2020). In scholarship, it is used in analysis (e.g., Pugh 2018) but is also criticized as a rigidly linear and restrictive plot about an individual hero destined to succeed (e.g., Ensslin and Goorimoorthee 2020). However, these authors are not actually referring to Campbell’s work. They are instead discussing Christopher Vogler’s hero’s journey, a significantly different interpretation based more on film than on Campbell. Joseph Campbell first described the hero’s journey in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949 (Campbell 2004). Christopher Vogler circulated what he called a “practical guide” to Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey as a memo in 1985 and then as a book in 1992 (Vogler 2007). Campbell’s book is a dense, meandering psychoanalytic exploration of the purpose and meaning of myth, ritual, folklore, fairytales, and stories more generally. Vogler’s book presents a linear adventure plot and characters typical of popular movies, with only passing references to myth and psychoanalysis. Videogame scholars and designers appear unaware of this distinction and continue to credit Campbell whilst using Vogler. This misconception disconnects videogame discourse from Campbell’s work, from critiques of Campbell’s work in other fields such as religious studies (e.g., Segal 1987), and even from Vogler’s book. This leaves current arguments about the hero’s journey in videogames superficial and insubstantial. This paper aims to correct these misconceptions by comparing depictions of the hero’s journey in videogame scholarship and design publications against Campbell’s book and Vogler’s interpretation. This paper is specifically concerned with the hero’s journey’s reputation in videogames as a plot structure. In narratology, structuralism is concerned with the chronological events that happen and the actants involved in those events as they exist on the deepest level of a story (Herman and Vervaeck 2019). In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell (2004) describes the rules and processes by which a hero may approach an existentially significant goal. Campbell’s hero’s journey is best understood as a maze with many paths leading to repetition, stagnation, and failure as well as success, similar to Brémond’s (1970) tree diagram reconstruction of Propp’s (2013) morphology. In contrast, Vogler’s (2007) hero’s journey is a linear sequence of 12 chronological stages, similar to Propp’s (2013) morphology. To Vogler, a story is a hero’s journey if its plot includes those 12 stages in that order, although Vogler claims variance is possible. To investigate the hero’s journey’s reputation in videogame discourse, 57 publications about the hero’s journey in videogames were gathered between 2022 and 2024: 21 journal articles, 9 books, 5 book chapters, 12 conference presentations, and 10 web articles all published between 2000 and 2023. These publications include highly ranked academic journals (e.g., Games and Culture), books assigned in university courses (e.g., Brathwaite and Schreiber 2009), industry conferences (e.g., Game Developers Conference), and popular games news outlets (e.g., GameDeveloper.com). These publications were compared to identify how they describe the hero’s journey and who they cite. 53 of the 57 publications credit the hero’s journey to Joseph Campbell and 45 specifically cite The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Only 24 mention Christopher Vogler, only ever alongside Campbell and only ever credited as a popularizer of the hero’s journey. Yet the hero’s journey they discuss has far more in common with Vogler’s hero’s journey than Campbell’s. Not only do all publications describe or imply the hero’s journey is a linear plot, but 27 publications claim the hero’s journey specifically comprises 12 stages (e.g., Rollings and Adams 2003) or 17 stages (e.g., Costiuc 2016), with consistent stage names and order. The names and order of the 12-stage version matches Vogler’s 12 stages, and even the 17-stage version matches Vogler’s interpretation of Campbell’s chapter titles as a chronological plot, even though Campbell’s chapters are not dedicated to discrete events and do not follow a strictly chronological progression. 11 publications described a linear plot with a different number of stages, but these were almost always truncated versions of either the 12-stage or 17-stage version given by others and use similar names in the same order (e.g., Ensslin and Goorimoorthee 2020). These stage names even appear in publications that do not explain the hero’s journey in full or list all 12 or 17 the stages (e.g., Jennings 2022). Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces may seem well-understood and even over-discussed, but more than 20 years of videogame discourse suffers from the same citation error. Authors believe they are discussing Campbell’s hero’s journey but they are actually using, advocating, and criticizing Vogler’s. Meanwhile, Campbell’s work is barely acknowledged. Arguments about the hero’s journey either apply to Vogler but not to Campbell, such as criticisms of linearity (e.g., Koenitz et al. 2018), or they are accurate but incomplete and need further engagement with Campbell’s work, such as criticisms of its authoritarianism and misogyny (e.g., Jennings 2022). This error must be recognized and corrected before the hero’s journey can be meaningfully examined and critiqued.

ABSTRACT. Little research has explored how single-player videogames simulate the process of leadership, and the work that has been done focuses on examining the underlying ideologies of in-game leadership structures. This project expands on such work to analyze how the depiction of leader identities in single-player videogames often elides the intersectionality of cultural values, race-ethnicity, and gender. Through this analysis, I identify that many videogames present white masculinity as a default leader identity, and suggest alternatives for presenting more diverse leadership perspectives in videogames.

ABSTRACT. This article explores how games stage “cross-species affinities” through encounters with strange or uncanny creatures that unsettle familiar notions of affection, kinship, and pleasure. Drawing on Haraway’s “companion species” and posthuman theories of affect, it argues that these relations make agency visible as an emergent, shared process distributed across players, creatures, and game systems. Through close readings and sequential analyses of gameplay data of The Last Guardian (2016), In Full Bloom (2024), and RUMINANT 4444 (2025), the article shows how mechanics of care, risk, and reciprocity generate ambivalent forms of intimacy that challenge anthropocentric assumptions. These games reveal how interacting with the weird and nonhuman expands the boundaries of the imaginable and reconfigures what it means to act, feel, and relate across species lines.

ABSTRACT. This paper will explore how arboreal imagery is represented in Elden Ring (FromSoft 2021). By undertaking a textual analysis of the Erdtree and its related ecology, I make a case for the complex polysemy of its representation, focusing on roots, ecosystems, its meteorology and its related item descriptions. Elden Ring is the selected case study because it offers such a range of types of arboreal representation. It depicts propagation, rot, hierarchy, mutation and mythology in its characterisation of flora, and does so without being a game specifically about trees and adjacent ecologies. I make this case to offer a paradigm that will allow for ecologically complex games that do not specifically have be about ecology themselves. Existing scholarship on arboreal ecology in games considers how games can frequently neglect the representation of complex environments. Chang observes a tendency to relegate surrounding ecologies in games to merely background decorations (2019). Similarly, Abraham and Jayemanne note the industry-standard use of “skyboxes” to imply the environs beyond the player’s capacity to explore (2018). Elden Ring is distinctive in so much as it situates arboreal imagery centrally in terms of both its narrative and its world-building without ever being a game that is specifically about trees or ecology. Equally, this is not to say that Elden Ring is an ecocritically focused game. The player/Tarnished is necessarily environmentally destructive, which would seem to justify Abraham’s scepticism of games’ capacity to incite climate action (2022). However, it will be argued that the relationship between the arboreal and its symbolic, mythological and spatial meaning is more complex than a much-needed call to preserve ecologies. Building on studies that examine plant ecology and gaming (Chang 2019; Sellar 2024), I aim to unpick depicted polysemy, gesturing to a plurality of ways that arboreal imagery can be layered, designed and packaged for players. The arboreal in Elden Ring is multifaceted in its connection to both the Erdtree and areas that immediately surround it. One way that I will unpick these associations is by employing a hauntological approach (Derrida 1994; Fisher 2014) to understand how the depiction of trees and adjacent flora are “haunted” by The Shattering (a cataclysmic war between the demi-gods caused by the shattering of the Elden Ring itself). Hauntology is defined as something that is no longer present in actuality but that persists in virtuality (Fisher 2014). Further, Fisher recognises that Hauntology is also that which has not yet happened, but which remains effective in the present (2014). In game studies, Kłosiński and Zarzycka discuss how biopolitical ideologies relate hauntologically in railway simulators (2025) and Skott and Bengton explore hauntology in gaming in relation to carceral violence and player entrapment. Ford’s (2021) analysis of ancient civilisations in games notes a hauntological nostalgia for lost, but advanced technologies. This convincingly outlines the dual momentum of hauntology I aim to interrogate, of both the persistence of the past in the present as well as the centrality of loss to futurity. In Elden Ring, Minor Erdtrees exemplify these structures of hauntology, existing as part of the Erdtree’s ecosystem specifically as offshoots because The Shattering removed the divine tree’s immortality and necessitated attempts at propagation (see Figure 1). Minor Erdtrees’ resemblance to the looming Erdtree they came from serves as a visual hauntology, what Derrida might have formerly identified as a “trace” (1994); their existence in the virtual present is marked by the past distress that The Shattering imposed on the Erdtree originally. Yet such seed dispersal in response to a catastrophic event is also future facing, engendering a survival drive that is simultaneously expressing the need to endure but also mourning the loss of the Erdtree’s Pre-Shattering immortality. Ecological alignments with hauntology will also be explored in relation to the mutated biome of Caelid, whose landscape blooms with fungus and is riddled with Scarlet Rot, a destructive product of a Shattering-based war between two demi-gods, Radahn and Melania. The ruined environ references The Shattering in its desolation and analysis will centre on the Putrid Minor Erdtree and the Putrid Avatar. Recognising these extensions of the Erdtree’s ecosystem, I will make the case for Caelid as a rotten and devastated version of a future that could have been, it is at once a residue of a war of The Shattering, but also a twisted manifestation of a future that never was. The evocative nature of arboreal imagery in Elden Ring also calls for an approach to analysis that considers the mythologies that the game evokes from outside of the text’s lore. There are a range of preexisting arboreal mythologies drawn on and I will assess the extent to which these alignments can be considered hauntological. These include the celestial fruit-bearing tree, Jambu in Hindu culture (Porteous 2002), as well as the cedar trees of the Gilgamesh Epos and the great Ash of Norse mythology, Yggdrasil (Nitzke and Braunbeck 2021). Moreover, the player is required to burn down the Erdtree at a certain point in the narrative, which will be investigated in relation Promethean legend (Neville 1996), questioning whether this act is emancipatory, an act of liberation from the overbearing Golden Order (a monotheistic fundamentalist religion dedicated to the worship of Queen Marika), or an ecological disruption, refuting the authority of the Erdtree’s ever-reaching canopy and adjacent ecosystems. Further points of analysis will include the ethereal spirit trees of the Mountaintops of the Giants, as well as the root systems of the Deeproot Depths. This paper will be of interest to game scholars and designers who are interested in ecological representation, gaming and philosophy, ecogaming, horticulture in games and post-apocalyptic games.

REFERENCES Abraham, B. 2022. Digital Games after Climate Change, Palgrave Macmillan. Abraham, B., Jayemanne, D. 2018. Where are all the climate change games? Locating digital games’ response to climate change, Transformations, 30, 74-89. Chang, A. 2019. Playing Nature, University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. 1994. Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Routledge. Fisher, M. 2014. Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Zero Books. Ford, D. 2021. “The Haunting of Ancient Societies in the Mass Effect Trilogy and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild” Game Studies, 22 (4), n.p. FromSoft. 2021. Elden Ring. Multi-console game. FromSoft. Kłosiński, M., & Zarzycka, A. 2025. “Trains, Stations, and Railways as Harbingers of Biopolitics in Digital Games: From Governance to Hauntology”. Games and Culture, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120251353555 Neville, B. 1996. ‘Prometheus, the Technologist’ International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 15 (2), 12–23. Nitzke S., & Braunbeck, H. 2021. ‘Arboreal Imaginaries: An Introduction to the Shared Cultures of Trees and Humans’ Green Letters, 25(4), 341-355, DOI: 10.1080/14688417.2021.2072633 Porteous, A. 2002. The Forest in Folklore and Mythology. Dover Publications Inc. Sellar, M. 2024. “Hiding (in) The Tall Grass: Rethinking Background Assets in Video Game Plantscapes” In Ecogames: A Playful Perspective on the Climate Crisis, edited by op de Beke, L, Raessens, J., Werning, S. & Farca, G. 353-372. University of Amsterdam Press. Skott, S., & Skott Bengtson, K.-F. 2021. ‘You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?’: A Hauntological Analysis of Carceral Violence in Majora’s Mask. Games and Culture, 17(4), 593-613. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120211049575

ABSTRACT. In this extended abstract, we propose to construct a mapping and analysis of entangled queer player-game experiences with Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (ZA/UM, 2021). Beginning with the self in the hybrid role of player-researcher, we adopt a feminist materialist perspective to examine experiences with the game in our respective and situated positions as queer players, drawing on elements such as personal history, bodily affect and queer affirmation in the process. We do this to construct an entangled player-game cartography of queerness in Disco Elysium, a mapping which simultaneously reveals how queerness is entangled with the game and how such entanglements contribute to considerations of queerness more generally.

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut (2021) is a third person Role-Playing Game (RPG) which weaves together elements common to crime fiction with those that are more surreal and abstracted. This culminates in a philosophically-engaged game with multiple narratives that centre around morally ambiguous characters who all live in a world designed around themes of existential dread and ambiguity. Playing as police officer Harry Du Bois in the fictional city of Revachol, you encounter various active and passive skill checks throughout your time playing the game, signalled by the sound of dice rolling.

These moments decide your success at various actions and dialogue options, yielding unique playthroughs overtly dependent not only on character statistics but also probability. Exemplifying this is Kim Kitsuragi, another police officer who, after passing a specific and difficult-to-encounter skill-check, discloses his identity as a gay man. Of central interest in this project is how queer disclosures are locked behind such skill checks in Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, and what impact failing them has on encounters with queer characters and elements in the game. This is similarly the case with other queer characters you may encounter in the game, many of whom are central to the game’s main narrative, which brings into question if and how queerness may be encountered independent of the act of disclosure.

This consideration of queerness independent of disclosure is our key concern in this proposal. Approaching this from the perspective of queer players, we are interested in examining how queer player perspectives entangle with, and reveal, aspects of queerness and queer identity in Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, considering what this implies about considerations of queerness more generally. To do this, we begin by considering the Kim character, focussing on how encounters with him in the quotidian rhythms of the game’s environments reveals a radically ordinary yet structurally powerful interpretation of queer identity, independent of disclosure(s).

Central to this mapping of entangled queer identity is our use of Carr’s (2006, 2019) work on textual analysis and Kuntz’s (2018) radical cartographies. Collectively, we use their works to formulate a cartographical method that involves the isolation and analysis of specific in-game elements and how they relate back to the player in a process of reflexivity and relational inquiry. We see this as an iterative process in line with Barad’s concept of entanglements, with successive considerations offering continuously novel insights and mappings as entanglements between player and game are (re)negotiated and (re)considered.

Implementing this research method, we consider and map our relations with Disco Elysium: The Final Cut as queer player-researchers, using specific in-game elements and/or player experiences as anchors to orient around as we encounter queerness in the game (see Ahmed, 2006). While initially completed in isolation, we seek to bring these elements together in a collaborative endeavour to consider how commonalities and deviations create the contours of our queer map. Of particular use here is Sedgwick’s (2009) work on ‘reparative’ and ‘paranoid’ readings, which we use as a comparative tool to assist in our discussions of how elements associated with queerness are identified in the game.

Overall, we present this project as an endeavour to account for quotidian instances of queerness, mapping out their occurrences in Disco Elysium: The Final Cut, and propose it as a novel contribution to the field of Game Studies and its sub-field Queer Game Studies as a result. Our exegesis of the entangled confluence of our reading of the game and consideration of personal experiences will show how, contra to other understandings of the source of digital games’ value as binary, individuated objects of control (ideological or dogmatic rule systems, Bogost’s procedural rhetoric (2008), etc.) or solely the product of players’ interpretative work, that the affective power of these artistic works lies in their capacity for participation and co-construction.