ABSTRACT. This paper examines Urbek City Builder (Fridus, 2022), a Chilean city-building videogame that introduces localized representations and mechanics linked to Latin American urban imaginaries. While mainstream city builders such as SimCity and Cities: Skylines generally reproduce Global North perspectives—prioritizing economic growth, individual management, and private transport—Urbek incorporates architectural references, socio-historical elements, and resource systems that challenge these conventions. Drawing on Hall’s Circuit of Culture, and combining autoethnography, production analysis and paratextual research (Discord and Steam), the study investigates how players and communities interpret such elements and whether these are recognized as Latin American. The paper contributes to discussions on Latin American game studies, global circulation, and the potential of city builders to articulate alternative cultural meanings.

ABSTRACT. The study analises how gamers change their games in diferent seasons.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract critically explores and analyses the aesthetic codes and possibilities that impact how we experience virtual party environments through two examples.

ABSTRACT. In 2025, Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch, and Bennett Foddy released Baby Steps, a sort of follow up to Foddy’s earlier physics games Getting over It with Bennett Foddy (2017) and QWOP (2008). Early impressions dismissed Baby Steps as a “meme game,” designed to be yet another difficult, rage-bait game targeted at streamers for its ability to gain views from the extreme reactions it provokes from players. While it can be brutally difficult, it slowly reveals itself to be a pensive mediation on toxic masculinity and the permeable boundary between games and the real world. This talk examines Baby Steps as a critical game that leverages difficult gameplay to facilitate critical reflection and, in so doing, models a kind of antifascist approach to game design.

ABSTRACT. In the algorithmically curated landscapes of contemporary video games, players loot, hoard, and consume with a fervour that mirrors and often magnifies the rhythms of late capitalism. From the pixelated mazes of Pac-Man to the hyperreal delivery routes of Death Stranding, games have evolved into complex systems of accumulation, where virtual objects are not merely tools or rewards but symbols within a mythic economy of desire. In the first part, we discuss how primal survival human instincts are played with to reinforce ideological structures. Shifting player’s gaze and desire towards consumption and accumulation. Following this analysis, we offer an ecological alternative model of play and engagement enriched by testimonies from yearlong in game ethnographic study of 20 PUBG mobile players across 5 different player squads and speculation by the authors.

ABSTRACT. This paper will analyse the ways in which the video game The Séance of Blake Manor (Spooky Doorway, 2025) utilizes game mechanics based around text manipulation and examination to engage the player in a supernatural mystery story set around the revival of Irish national identity in the late 19th century. Taking place at a séance in Western Ireland in 1897, the player takes on the role of Dublin detective Declan Ward and will be immersed in a narrative at the intersection of mystery, folk horror and their ties to the roots of Irish nationalism. The analysis of The Séance of Blake Manor will build on the work by Clara Fernández-Vara’s interdisciplinary approach to the mystery genre in video games. In “Game Narrative Through the Detective Lens” (2018), Fernández-Vara examines the ways in which detective and mystery stories have always contained ludic element. She quotes Bulgarian-French historian and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov’s description of the pleasure of these stories as one of reconstruction of a text the author has in mind. From Todorov’s “The Poetics of Prose” (1977): “The story of the crime happens before the story starts, while the story of the investigation is how the first story is discovered.” (Fernández-Vara, 2018). That is, the enjoyment in these stories is from the reader taking the same position as the detective in trying to anticipate and reconstruct the story that the author has in mind and has not yet revealed. Expanding on Fernández-Vara, this paper analyses how, in games like The Séance of Blake Manor, the player is not only reconstructing the story internally as a reader but actively doing so mechanically through manipulation of the text itself. For example, in the adventure games that reached their height of popularity in the 80s and 90s and preceded this title, players were presented a list of nouns and a list of verbs to choose from. Successful advancement in these narrative focused games consisted in combining the right noun with the right verb and constructing the correct sentence to continue progressing the story. The Séance of Blake Manor forms part of a new generation of games that have evolved the mechanics of textual manipulation in novel ways. It successfully combines many of these innovations into one experience. In the game, the player must work out the identities of twenty other guests at the manor from nouns found within its 3D environment and context clues, similar to Return of the Obra Dinn (Warp Digital, 3909 LLC, 2018). The player must also connect text ideas to form new deductions that will open new avenues for investigation, as in Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments (Frogwares, 2014). And the player will collect nouns, verbs and adjectives through an investigation of their environment and dialogues with the other guests so that they can then complete the missing gaps in sentences that deliver further clues to the mystery, as in The Case of the Golden Idol (Color Gray Games, 2022). Through such a multi-varied mechanical approach of textual manipulation, players are incentivised to fully explore and learn all the secrets of Blake manor. They dialogue extensively with a wide variety of guests that represent a cross section of late 19th century Irish society. They find journals, object descriptions and other textual clues as to the growing dissatisfactions and social tensions of the time. And, as they advance in the story, they will be confronted by a supernatural curse that reveals much about the generational harm enacted on Ireland’s rural populations. The game’s setting is crucial to this rich interplay between text and game mechanics. Set in 1897, Ireland was then undergoing a cultural revival in which authors such as William Butler Yeats sought to reawaken the country’s sense of cultural identity by collecting the old folk stories and myths of its past. The ludic pleasures to be had in the uncovering of the central mystery and manipulation of the narrative’s text mirrors this centrality of stories and storytelling to the Irish national identity, a symbiosis that is unique in video games. The game’s folk horror mystery is also new addition to the recent study of how this genre has developed in the medium (such as in the work of Tanya Krzywinska). It adds further evidence that folk horror narratives are characterised by the conflict between a supposedly sophisticated urban world and rural communities that are seen as threatening in their attachment to tradition and whose past haunts the present. This paper will be of interest to academics focused on the relationship of narrative to gameplay and engaged in modelling how players interact with narratives. It will also be useful to scholars looking at the intersection between history, cultural identity and storytelling, and how these subjects find their expression in the medium of games. Finally, it will be of use to anyone interested in the enjoyment to be had in the myriad ways we interact with the stories we tell about each other, to each other.

ABSTRACT. Games explicitly marketed to girls have historically been characterized by highly stereotypical themes and aesthetics, as well as limited gameplay. In response to scholarly calls to diversify, queer, and appropriate games in order to represent a wider range of identities, this talk assesses the current state of girls’ games using a quantitative analysis of those featured on Mattel’s website and the first 20 sites listed by Google under the search query “girls’ games.”

ABSTRACT. Left finger contracting, left leg arching; left thumb turning, left hip pivoting and body leaning. Grip released, foot planted; right finger grips, right leg lifts. The mountain seems to move under our toes. This is the micro loop of Baby Steps (Foddy, Cuzzilo & Boch 2025), an intensely difficult walking simulator of vertiginous scope, and also the core loop of Baby Steps (2025) ,a sublimely granular mountain simulator at a uniquely micro scale. In this extended abstract I argue that the emergent phenomenological and ontological complexity of this minimalist design demands a new perspective on walking simulators produced by thinking both at once: man feeling mountain, mountain feeling man.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the relevance of literary-based memory and identity studies for understanding queer autobiographical videogames, addressing a persistent gap in game research, where such works are often studies through the framework of “empathy.” Drawing on the writings of Candau (1998), Eakin (2005, 2008), Lejeune (1989), and Pollack (1992, 1993) we identify four analytical categories central to autobiographical genres – the autobiographical pact, proper name, homeostatic function, and norms of “normalcy” – and apply them in close readings of the games dys4ia (Anthropy 2012), Coming Out Simulator (Case 2014), and He Fucked the Girl Out of Me (McCue 2022). Our analysis demonstrates both continuities and productive tensions between literary autobiography and queer digital life writing. We argue that memory and identity studies illuminate how queer creators mobilize autobiographical games to document marginalized histories, challenge official memory, and resist hegemonic identity norms.

ABSTRACT. While literature has indicated temporal shifts in gameplay engagement, few studies examine how exploration pleasures evolve in open-world games, particularly the impact of familiarity on exploring and the role of nostalgia for first discoveries. This qualitative study explored changes in exploration joy over time, familiarity's transformative effects, and strategies to recapture first-discovery emotions, including “exploration nostalgia” wherein players seek to relive the emotional intensity of their initial discoveries. Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 16 experienced players (Mean age=26.8 years; mean hours in game=182) of open-world games (Elden Ring, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Valheim, among others) revealed six themes: Initial Novelty Thrill, Sadness of Losing Novelty, Factors Affecting Exploration, Factors reducing Joy of Exploration, Nostalgia Triggers, and Strategies for Recapturing Exploration Nostalgia. Findings deepen understanding of gameplay behaviour from exploration excitement to nostalgia, advancing game research by pioneering insights into players deriving enjoyment from evolving exploration behaviours.

ABSTRACT. The thesis to which this paper is a part of is focused centrally on queer Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander experiences and resistances within and around the playing of videogames. It further engages sites of queer Indigenous public representation and builds on the emerging literature of Indigenous gameplay to understand what that representation may mean for queer Indigenous players and what may form resistance to existing practices. Central to the paper is a set of discussions with queer Indigenous people who game, as they disclose their hopes and aspirations and their practices of engagement and resistance regardless of whether games are providing an inclusive or ‘safe’ space. Through a stand-alone survey, they have disclosed their own thoughts on what it means to be a queer Indigenous person engaged in gameplay. This project is located within the Australian Research Council Saving Lives: mapping the impact of LGBTIQA+ Indigenous Artists program (O’Sullivan, 2021), that demonstrate what queer, and queer Indigenous representation – or a lack of it – can mean for joyful and fulfilling leisure. Respondents’ experiences and reflections are valuable insights into practices that take form when putting what Maria Lugones idea of ‘world-travelling’ into action (2003). Lugones’ uses the idea of world-travelling to describe a person’s capacity to navigate places that are not fit for purpose and create their own pathway through colonially-loaded spaces. World-travelling can take place in any area that is dominated by colonialities and colonial forces, videogames included. These navigation capacities are developed by dealing with colonial stories and heteronormative impositions as queer Indigenous players find themselves as ‘unexpected readers’ (Castillo, 2022, n.p.). Across the thesis the idea of the ‘unexpected reader’ is transformed into the unexpected player. Elaine Castillo frames the unexpected reader as one who is unable to directly relate to the stories and characters represented. The unexpected reader is required to build connections across stories and characters that are not familiar or are not created with their existence in mind. Similar experiences were raised by Gaining Lives survey respondents when dealing with videogames characters and stories. For this reason, across the thesis I have adapted Castillo's concept of the unexpected reader to a gaming context in what I will consistently refer to, and explore, as the unexpected player. Unexpected players, in this rendering, are required to navigate both colonial reiterations and impositions in videogames through world-travelling, and in order to locate their own pathways in a manner that they deem fit for purpose This paper focuses on what play means and does for the queer Indigenous players that responded to the survey. While the social activity of play alludes to numerous activities and affects (see Ruberg, 2015; 2019; Trammel, 2023), in the context of this study play is understood as engagement with a leisure activity, in this instance, videogames. This presentation will attend to the meanings that respondents have given to play and considered through their practices. Play, in respondents’ arguments, has a close connection to the characters discussed in the previous chapter and to being able to shift representational power relationships. Furthermore, gameplay is how respondents engage with videogames and what meaning they give to their practices. These interconnections give play a different sense that is not separated from practices as well as showing how respondents’ world-travelling and unexpected player situation influences approaches to play.

ABSTRACT. This abstract presents an emergent phenomenon of parasocial grief (Wullenkord & Brüggeshemke, 2025) through contextual framing of the meme “o7” in the Steam community surrounding the single-player game RimWorld (Ludeon Studios, 2018). The case presented here offers an insight into how mod-users mourn and commemorate a modder’s passing, indicating parasocial relationships that have otherwise remained hidden, but which are exposed in the expression of parasocial grief. Parasocial Grief describes the sense of loss experienced when a parasocial relationship ends, in some cases leading to the creation of memorial sites on social media (Sanderson & Hope Cheong, 2010). Modding in games communities has been researched from a variety of angles, such as pro- and antisocial perceptions (Curtis et al., 2022), modding as a cultural, creative, and communal space (Sihvonen, 2021), and as collaborative practices (Sotamaa, 2010) to name but a few. Yet mod-users’ reflections on the loss of a modder and what such indicate in terms of intersections of play and parasocial relations within a single-player game community are unclear from the current literature.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract examines how superfans shape the contemporary League of Legends fan ecosystem, where platformed spectatorship, emotional investment, and transnational fandom flows intersect. Drawing on a mixed-methods design that includes a bilingual survey and cross-cultural interviews, the research identifies the time, emotional, and monetary inputs that underpin superfan practices. These practices generate pleasure, identity, and community while contributing to wider participatory cultures. The study proposes a Superfan Influence Model that outlines four pathways of influence: visibility amplification, social coordination, economic signalling, and boundary-work. Cross-cultural comparison demonstrates how East Asian idol-culture logics strongly inform Chinese fandom practices, while similar dynamics appear more loosely structured among European and North American participants. The findings highlight superfans as culturally embedded actors who shape visibility, discourse, and stakeholder behaviour within esports ecologies, offering new insights into how globalised fandom formations reconfigure participation and affective labour in platform-mediated environments. Due to time constraints, only the extended abstract is submitted at this stage; a full paper will be produced if invited.

ABSTRACT. This study examines the role of intergenerational video game play in fostering gaming capital and gamer identity among elderly players (aged 65 and above). While older adults remain underrepresented in gaming spaces, intergenerational play offers opportunities for socialization, skill acquisition, and identity formation. Drawing on Social Identity Theory and the concept of gaming capital, we analyze interview data and survey responses. Preliminary findings suggest that intergenerational play enhances family bonding and encourages sustained engagement, though skill gaps and shifting dynamics limit long-term participation. Insights aim to inform inclusive design strategies and promote equitable access for aging populations.

ABSTRACT. This research contributes to the understanding of the dynamic sector of gaming and its role in promoting mental well-being, specifically focusing on the new and under-investigated genre of cozy games. Recent studies have indicated that mindful engagement with games can positively influence mental well-being such as reduction in anxiety and stress (Barr & Copeland-Stewart, 2022). Cozy games represent a genre celebrated for their calming, warm, and soft characteristics, offering players a wholesome gaming experience exemplified by titles like Animal Crossing: New Horizon (Nintendo, 2020) (Barr & Copeland-Stewart, 2022). The term ‘wholesome’ encapsulates concepts of moral virtue, physical well-being, innocence, and upliftment (Stevenson, 2010; Waite, 2012). This study employed semi-structured interviews, recognized as an ideal tool for gathering rich data on personal experiences, opinions, and meanings, especially regarding a deeply personal topic like mental well-being (Brennen, 2017; Kvale, 2011). A total of twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted via Zoom, each lasting 45-60 minutes, until thematic saturation was reached.The research findings revealed that cozy games provide gratifications that extend beyond mere hedonic pleasures, leading to a more profound and meaningful escapism that fosters growth and healing. Crucially, the research challenged the strict classification of coping mechanisms into either purely emotion-focused or problem-focused (Lee & Chen, 2023). Participants simultaneously employed cozy games for dual functionality: immediate emotion-focused coping (stress relief) and later, problem-focused coping (gaining mental clarity). This suggests that cozy games act as a "psychological airlock," transitioning players from a high-stress state to a regulated state where they can address real-world problems.

ABSTRACT. The present article proposes to explore anti-woke player practices that go in open opposition to the tendency of including LGBTQ+ representation in video games, and their implications for both player cultures and video games as a medium. We propose to analyse the user discourse around Baldur’s Gate 3’s No Alphabets mod (orinEsque 2023), within the material infrastructures of modding platforms, right-wing extremism, AI usage, and censorship.

ABSTRACT. This article examines how post-pandemic gaming platforms and cultures transform “playtime” into social currency. Grounding our analysis in a collective autoethnography of unfinished Baldur’s Gate 3 playthroughs, we situate backlog guilt and technical upkeep within histories of gendered leisure. We argue that platform ecologies—from Steam metrics to Discord sociality—intensify the pressure to optimize leisure as capital. Contributing to critical conversations on digital playbour within the DiGRA community, we conceptualize how these platforms and subcultures produce manifestations of what we term “playtime anxiety.” This framework reveals how technical performance obscures the labour of play, narrowing legitimate participation and reconfiguring "not-playing" as a social and moral failure.

ABSTRACT. This study examines how Chinese otome game players construct virtual to real intimacy through the emerging phenomenon, ‘cosplay commissions’, where they pay cosplayers to portray game characters and perform scripted encounters (e.g. Chen et al. 2025; Zhou et al. 2024). Unlike the virtual romance already designed in otome games, commissioned performances let players choose cosplayers, create scenarios, and shape emotional experiences through relational labor. Cosplayers negotiate constructed intimacy through continuous identity shifts, moving between performer, emotional laborer, and service provider roles (Bandelj 2020; Baym 2015; Duffy 2016; Hochschild 2022). Cosplay commissions bring in-game intimacy into offline interaction and reshape dynamics of identity, expectation, and power among participants.

Existing research on paid intimacy shows that emotional connection in commercial contexts is produced through negotiated emotional and relational work rather than spontaneous sentiment (Zelizer 2000). Emotional labor involves managing expressions to create a desired atmosphere, while relational labor highlights ongoing responsiveness that sustains connection (e.g. Hochschild 2022; Baym 2015). In digital romance, quasi-virtual intimacy explains how emotions formed in virtual settings seek grounding in interpersonal interaction (Chen et al. 2025). These perspectives help explain why emotions formed in otome gameplay come to be enacted in offline commissioned encounters. This study explores how commercial and emotional relationships are integrated within cosplay commissions, and analyzes emotional labor from the dual perspectives of players (commissioners) and cosplayers (commission recipients), thereby filling a gap in existing research.

This study shows that paid cosplay commissions provide a pathway for transforming virtual romance from otome games into embodied and emotionally reciprocal interaction. Players and cosplayers both invest emotion, and through preparation, live interaction, and post-session feedback, they construct a temporary but meaningful form of closeness. Players use commissions to make imagined affection feel real, while cosplayers gain not only income but also a sense of being valued through emotional recognition.

The study also highlights that intimacy in this context is actively performed and shaped by ongoing negotiation. Boundaries, rules, and agreed expectations help both sides remain emotionally engaged and make it possible for intimacy and monetary exchange to coexist. At the same time, this intimacy is influenced by commercial aims, personal limits, and occasional mismatched expectations. These findings extend existing research by showing how virtual intimacy within otome games is grounded, negotiated, and emotionally sustained through collaborative labor in a commercialized setting.

ABSTRACT. Anecdotally, it is common for people to revisit video games that they have played before. However, relatively little is known about how video games might affect their audience differently upon the second, third, or nth play-through. As part of a larger study on replaying experiences, we collected self-report data (current n ~ 400) about psychological traits and preferences related to replay motivations. This project contributes to our understanding of selective exposure for video game experiences.

ABSTRACT. “Figure out the ideal habitat of forgotten flora” and “nurture the Abbess' garden” are two excerpts that feature in the promotional texts of the respective recent cozy botany-themed games Botany Manor (Balloon Studios 2024) and The Abbess Garden Demo (MD Studio 2025). These descriptions and the games’ main mechanics fall in line with characteristics usually encountered in cozy games: safety, abundance, and softness (Short et al. 2018). Both games also feature historical settings, which typically encompass themes of (male) violence (Serrano Lozano 2020; Wright 2022), annexation (Holdenried and Trépanier 2013; Chapman 2016), a “March of Progress” narrative (Fogu 2009; Houghton 2024), and historically inspired gendered limitations (Orellana Figueroa 2022; Barba-Alonso and Ortega-Sánchez 2024). Through textual analysis of the abovementioned games, this paper explores what happens to representation of historical realities when the prioritisation of ludic, narrative, and visual safety (Waszkiewicz 2024) renders the past cozy. By centering female protagonists tending to plants in two different historical contexts (Victorian England and Grand Siècle France), these games are fruitful case studies to better understand how videogames mediate the pleasures of cultivating nature in the past, exploring intersecting themes of gender, science, and harm.

Botany Manor and The Abbess Garden feature core mechanics that link affect to care and observation of plants: players nurture, examine, and discover plants while gathering botanical knowledge, encouraging slow, attentive engagement with the gameworld. This emphasis on the “vegetal,” common in cozy games (Pinder 2024), reflects their affective design, inviting players to “nurture, care, and tend to” (Bódi 2024, 58). In Vandewalle’s (2025) work on conceptualizing historical cozy games, he foregrounds elements of "a cozy mode of historical games" that feature elements such as "nature", "collectives" and "non-photorealist aesthetics", which elements are present in our case study games as well. He also notes an absence of specific timeframe and "a complete or potential absence of violence". Botany Manor and The Abbess' Garden offer expansions on this initial framework, as these games do incorporate specific historical settings and both titles embed narratives of power, politics, and harm. They acknowledge historical structures of inequality and danger but displace these into text and dialogue rather than gameplay. In Botany Manor, players assume the role of Arabella Greene, a botanist whose career was constrained by institutional sexism, revealed through letters, instead of direct playable obstacles. Similarly, The Abbess Garden hints at threats to the abbey under a new king, conveyed through conversation rather than active manageable peril. This design allows players to inhabit historically informed worlds without experiencing danger firsthand. As such, this paper argues that it is not just plants players tend to and cultivate in these games, it is also the historical imaginary, harnessing cozy games’ potential to contribute to a “new mode of doing history in games” (Vandewalle 2025, 2).

Botany has long occupied a liminal space between science and domesticity. Men’s plant classification was framed as “science”, while women’s botanical illustrations and knowledge were dismissed as “hobby”, “art”, or “domestic labour” (Shteir 1996; Sagal 2022). As such, botany naturally draws attention to historically gendered power dynamics, which these games recreate mechanically (by focusing on care as feminine labour) and representationally (male non-player characters often are dismissive and threatening). Sullivan et al. (2020) demonstrate that gendered power dynamics extend into game mechanics themselves, where crafting mechanics become linked to the feminized, domestic, and leisure. We argue that similar influences are in effect in the realm of ludic botanical care. Additionally, the masculine scientific authority that historically dismissed women’s botanical labour also intersects with the colonial authority in botanical classification. As Minnen and Kagen (2025) argue, the labeling and collecting of knowledge of plants emerge from colonial taxonomies that impose order on the natural world. The catalogues are present in both games and function as systems of classification that establish mechanisms of knowledge, contributing to a feeling of control that strengthens the “cozy” orderly atmosphere these titles cultivate. This paper analyses how the games' classification and care-based mechanics build scientific knowledge, and how these knowledge practices remain entangled with the gendered and colonial histories that shaped botany.

The cozy gameplay design transforms these sites of historical injustice into cozy spaces for exploration. History becomes a curated archive of harm, inciting players to interact with it indirectly through letters, books, and conversations. Additionally, the games allow players to voluntarily engage critically with how knowledge was produced, gendered and policed. This paper argues that Botany Manor and The Abbess Garden challenge conventional notions of historical games, suggesting that the comfort and care embedded in cozy game design can provide new ways of experiencing and critically reflecting on the past, allowing players to indirectly, yet meaningfully, explore historical injustice. As such, its audience is scholars interested in the intersection of game studies, game design, environmental humanities, and history.

ABSTRACT. Calls for playfulness in research suggest that playful research can, among other things, bring joy and pleasure of learning (Nørgård and Moseley 2021). As Trammel (2020) argues, however, games can be oppressive and traumatizing for the minority voices participating – and the game of academia is not an exception here. Despite game studies scholars looking into policing pleasures and access to play for decades, the discipline itself has yet to overcome its internal access limitations that restrict the pleasure of learning for the voices outside the majority. Postcolonial research in game studies is one area aiming to break the unequal representation of different cultures, races and ethnicities in game studies, bringing in minority perspectives. However, as Mukherjee (2017) notes, a big chunk of postcolonial theory and what has been taken from it by game studies presents the Western, or, more often, Western European perspective. With the discourses being so focused on imperial Europe and responses to its actions, other empires remain less discussed – and results of their colonization less seen. The European colonizers are often grouped under the umbrella of whiteness. While the discussions around issues with grouping people of color under one label are more common postcolonial theory (Gunew 1997), non-monolithic nature of whiteness deserves greater attention (Imre 2012). It is the lack of this diversity that leads to one-sidedness of the discussions surrounding epistemic injustice in game studies. Unpacking the notion of “dirty whiteness,” Harrer (2024) notes how Eastern European whiteness keeps being condescended upon and marginalized by those embodying “eurowhiteness.” Bringing in this division, however, does not automatically show all the nuances of yet another division that worsens the epistemic violence and exclusion of certain nationalities. Ukraine is among the countries that remain underrepresented even as a part of Eastern Europe. Ukraine has long been excluded from discussions on postcolonialism (Khylko and Khylko 2024) due to whiteness of the population and an oppressor not being a European empire. At the same time, Ukraine had long been a factual colony, and only recently regained some independence, that has been and is being threatened by Russian military invasion. In many areas, game studies included, the invisibility of a postcolonial position of Ukraine, masked under “post-Soviet” generalizations, led to the lack of acknowledgement of Ukrainian scholars’ struggles. Game studies, however, is a specific case. Like most knowledge fields, it is shaped by global hierarchies that determine who is recognized as a legitimate producer of theory. It is also rather new, is often presented as a particularly international and intersectional field, and requires access to particular products (e.g., digital game platforms) and spaces. This extended abstract presents our in-progress collaborative autoethnographic project as Ukrainian game studies scholars, outlining our theoretical framework and emerging reflections. Building on Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice, we argue that Ukrainian scholars face a dual barrier to participation in game studies: structural inaccessibility within Ukraine, and epistemic misrecognition within Western institutions. Together, these barriers restrict not only who can enter the field, but also which forms of knowledge are treated as credible within it. This study aims to point at the limitations of current discussions on diversity and accessibility in game studies, and show how these discussions reflect broader epistemic injustice despite topics of power and privilege having been raised more frequently in the past decade.

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the role of video games in supporting the resilience of the Galician language (Galicia, Northern Spain), a minoritized language situated in a highly globalized digital environment. While video games are increasingly central to global cultural production, minority and minoritized languages often remain marginal within both commercial and independent game spaces. The dominance of English, alongside major global languages such as Spanish, French or Japanese, creates particular challenges for smaller linguistic communities seeking representation in interactive media. Departing from the premise that the interactive and immersive nature of video games makes them a particularly significant site for language use and cultural transmission, this paper explores how Galicia’s gaming heritage and contemporary development and translation practices engage with the Galician language, and how these interactions can contribute to shedding light on broader questions regarding cultural sustainability and the role of interactive media in supporting linguistic revitalization initiatives. The paper is based on a research visit to the Museo do videoxogo de Galicia (Galician Video Game Museum, MUVi), an institution dedicated to collecting and narrating video games and video game history in Galicia. This cultural institution provides a useful archive for understanding the relationship between video games and linguistic identities. Following research on minority linguistic landscapes in museums and tourist environments (Pietikäinen & Kelly-Holmes, 2011; Robinson-Jones, 2022), I examine how the museum preserves, catalogues, and displays material relating to Galician language and identity. This includes analyzing exhibition practices, metadata systems, examples of Galician-language interfaces, games created in Galician originally or with a Galician language component, fan translations and localization efforts, promotional materials, and documentation of the regional gaming industry’s evolution. Through systematic documentation and analysis of the museum’s holdings, this research creates a comprehensive database of Galician-language gaming materials that reveals patterns in language use, representation, and community engagement. To complement the creation and analysis of this database, I will be drawing from semi-structured interviews with a diverse range of stakeholders in the video game industry in Galicia. Interview participants include MUVi board members and curators who shape institutional narratives around gaming heritage, independent and commercial video game developers working in or with Galician, and members of the public involved in both professional and non-professional video game translation into Galician. These interviews identify specific challenges and opportunities in the use and integration of a minoritized language such as Galician in games and game-adjacent activities, including streaming, content creation, and online gaming communities. The interviews contribute to mapping the community of developers, curators, and translators who are active in this area, revealing networks of collaboration, shared practices, and strategies for maintaining linguistic presence in digital spaces. Through this mixed-methods approach, the research ultimately contributes to a better understanding of how games and game-adjacent initiatives contribute to the vitality of minoritized languages in the contemporary world.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract examines a cross-franchise musical trace from NiGHTS into Dreams (Sega, 1996) embedded within Sonic Adventure (Sega, 1998) as a case of ludomusical hauntology. Drawing on ludomusicology, hauntology, and autoethnography, it explores how a displaced soundtrack produced uncanny yet pleasurable affects for 1990s players encountering it without contextual knowledge. The paper argues that this accidental sonic haunting reveals how misrecognition and technological limitation of the time shaped distinctive forms of pleasure, memory, nostalgia, and platform identity in late 1990s gaming cultures.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines the spread of neo-reactionary rhetoric and codebases among online game development and programming communities through live streams, forums, and code repositories. This rhetoric, which I characterize as “nostalgic ludopoulism,” appeals to nostalgia for “a greater past” in game development and lionizes a form of game development practice that centers the highly skilled, craftsman developer over the seemingly unskilled developers using off-the-shelf game engines and programming environments. These discourses and technologies shape both designer identity and the development of new programming practices and software intended to support neo-reactionary political movements. Further, ludopoulism’s “thin ideology” (Mudde 2004) allows for the ideological capture and undermining of labor organization, consumer rights and right-to-repair advocacy, and other solidarity movements which stand against the consolidation of capital.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how the UK’s Online Safety Act both reflects and extends a long history of national cultural regulation and censorship that has shaped video game development, access, and expression far beyond the UK’s borders. It situates the Act within a broader history of national moral panics and reactive regulation, beginning with the first 18-rated game, and considers how transnational and corporate forms of censorship continue to affect British development and play. By incentivising over-policing, the Act links legal and corporate frameworks of control and reproduces patterns of disproportionate regulation affecting marginalised groups.

ABSTRACT. The era of FMV’s heyday was brief – beginning in 1992 with games such as the controversial Night Trap and concluding in 1997 (Majewski & Knight 2025). This paper will examine the subsequent period, from the collapse of the FMV game around 1997 until the reinvention of FMV in 2015 by indie games such as Sam Barlow’s Her Story. It is proposed that this period of relative inactivity in FMV development be referred to as ‘The FMV Interval’, of which it is argued that even though the number of FMV games released was small in comparison to the preceding years of the 1990s, game developers continued to persist with the genre as well as employing FMV for cut-scenes (Klevjer 2014) in non-FMV games. Released in late 1997 and early 1998 respectively, two significant games signal the twilight of the classic FMV era – Riven: The Sequel to Myst, and the fifth entry in the Tex Murphy series, Tex Murphy: Overseer. While both titles were successful, both signalled in their own ways the decline of the attraction of FMV. Regarding Riven, the Myst series showed that while developers no longer saw FMV as a necessary “crutch” to tell complex narratives (Majewski & Knight 2026), they did not abandon FMV entirely, retaining it where justified by the desire to maintain storytelling continuity within a franchise, or where a more direct connection to a film was needed. Following the viable possibilities of 3D graphics and such indicators as the failure of the promise of the 3DO console in 1997 and its explicit association with FMV, industry players sensed a distinct shift away from the fortunes of FMV as a worthwhile genre and so by 1998, in the words of the Gabriel Knight series’ designer Jane Jensen, “FMV was dead and 3D was the future.” (Jensen cited in Salter 2017, 55). It is worth highlighting here the somewhat underexplored umbilical connection between FMV in its 1992-1997 heyday with the adventure game genre. While FMV never came to be the dominant mode of production for adventure games, the low-action, low-interactivity nature of adventure games made them a natural site for FMV experimentation. From this perspective, the steady decline of the adventure genre setting in during the late 1990s effectively cut off one of the most promising branches of development for FMV. The pattern of using FMV to maintain franchise continuity was also employed in a few film-to-game adaptations and extensions. In the case of the Lord of the Rings and King Kong franchises, game adaptations would incorporate footage from the films either in their introductions or as bonus content. A more complex and ambitious example could be found in Enter the Matrix (2003), which did not adapt, but rather extended the film The Matrix Reloaded (2002), and for which additional footage was filmed alongside the film (Jenkins, 2006). The late 1990s were also notable for the rise of the DVD as a PC storage device and separately, the DVD player as a platform for home video with interactive features. Affording 10x more space than CDs, the DVD facilitated substantial increase in video quality in PC releases such as Tex Murphy: Overseer, as well as fostering a little-noticed alternate continuation of FMV development on the DVD player. Key pioneers in this effort were Rob Landeros and David Wheeler, earlier responsible for two important FMV games of the first wave developed at Trilobyte, The 7th Guest (1993) and The 11th Hour (1995). After parting with Trilobyte, Landeros and Wheeler released their next title, the psychological thriller, Tender Loving Care (Perron 2003), on the PC-DVD in 1998, followed by a DVD player format release in 1999. They would then develop one more title, Point of View: An Interactive Movie (2001), but the lack of success with these titles ultimately led to their company shutting down. Nonetheless, the DVD would occasionally be used as a format for interactive movies (Barlow 2004) and a location for tie-in games, like Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007) with its so-called ‘navigational cinema’ mode, and Adventure at the Center of the Earth (2008). While FMV games have frequently been discussed as a disreputable format associated with low quality in its heyday (Perron 2003; Russell 2012), FMV as a mode of production was in fact comparatively expensive. It would not be until the digital video revolution of the early 21st century that FMV would become convincingly viable for smaller studios. It is at this point that titles such as Yoomurjak’s Ring (2006) and Darkstar (2010) emerge, as well as a slew of low-cost FMV-based hidden object games in the Mystery Case Files series (2005-2012) from Big Fish Games. As the second decade of the 21st century opened, the development of new FMV games remained infrequent, but the format maintained an ongoing low-key nostalgia-fuelled popularity as evidenced by a wave of adaptations and re-releases. Numerous interactive movies (Perron 2008) from the FMV heyday like The 7th Guest were adapted to the iPhone and iPad. This nostalgia factor, combined with the new possibilities of low-cost video production and the advent of alternative financing through crowdfunding, ultimately led to the end of ‘the FMV Interval’. Appropriately, if Tex Murphy: Overseer (1998) led FMV into this period, then it may be argued that the next, crowdfunded Tex Murphy game, Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure (2014) signalled a rebirth for FMV games. A year later, the critically-acclaimed Her Story would open a new chapter for the format, leading to countless new interactive movies.

ABSTRACT. This study examines how games express youth’s engagement with different types of cultural heritage. It is part of the Europe Horizon project EPIC-WE (2023–2026), in which over 400 young people took part in 12 cultural game jams in three cities in the European Union. The paper combines a distant reading of all 116 EPIC-WE games with a close reading of three selected examples. The readings are based on a conceptual framework that draws its categories from UNESCO documents (tangible heritage and intangible heritage), critical heritage studies (authorised and subversive heritage discourses), game studies (national and regional heritage in games), and works related to the EPIC-WE project (games through culture and games for culture). The paper proposes a complex approach to the analysis of games and heritage, which may also be useful in the study of the complexity and intersectionality of game- and heritage-related pleasures.

ABSTRACT. This paper uses feminist political economy to ask: what are the clear, demonstrable political and economic outcomes of Gamergate? Who made money, who gained power, who lost money, who lost power? Importantly, who paid for it? Who paid for the websites that hosted the content? Who paid the writers themselves? This paper argues that Gamergate was a critical moment for the far/alt-right to determine how to bring about the change they wanted to see in the world by weaponizing overly simplistic culture wars and memetic language that would redirect the attention Gamergate was paying to feminists in video games to politics at large. This was facilitated through an infrastructure of websites, social media platforms, streaming services, imageboards, and media companies associated with conservative movements.

ABSTRACT. Rope mechanics have offered a unique form of traversal in video games since the early 1980s, evolving from simple static obstacles to complex physics-driven systems. This paper presents a historical analysis and taxonomy of rope-centric game mechanics in video games throughout the twentieth century. Through examining a range of games that feature ropes, grappling hooks, and swinging mechanics, we identify distinct categories of rope-based interaction and chart their evolution over time. From early arcade and console titles that introduced simple rope swings and climbing, to later innovations in grappling hook mechanics and physics-based rope systems, the study highlights how technological and design developments expanded the possibilities for rope mechanics. We discuss how these mechanics influenced gameplay and player experience, and extract key implications for 2D game design. By documenting a full typology of rope mechanics and notable historical implementations, this work provides insight into the role of a specific game mechanic in the broader context of game history and design.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines Gaucho and the Grasslands, a Brazilian indie game that mobilizes hyperlocal culture to navigate globalized game markets. Through semi-structured interviews with Epopeia Games’ developers and thematic analysis of 377 Steam reviews, we investigate how cultural specificity is negotiated in both production and reception. Our findings show that hyperlocal design fosters strong affective resonance among Brazilian players while revealing structural and epistemic constraints that Global South studios face when addressing international audiences. Although the developers do not explicitly adopt decolonial frameworks, the game performs a decolonial gesture by asserting the legitimacy of Southern Brazilian cultural knowledge within contemporary game culture. For the DiGRA community, this study contributes empirical evidence on hyperlocality as a design practice and expands discussions of peripheral game development, illustrating how Brazilian creators challenge center–periphery dynamics and broaden representational possibilities in global game ecosystems.

ABSTRACT. This paper responds to extant objections to the overrepresentation of flow theory in contemporary game design practices. While game designs that reject flow theory are apparent, designs that offer players opportunities to critically reflect on flowing experiences in tandem with non-normative pleasures are less so. Reaching beyond commercial games media, this research conducts a case study of British television show Taskmaster’s game design elements. From this, a design framework is constructed to inform flow-critical game designs. It is concluded that this framework may offer players opportunities to freely choose between normative and non-normative play, and critically reflect on their experiences.

ABSTRACT. Dark Patterns (DPs) are manipulative strategies prevalent in video games. Existing research on DPs in mobile gaming, however, is often challenged by reliance on self-reports, limited sample size, and a lack of systematic analysis on how different DPs interact. This study conducted a content analysis of the top 50 grossing mobile free-to-play (F2P) games on Google Play to map their prevalence and co-occurrence. Preliminary results indicate that four types of DPs—Psychological Manipulation, Intermediate Currencies, Pay for Expendable Updates, and Play by Appointment—are the most prevalent, appearing in over 80% of the games. Psychological Manipulation, which averages over six distinct instances per game, shows strong correlations with all six Monetary DPs and Play by Appointment. Monetary DPs also exhibit high intercorrelations, suggesting a deep connection between the usage of DP and the game’s monetization model. These findings highlight taxonomical inconsistencies, re-emphasize the blurred line between manipulation and persuasion, and raise questions about the ‘rationality’ of in-game spending due to the financialization potential of mobile game economic systems.

ABSTRACT. This extended abstract unpacks the result of applying Khaled and Barr’s method for design materialization to a case of tabletop roleplaying game design. It briefly brings in Rennick and Roberts’s trope-informed design as another, more minor but still substantive example of what critical game design provides to TTRPG design.

ABSTRACT. The introduction of Alexandrian design patterns into the discipline of game development was proposed twenty-five years ago by Bernd Kreimeier (2002). In the quarter century since its introduction a significant number of scholars and developers have explored possible implementations of these concepts. This work has reached a level of maturity and critical mass that demands reexamination and consolidation in order to move this work forward and foster broader adoption and efficacy.

ABSTRACT. INTRODUCTION When selling in-game skins, publishers have choices to make surrounding where the inspiration and value of these digital goods are derived. For many esports games, this decision has increasingly turned towards inviting various transmedia influences into their games. Arguably, the most extreme case can be found in Fortnite (Epic Games 2017), which has incorporated an extensive and eclectic range of IP collaborators across the domains of anime, superhero comics, pop stars, fashion brands, cinema, and other videogames. In contrast, Riot Games employs a fundamentally divergent approach in League of Legends (2009) that draws only on the endemic intellectual property that they have had a hand in producing. In this research, we investigate Riot Games’ endemic approach to IP development in and around LoL. We conduct a comparative case study of three transmedia texts created by Riot Games to explore how established publishers look inwards to mobilise aspects of games design and play through transmedia engagement.

ENDEMIC INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY To understand this model of endemic IP, it is first pertinent to understand the broader dynamics of affect and reciprocity which underscores Riot Games’ monetisation approach.

“People who look at the world through a short term, transactional, cynical lens, really struggle to understand Riot [...] These people think we make things like Arcane to sell skins, when in reality we sell skins to make things like Arcane. Riot is a mission driven company where Rioters are constantly striving to make it better to be a player” (Tryndamere 2024).

The above is an excerpt of a post made on the /r/leagueoflegends subreddit by Riot Games co-founder and current president Marc Merrill. The post was a response to reports that the Netflix series Arcane (Fortiche 2021), a stand-alone cinematic expansion of the League of Legends universe, was a financial failure despite its widespread positive reception (Yin-Poole 2024). Merrill’s quote speaks to the reciprocal model of player engagement which defines the free-to-play monetisation strategy in LoL, situated in an affective relationship between Riot Games and the playerbase (Jarrett 2021; Enverga, 2021). Arcane is far from the only ‘gift’ Riot Games has offered to their players in ostensible goodwill: the virtual K-Pop group K/DA, international esports series, and a Hall of Legends commemorating star players are each key transmedia texts within this cultivated portfolio of endemic IP.

The importance of transmedia content has been highlighted by audience researchers considering the ways engagement occurs across ‘different technological devices, distribution platforms and forms of content’ (Evans 2019, 9). While engagement is not a new concept, the way modern audiences freely move between transmedia contexts creates new possibilities to financially leverage engagement (132). Taking K/DA as an example, Ivănescu (2024: 44) points out that ‘the music itself provides a transmedial bridge between the videos and the game through the sound effects of the band-themed skins – an ideal monetisation tool’. In this case, the design of in-game skins mirrors the personas and sounds of the K-pop group, allowing fans of both the music videos and players of the game to further their engagement across these transmedia bridges.

METHOD This paper utilises a comparative case study analysis (Bartlett and Varvus 2017) of Riot Games’ endemic approach to IP with wider esports publishers, including Blizzard/Activision and Epic Games, who are much looser in allowing IPs outside of their making into their games. Through using a comparative case study analysis and adapting the ideas of macro (outside of the game) and micro (in-game), the paper aims to follow both the transmedia connections made by specific pieces of IP deployed in esports games, as well detailing where their IP derives. The central case studies of this paper are K/DA, Arcane, and the Hall of Legends which each present a LoL centred case study of in-game monetisation and wider transmedia production.

CONCLUSION Key to Riot Games’ endemic model of IP is the cultivation and strategic mobilisation of in-game characters and modes of play. As the examples in this paper demonstrate, publishers are experimenting with new transmedia connections to sustain players’ engagement across games-as-a-service models. Riot Games currently stand out against their competitors both new and old by focusing inwards and developing their own bespoke IP experience for players. This ultimately serves a dual purpose; these new transmedia offerings can be positioned as gifts to the LoL community to strengthen the affective relationship between publisher and player, while also serving as a difficult to quantify but nevertheless significant IP worldbuilding endeavour.

ABSTRACT. Friction is typically framed within Interaction Design as a usability flaw—something to be minimised in order to maintain a seamless experience, driven by its efficiency of uninterrupting flow (Csíkszentmihályi, 1990). This assumption also permeates much of Game Design philosophies, where maintaining players in flow became essential for their engagement and retention. Yet, as argued by scholars of interaction and game design concerned with ethics, politics, and dark patterns, this seamlessness can obscure structural inequalities and reproduce power asymmetries. When examined through an intersectional lens, friction emerges as a tool for shaping access, control, and agency—inviting alternative forms of pleasure that exceed the paradigm of uninterrupted flow. This extended abstract reinterprets findings from a qualitative analysis of intentional friction in interaction design to argue that some sorts of friction can generate reflective, political, sensory, and transformative pleasures in games and play.

Our study was based on purposeful sampling across commercial, artistic, speculative, and infrastructural cases, examined how friction is intentionally integrated to shape behaviour, provoke reflection, support self-regulation, resist surveillance, and promote literacy. This corpus included interventions such as checkout delays designed to interrupt impulsive consumption, community-operated local Wi-Fi libraries that require physical presence, browser extensions that deliberately corrupt advertising profiles, minimalist phones that restrict algorithmic engagement, and phone accessories that impose a physical step before accessing distracting apps. Although these examples were not developed for games, their mechanisms resonate strongly with ludic concepts such as pacing, agency, challenge, subversion, and meaning-making, as well as with critiques of persuasive or extractive design within games.

Reinterpreting these findings for DiGRA’s theme Intersectional Pleasures highlights how friction can operate as a generator of alternative pleasures that challenge dominant assumptions about tempo, engagement, and value in play. The analysis identifies four behavioural modalities—pause, reflect, resist, and reform—each associated with distinct affective and political possibilities.

Pause describes intentional disruptions that interrupt automatic behaviour. These interruptions, seen in features such as reading prompts before content sharing or timed delays before checkout, create brief intervals for sensory recalibration and intentionality. When translated to games, pause-frictions can produce contemplative or sensory pleasures by slowing play, foregrounding embodiment, and creating affective density. They challenge the assumption that pleasure is bound to the uninterrupted absorption characteristic of flow, showing instead how slowness and hesitation can generate meaningful and enjoyable moments. Death Stranding (2019) and its contemplative gameplay, and all the planning it requires before going to the field in order to traverse it successfully. Desert Bus (2008) and Mountain (2014) are also examples of contemplative gameplay, although more extreme.

Reflect emerges when friction opens space for ethical, epistemic, or social contemplation. Interventions that require physical proximity to access a digital library, or that demand reconsideration before completing a purchase, exemplify how friction can foreground the politics of distribution, consumption, and presence. Games similarly employ reflective friction when they deliberately slow decision-making, emphasise consequences, or interrupt impulsive actions. These frictions create epistemic pleasures rooted in awareness, interpretation, and ethical discernment—especially significant in intersectional contexts where players negotiate identity, power, and representation. Papers, Please (2013) is an example, juggling with how bureaucracy affects the life of people.

Resist captures friction’s role as a tool against surveillance, algorithmic capture, or coercive behavioural loops. Projects such as the AdNauseam extension, which floods tracking systems with misleading data, illustrate how friction can be co-opted as an act of technological resistance. In games, resistant pleasures arise when players subvert expected mechanics, reclaim autonomy from retention-driven loops, or interrupt patterns of extraction embedded within game economies. This aligns with design perspectives that challenge frictionless optimisation and call for more situated, value-driven forms of interaction. For example, in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty (2001), more towards the end game reminds you have been playing for far too long, and in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater (2004) the game warning the player “Please consider resting” to encourage players to take a break in long play sessions.

Reform describes how friction guides long-term behavioural transformation. Examples such as minimalist phones or physical tags that mediate access to apps demonstrate how friction can support healthier habits without blocking agency. Within games, reform-friction can encourage sustainable play rhythms, support accessibility needs, or cultivate new relationships to challenge and mastery. These frictions produce transformative pleasures grounded in self-regulation, agency, and the reconfiguration of habitual interaction patterns. In The Graveyard (2008), the playable character takes us on a small journey through a cemetery. She does not run and jump, she does not walk fast, there are no shortcuts. She walks in difficulty aided by a cane.

By reframing friction through these four modalities, this paper argues that friction is not merely a barrier to be eliminated but a generative site for intersectional pleasures. These pleasures arise when designers prioritise player intention over their retention, create opportunities for deliberation, and foreground players’ diverse identities and embodied experiences. Friction destabilises the dominance of seamlessness and invites moments where disengagement, hesitation, interruption, and critique become pleasurable in themselves. For game design, recognising friction as a productive element opens pathways toward more inclusive, ethical, and reflective play experiences—especially those that resist extractive interaction models and affirm alternative ways of sensing, acting, and relating within ludic environments.

Key References

Braun, V. & Clarke, V. (2006). Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 3(2), 77–101. Cardoso, P., Melo, R., & Carvalhais, M. (2020). Breaking the Hedonistic Loop: Meaning before fun in videogames. In ARTECH ’19. Csíkszentmihályi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row. Zagal, J. P., Björk, S., & Lewis, C. (2013). Dark patterns in the design of games. In FDG 2013. Cox, A. L., Gould, S., Cecchinato, M., Iacovides, I., & Renfree, I. (2016). Design Frictions for Mindful Interactions. In CHI EA ’16. Stolterman, E. & Löwgren, J. (2007). Thoughtful Interaction Design. MIT Press.

ABSTRACT. INTRODUCTION The proliferation of misinformation and the erosion of shared epistemic foundations present a critical challenge to contemporary digital societies. Traditional public knowledge services often operate on a broadcast or retrieval model, struggling with user engagement, inclusivity, and adapting to the dynamics of user-generated content. Conversely, digital games are masterful systems for motivating sustained, collaborative, and complex problem-solving within diverse communities. This research argues that the path toward more resilient public knowledge infrastructures lies not merely in applying superficial game-like elements (“gamification”), but in a foundational re-imagination guided by core game design theory. We propose a novel theoretical framework that synthesizes principles from participatory design, motivational game mechanics, and information credibility models. This framework, “Collaborative Knowledge Play,” aims to provide a blueprint for designing systems where the very acts of verifying, contesting, and co-creating public knowledge are experienced as intrinsically meaningful play. This directly engages with the DiGRA 2026 theme of “Intersectional Pleasures” by investigating how the complex pleasures derived from systemic mastery, narrative agency, and community participation—core tenets of game design—can be architected to foster equitable and trustworthy knowledge ecosystems.

Theoretical Framework and Methodology Our methodology is interdisciplinary and theory-driven, comprising three integrated phases. First, we conduct a theoretical synthesis, critically analyzing and integrating concepts from game design theory (such as endogenous value, possibility spaces, and feedback loops), information science models of credibility and community-based knowledge construction (aligning with Alton Chua’s work on UGC quality and rumor propagation), and critical studies on intersectionality and participatory culture. This synthesis will produce our “Collaborative Knowledge Play” framework, which posits key design dimensions: Procedural Rhetoric for Verification (how game rules model good epistemic practices), Intersectional Player Positioning (how systems acknowledge and leverage diverse identity-based knowledges), and Scalable Social Pleasure (designing for trust and repute within a contributory commons). Second, we employ a critical speculative design approach. Using the developed framework, we will generate and analyze a series of high-fidelity conceptual prototypes for hypothetical public knowledge games. Examples include a Participatory Archival Memory Game where players collaboratively reconstruct historical events from fragmented, multi-perspective sources, and a Rumor Resilience MMO where guilds work to map and defuse misinformation networks using game-theoretic tools. These prototypes are not meant for development but serve as “theory-heavy objects” to stress-test and refine our framework through expert workshops and focus groups with game designers, information professionals, and community advocates. Third, we will execute a comparative case study analysis of existing digital platforms that occupy the ambiguous space between “game” and “knowledge tool” (e.g., Foldit, WikiRace, certain citizen science apps). This analysis will be guided by our framework to identify emergent best practices, latent design patterns, and gaps where current implementations fail to deliver either robust knowledge outcomes or deeply engaging play.

Contributions This research is expected to yield three primary outcomes. The foremost is the articulation of a robust, original game design theory framework specifically tailored for the context of public knowledge and information integrity. This framework will translate abstract information science challenges into concrete, actionable game design vocabulary and principles. Secondly, the research will produce a critical catalog of design patterns and pitfalls for creating systems that balance ludic engagement with epistemic rigor, particularly highlighting how design choices can either amplify or marginalize intersectional perspectives and contributions. Finally, the project will generate a set of evaluative heuristics—grounded in both game design and information quality metrics—for assessing how well a given system facilitates “collaborative knowledge play.” These heuristics will consider not just output quality but also the experiential quality of participation across different user identities.

Conclusion This study positions game design not as a set of cosmetic tools for engagement but as a critical theoretical and practical discipline essential for reimagining the digital public sphere. By developing a dedicated game design theory framework for public knowledge ecosystems, we aim to provide scholars, system designers, and policymakers with a new lens and toolkit. This work argues that fostering a healthier information environment requires designing spaces where the procedural, social, and narrative pleasures of games are strategically aligned with the civic, intellectual, and ethical pleasures of building a shared, trustworthy understanding of our world. The proposed framework offers a pathway to design such spaces intentionally, making a significant contribution to the fields of game studies, information science, and digital civic design.

ABSTRACT. This paper reads BearBone Studio's Minds Beneath Us (2024) as an exigent and critical intervention into data colonialism and technologized empathy. The cyberpunk game is culturally situated in a Taiwanese dystopia, critiquing the island's semiconductor-dependent geopolitical economy. Drawing on Jade E. Davis's critique of empathy as colonial technology, Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias's theorization of data colonialism, and Lauren Berlant's concepts of glitch/infrastructure, I argue that Minds Beneath Us (BearBoneStudio 2024) stages "glitchfrastructural" encounters: in-game deformation reveals infrastructural failures of empathy when confronting peoples algorithmically rendered as computational resource.

ABSTRACT. As women who play, study and create video games, we find games exceptionally gratifying when they are able to authentically represent our genders, sexualities and romantic fantasies –and in rarer occasions our ethnic, cultural and religious identities. In such instances, we derive pleasure not only from playing with our sexual and romantic desires but also from recognizing ourselves in what we play. In other words, pleasure derived from the representation (Shaw 2015; Chess 2018; Ruberg 2022) of the complex intersections of (our) marginal identities is a central issue in our autoethnographic approach to research-creation, which will be the subject of our presentation. Both in our research and creation, it was important for us from the start to adopt an intersectional perspective on pleasure, in the games we analyze, specifically A Tale of Crowns (qeresî 2019–present) and The Sims (Maxis 2000–present), and the game we are making, which we named Dispirited. This research-creation project is part of an ongoing larger research project, whose title translates to “Un·anchoring-Un·inking: From Screen to Map, Queering Space through the Margins” . It focuses on gender, sexuality, and identity in audiovisual media from an intersectional, intermedial, queer and (counter-)cartographic perspective. Funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, our project is carried out by our team of researchers at the Queer Sensibilities lab. As its name implies, our lab’s research philosophy is rooted in the queerness of feelings, among which we can count pleasure in its romantic and erotic forms. By “queer sensibilities”, we mean to anchor our research methodology in what Catherine Nash and José Esteban Muñoz describe, cited by Boyce, Engebretsen, and Posocco (2017). Our presentation will follow the research-creation structure, i.e. start by showcasing the research we conducted and then talk about our creative process, inspiration, methodology, and goals as researchers and creators. On the research-side of our project, we are conducting analyses on the discourses found within and surrounding A Tale of Crowns and The Sims. These analyses include close readings, a (self-)reflection on creative discourses and the dialogue between creator and player, as well as an examination of fan communities and fan creations. For The Sims, we are conducting data-analyses concerning the way fans use gameplay mechanics to reimagine, reclaim or create spaces for characters from fictional works who are perceived as queerbaited or queer-coded. As for A Tale of Crowns, we are interested in the marginalized identities (middle-eastern and queer) included within the fantasy game world. The perspective of the creator, a.k.a. “qeresî”, is also important, since she identifies in the opening menu of the game as a Kurdish woman from the diaspora. This game is a rare and valuable example of an independent dating-sim and interactive fiction written by a woman which combines intersectionality and queerness with an underlying discourse on (Self-)Orientalism (Said 2003; Lau and Mendes 2011) and decolonization. These notions are particularly important for the autoethnograhical perspective we have chosen for the creation of our game, Dispirited, as we will detail in the second part of our presentation. Indeed, as French women of Turkish and Chilean origin, our game’s universe functions as a crossroads for these three cultures. Using Twine, we are currently in the process of writing Dispirited as an interactive fiction and a dating-sim taking place in a utopian fantasy universe: the main story takes place on a flying island inspired by our Chilean and Turkish cultures, while our world encompasses a faraway country inspired by our French nationalities. The point of writing an interactive fiction is to allow some narrative agency to our players. Hence, some important parameters related to the notions of intersectionality, queerness and marginalized identities will be incorporated in our game, which can also be found in A Tale of Crowns, such as being able to choose one’s gender, gender expressions, and sexual preferences. These parameters of representation bear an important role in the interaction with the four love-interests who will define the romantic modularity of our game’s narrative. Therefore, they are essential in creating the framework of a pleasurable game experience founded on the exploration of amicable, romantic and/or erotic narrative possibilities. We will conclude our presentation by defining the aim of making an interactive fiction. This could be summarized as the desire to involve ourselves in the co-creativity process this type of games enables, from the creation-side, a perspective which research alone could not provide. The notion of pleasure will also be mentioned from a metacreative and meta-academic perspective, related to the act of research-creation. This will lead us to further examine our goals in relation to our players. Indeed, we want them to find pleasure in their own in-game representations, to create their own places and identities within the albeit limited frame of our simulation. Our job will therefore be to establish an imaginary world conducive to players’ reappropriation. Our second prospective goal is to create a “sensible” queer utopia (Muñoz 2009), which relates to our project’s counter-mapping approach. To achieve that goal, we are planning to reconfigure our players’ narrative agency into the mapping of their sentimental path following the model of the Map of Tender. Imagined in 1654 by Madeleine de Scudéry, the Map of Tendre is an allegory of romantic relationships. Conceived within the Précieuses movement, it reflects an entire sentimental philosophy: measured progression, pitfalls to avoid, and the quest for a gallant ideal. However, the Map of Tender can today be seen as outdated as it advocates a chrononormative ideal that imposes mandatory stages in romantic relationships. Instead, we want to propose a reimagining of the Map of Tender, a newer version based on queer co-creation where the sentimental narrative paths of each player could be cartographied. In practice, as a game mechanic, this would translate to matching a story with places in a romantic quest. The notion of pleasure resides at the root of narrative games involving intersectionality, queerness and romance. We aim at shedding light on the way pleasure can be interpreted within the framework of the meta-analysis our autoethnographic approach implies, in the meta-process of academic research on both games and game creation.

ABSTRACT. In 2006, a BGForum thread called “Is it me or does FFX-2 suck ass?” captured a highly gendered discourse on the validity of the sequel to acclaimed Final Fantasy X (2001) (hereafter “X”). User Dustinsp laments it as a game “for ‘girl power!’ [...] shut it off and gave [it] to [my] 12 year old female cousin.” Nearly a decade later, a 2014 GameFAQ forum thread titled “Im worried that X-2 might be too girly..” revisited this discourse. User Sand_Flare responded, “X-2 is indeed super girly. Sickeningly so at some points. Might want to keep the doors locked when you play this one.” Another decade later, in 2023, user olliedreamer on Instagram asserted “FFX-2 was made for the girls gays and theys”. In the comments, both queer and nonqueer gamers converged to celebrate the very mechanics, dynamics, and story points that were earlier dismissed as “too girly” or “fanservice”. We position this debate as a pivotal entry in the framework of feminism and queerness in game studies (Chang 2017; Mortensen 2018; Ruberg 2019; Phillips 2020).

Final Fantasy X-2 (2004) (hereafter “X-2”) has indexed changes to gamer literacies around gender politics and feminism since its initial release in 2003, but has earned little attention from scholars of games. This evolving discourse prompts us to read X-2 as half of a mirrored narrative which grapples with playful and pleasurable resistance to patriarchy. Where X situates male character Tidus as an interloper fated to contest traditional religious sacrifice and the burden of upholding oppressive patriarchal regimes, X-2 orients female main character Yuna in the aftermath of war and the decimation of X’s controlling structures. The decades-long discourse on X-2’s validity as a final fantasy game is actually an argument over what kinds of stories are legitimate, who is allowed to tell them, and which player demographics are willing to accept canonical feminist sequels to seemingly traditionally-masculine titles. The most polarizing additions X-2 made, dressphere transformations, proto open-world movement, and a plotline centered on Yuna’s grief, attempt a marriage between traditional JRPG mechanics and what Ursula LeGuin calls the “carrier bag theory of fiction” to answer an unpopular question: is the revolution destruction or the playful exploration that must come after (LeGuin 1996)? Do we even want to hear stories about dancing?

In the opening sequence of X-2, we witness Yuna’s transformation from her traditional religious appearance into a singing and dancing J-Pop icon before a stadium of adoring fans. This moment was jarring for many fans of X, who previously witnessed Yuna dancing for more somber occasions: as a ritual to guide the souls of the departed back to the Farplane. Tidus explains in a cutscene voiceover: “People die, and Yuna dances. When will she stop dancing? When will it stop? Yuna won't stop dancing—not until Sin is gone.” Sin is now gone at the beginning of X-2, along with the whole cycle of religious violence it embodied. Does this mean Yuna is no longer allowed to dance? She herself expresses this uncertainty in her opening voiceover: “My body just started dancing by itself. I didn't know what was going on. I was... frightened.” The anarcho-feminist icon Emma Goldman is often attributed with the quip, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” But the actual quote from her autobiography goes further, in response to a comrade who called her dancing undignified: “I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal [...] for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that [...] the movement would not be turned into a cloister” (Goldman 2006). Yuna’s dancing in X-2, along with the game’s lighthearted tone and playful characters, represent a feminist response to destruction and grief that insists on the life and joy of further transformations.

The vehicles for these transformations are the dresspheres, which replace summons in X as collectible items that enable continual swapping between jobs through mid-battle transformation cutscenes. These transformations, which can also be categorized as a kind of dance, have a lineage to magical girl anime like Sailor Moon (1991-1997), Princess Tutu (2002-2003), and Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997). Scholarship on this genre is extensive and rich, highlighting its importance for queer communities and women’s rights groups (e.g., Saito 2013; Mansky 2019; Karadovin 2022). We argue that transformation in X-2 further complicates the magical girl tradition through the garment grid menu, which connects individual transformations of powers and outfits into complex spatial relationships that are continually traversed mid-battle. These spatial relationships prioritize a queering of linear map traversal found in the original game and necessitate serious dress-up as a means of articulating a dynamic identity. This forces the player to reflect on the logics of continual transformation–a theme that proves essential to the game as a whole, as exemplified by the nonlinear “mission” structure and quasi-open world access to the map of Spira.

In the last lines of X-2 Yuna reflects on her journey as an ongoing sequence of transformations: “So much has happened! And I'm sure it's only the beginning. Through the smiles, tears...through the anger, and the laughter that follows. I know that I will keep changing. This is my story. It will be a good one. It all began when I saw this sphere of you.” Even this line refracts the plot of X, which begins with Tidus’ words: “This is my story…” X-2 is a carrier-bag narrative that lingers with the joy and grief of quiet transformations and playful revolution. By returning to this neglected entry of an iconic franchise, we trace a lineage through magical girl transformations and dancing revolutionaries to the serious dress-up required to build new worlds. Ten years before gamergate, X-2 was a central object in conversations about gender, video games, and the evolving craft of playable narratives. This project positively centers Final Fantasy X-2 as a still-needed articulation of flamboyant femininity that contests patriarchal storytelling methods.

ABSTRACT. Mathematics is ubiquitous in game design, whether in creating board games and video games or in the analysis of their systems. Yet it remains rarely discussed in scholarly texts outside educational sciences and STEM-oriented research. This article aims to highlight the role mathematics has played in the history of games to encourage the video game research community to engage more with mathematical concepts. It traces important historical interactions between mathematics and games and displays two contemporary case studies that highlight the role of mathematics in the construction of game mechanics and aesthetics.

ABSTRACT. Background This study critiques the dominant "AI promise" in gaming, which frames AI as an inevitable, benevolent force for democratizing play. Moving beyond this utopian discourse, the research analyzes AI's multifaceted impact on historically marginalized players, including those with disabilities, from racial/ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ communities, and low-income backgrounds. Grounded in the view that technology is a non-neutral cultural artifact, it frames in-game AI as a contested terrain where ethical outcomes are shaped by socio-technical contexts, training data economies, and user agency. Goals The primary goal is to deconstruct the "AI promise" through a three-level analysis: examining AI's assistive potential for individual empowerment (micro), uncovering how it perpetuates societal biases (meso/macro), and documenting grassroots community re-appropriation. The central argument is that AI's net impact arises from the tension between top-down, often-biased implementations and bottom-up, user-driven adaptation and resistance.

Methodology To address these goals, a multi-method, tripartite research design was implemented, allowing for a holistic investigation. 1. Micro-Level: Mixed-Methods Study on Assistive AI. A cohort of 16 visually impaired players, representing diverse ages, impairment types (e.g., retinitis pigmentosa, congenital blindness), and gaming proficiencies, was recruited. Participants engaged in longitudinal gameplay sessions in Justice Online, a popular MMORPG. They completed standardized navigation and object-interaction tasks both with and without the game's proprietary "AI Eyes" feature—a context-aware audio description system. Quantitative performance data (completion time, error rate) were collected via telemetry software. Complementary phenomenological data were gathered through post-session, semi-structured interviews, which were transcribed and subjected to thematic analysis to capture subjective experiences of agency and immersion. 2. Meso/Macro-Level: Computational Bias Audit and Social Impact Experiment. To expose embedded biases, a computational audit was conducted using AI Dungeon, a narrative game powered by a large language model. Researchers generated 547 unique story continuations across systematically varied protagonist identities (gender, race via naming conventions, disability, socioeconomic status). Advanced computational text analysis techniques, including sentiment analysis and topic modeling, were used to identify patterns of stereotyping. Concurrently, a controlled lab experiment with 28 four-person teams (n=112) in Sea of Thieves investigated the social impact of an autonomous AI crewmate. Teams were randomly assigned conditions with or without the AI, and post-session surveys combined with sociolinguistic analysis of voice chat logs measured impacts on team cohesion and social communication. 3. Grassroots-Level: Digital Ethnography of Modder Communities. A sustained digital ethnography was conducted over three months within an international Discord community of over 200 modders. These practitioners collaboratively create and share custom AI-voice packs for classic text-heavy RPGs. Researchers conducted approximately 450 hours of observational fieldwork, systematically analyzing 2,317 community posts, development threads, and tutorial exchanges. Critical discourse analysis was applied to understand motivations, power dynamics, and knowledge-sharing practices within this space of grassroots innovation. Results The findings reveal a contradictory and complex landscape: - Contingent Empowerment: At the individual level, the "AI Eyes" assistive feature demonstrated significant quantitative benefits, reducing average task completion time by 42.7% and interaction errors by 61.3%. Qualitatively, 87.5% of participants described a transformative restoration of agency and narrative immersion, redirecting cognitive effort from overcoming barriers to experiencing pleasure. This validates AI's potential as a tool for sensory translation and adaptive design. - Systemic Amplification of Bias: The bias audit revealed that AI systems function as powerful amplifiers of societal prejudice. Narratives with female-coded protagonists were 71.8% more likely to involve tropes of passivity or rescue. Characters with names associated with specific ethnic minorities were strongly correlated with descriptors of exoticism or aggression, while being systemically underrepresented in roles of authority or expertise. This demonstrates a foundational architectural problem masked as algorithmic neutrality. - Social Thinning and Communal Erosion: The social experiment revealed a critical paradox: the AI assistant's operational efficiency came at the cost of communal bonding. Teams using the AI reported significantly lower scores (23.1% lower on average) on metrics of social connection and shared accomplishment. Sociolinguistic analysis confirmed a 34.8% reduction in non-instrumental, social-affective communication (e.g., joking, emotional support), effectively eroding the "magic circle" of play vital for marginalized communities seeking connection. - Grassroots Re-appropriation and Innovation: Confronting these limitations, the modding community exhibited sophisticated agency. Motivated primarily by "filling accessibility voids" and "resisting algorithmic paternalism," these users engaged in complex technical co-design—fine-tuning open-source speech synthesis models, creating custom pronunciation libraries, and building shared repositories of knowledge. This practice inverts the traditional AI value chain, transforming AI from an opaque, top-down solution into a malleable, bottom-up toolkit for self-determined accessibility. Conclusion This study concludes that the "AI promise" in gaming is a dynamic site of political negotiation, not an inevitable technological endpoint. It delineates an interconnected trajectory: tangible but contingent individual empowerment is inherently limited by invisible yet pervasive architectures of systemic bias, which are, in turn, actively challenged and reconfigured through resilient, agentive practices at the grassroots level. For AI to ethically fulfill its purported liberatory potential, the industry must undergo a paradigmatic shift from techno-solutionism to infrastructural justice. This requires three integrated pillars: 1. Mandatory Bias Auditing: Rigorous, ongoing audits for stereotyping and exclusion must be integrated throughout the development lifecycle. 2. Community Data Sovereignty: Formal frameworks must be established to return control over personal data and algorithmic outputs to the marginalized communities they impact. 3. Formalized Co-Design: Community-led design practices must be integrated as compensated and essential components of development, not as optional afterthoughts. Ultimately, true accessibility cannot be algorithmically generated; it must be collectively built through sustained partnerships that share power, resources, and technological control. Only then can AI in games transcend its role as a mirror of societal prejudice and become a collaboratively shaped instrument for genuine intersectional liberation and the co-creation of dignified digital worlds.

ABSTRACT. Helldivers 2 has drawn a massive global audience, yet little research explains why players find its unstable, unpredictable world so appealing. This paper addresses that problem by arguing that the game creates a social environment in which instability becomes a source of pleasure rather than frustration. Using a framework drawn from Durkheim, Benjamin, Veblen, Stouffer, and Weber, I analyze how shifting rules, repeated spectacles, communal craft labor, player comparison, and episodic charismatic leadership interact to produce what I call the intersectional pleasures of anomie. This approach shows how live-service games transform uncertainty into cooperation, creativity, and emotional investment. The conclusion demonstrates that Helldivers 2 offers a model for understanding how instability functions as both a design strategy and a meaningful player experience across contemporary digital games.

ABSTRACT. In Playing Nature, Chang (2019) proposes the notion of the Mountain - Water game to reconsider the entanglement of humans and nature in discussions of nonhuman games. Her idea draws from traditional Chinese shan-shui-hua (山水画)—literally “mountain-water painting.” Using games such as Journey (2012) and Mountain (2014), and engaging theories mainly from Yifu Tuan’s topophilia and Jakob von Uexküll’s animal life-worlds, Chang examines the human - environment relationship in games by shifting away from an anthropocentric lens. She treats shanshui games as more than visual aesthetics, situating them within theoretical movements like new materialism and posthumanism that emphasize entanglement between human and nonhuman entities. This framework resonates with emerging scholarship in posthuman game studies, particularly work on distributed and agential play (Fizek, 2021; Wilde, 2023; Mustola, 2021). Nevertheless, why do we rely so heavily on Western theoretical lenses when discussing shanshui games? What might change if we re-center the history, theory, and experience of Chinese shanshuihua and bring them more directly into game studies? Hui (2021, p.141) introduces shanshui in the context of cosmotechnics to “resituate humans and their technological world within a broader cosmic reality, where the cosmic and moral orders are unified via technical activity” (p. 141). Rooted in Daoist philosophy of oppositional continuity, where shan (mountain) corresponds to yang and shui (water) corresponds to yin, shanshui reflects a recursive understanding of technology. This view differs markedly from Western cybernetics, with its focus on control, feedback, and regulation, shifting from mechanism to organicism. Inspired by Hui’s cross-cultural approach, which centers shanshui within Daoist and Neo-Confucian traditions as a means of understanding technology, my ongoing research reintroduces Daoist shanshuihua into game studies. There are two main preliminary findings in this research. First, shanshuihua in the Song–Yuan dynasties (960 – 1368) was not merely a guide and depiction of self-cultivation (Gesterkamp, 2022) or an anthropomorphic metaphor (Hennessey, 2024), but a cosmic body orchestrated into a unified rhythm with the human body (Li, 2022). In contrast to Chang’s (2019) observation that the grand landscape in the game Journey minimizes player bodily presence, Song–Yuan Daoist painters saw human existence as immense within the landscape (Li, 2022). A striking example is Huang Gongwang (1269–1354), a Daoist literati painter and one of the “Four Masters” of the Yuan dynasty, who translated internal alchemical visions into painting, rendering each stage of the process. This understanding of dissolving boundaries between body and cosmos invites us to rethink the design of virtual game environments in ways that move beyond anthropocentric norms while still enhancing player agency. Second, shanshui is more than a natural phenomenon; it is a Daoist “perception of the raw material of nature” (Huang, 2012, p. 173). In Daoist traditions, shan represents a true form (zhengxing, 真形) that refers to a higher realm of existence and transcendent reality (Liu, 2022; Huang, 2012). Daoist practitioners created script-like landscapes, such as “dragon script,” registers, and talismans, and used them in the rituals, including summoning supernatural powers within the landscape and the myriad mountain and water deities (Huang, 2012). This tradition of “writing as landscape” understands shanshui as an interactive, multisensory, and transmedia experience characterized by constant change, reshaping, and mirroring (Huang, 2012, p. 186). Bringing this tradition into conversation with game studies suggests new ways of conceptualizing shanshui games as embodied, multisensory environments rather than static scenic backdrops. Extending Daoist perspectives on shanshuihua beyond Chang’s analysis, my research also revisits game Mountain (2014) to illustrate how contemporary videogames can be understood within this framework. I argue that an idle game like Mountain presents the virtual landscape not as an external entity controlled by the player, but as a cosmic body that connects with players through affective and emotional resonance. Given the scarcity of existing games that capture the essence of shanshui games, my research also involves the speculative design of a physical exercise game to reimagine the relationship between the virtual game environment and the player’s body. Taken together, these perspectives position shanshui as a worlding process that opens new possibilities for studying games alongside, rather than solely within, Western frameworks. Worlding and worldbuilding confront the postcolonial, racist, and patriarchal structures embedded in capitalist modernity (Langlois, 2023; Kondo, 2018; Cadena & Mario, 2018; Escobar, 2017). Worlding is not just discursive representation but a process of temporalization that generates multiple temporalities grounded in non-Western imaginaries (Cheah, 2016). The shanshui game, then, becomes a worldbuilding project rooted in the history and theory of Chinese shanshuihua, offering a way to rethink the onto-epistemology of games beyond representing fictional settings. My aim is not to claim the superiority of one framework nor to reinforce an East/West binary. Instead, I propose a comparative approach that expands and diversifies our understanding of player–game relations through the lens of shanshui. The shanshui game serves as a relational practice that reimagines how we play and make games.

ABSTRACT. This article examines Ready or Not as a tactical shooter that operationalizes existentialist ethics through procedural, visual, and relational design. Moving beyond traditional moral frameworks, the study adopts a Sartrean perspective—emphasizing situated freedom and accountability—to analyze how the game’s first-person realism, implicit choice, irreversible outcomes, and procedural randomness create a structure of finitude and moral ambiguity. Ready or Not innovates in its representation of intersubjective ethics by embedding moral tension within multiplayer cooperation. Finally, the article argues that the game’s frequent adaptation of real-world crises produces a distinctive moral proximity that heightens existential reflection. The analysis thus contributes to the developing field of existentialist game studies by demonstrating how realistic tactical shooters, often dismissed as procedurally conservative, can in fact function as sophisticated laboratories for ethical inquiry and self-knowledge.

ABSTRACT. The first vegan product we get to fry in Arctic Eggs (The Water Museum 2024) is a cigarette. I did not hope for a vegan run; the game is called Arctic Eggs, and it is a dystopian frying sim set in the late 21st century. Yet I flinch when asked to fry a live cockroach; flinch because I feel for the cockroach, not because I am disgusted by it. Later, I come back and fry two of them at the same time.

The game, as most texts of Western cultures, could be described as carnist (Potts 2016). One of the main sources of pleasure is overcoming the material resistance (Janik 2022) of a frying pan along with its various contents, from eggs, through fish and sausages, to cockroaches, cigarettes, shot glasses with ice, and bullets. Technically, the game would not have to employ non-human animals as obstacles, as tools (Jański 2016); would not have to govern their bodies and use them for profit (Shukin 2009); would not have to represent them as generic, powerless, and even though killable and ephemeral – abundant (Imbierowicz 2022, Van Ooijen 2018). Technically, we could have been frying pancakes.

Arctic Eggs’ carnism, however, goes beyond repeating and reinforcing the mainstream carnism of North America and Europe. In its world, a colony set in the Arctic in a rather distant future, the fusion between people and machines has reached the science-fiction level. Human body parts are being replaced with electronic ones. Old age,illness, and disobedience can be mitigated with replacements. All prisoners had their heads replaced. With limbs goes memory, identity, the sense of taste. The existence of transhuman subjects (Braidotti 2013) – from people with minor enhancements until the Saint of six stomachs, consisting mostly of body parts in jars – puts the carnism of the game and the anthropocentric treatment of non-human animals in a different perspective.

In this paper, I am employing the tools of posthumanism, transhumanism, and animal studies (besides the ones mentioned above, Wolfe 2010, Haraway 2008, Singer 2015, and others) as well as, minorly, an auto-ethnography of a pro-animal-studies scholar playing a game about frying animal bodies, their excretions, and multiple other meaningful artifacts. I am doing so to explore the animal treatment in Arctic Eggs as an interesting example of a borderline animal use which, on the one hand, is clearly abusive as most animal uses, but on the other hand, is interestingly intertwined with questions of identity and ability of the subjects frying and consuming. “The face is what forbids us to kill,” wrote Emmanuel Lévinas (1985, 86). Patryk Szaj (2016) argues that the face Lévinas described – a sign of an irreducible Other that calls for non-violence, respect, care, dialogue – might belong to a non-human animal as much as to a human one. And yet the perception of the face of the Other is subjective; rooted in the person perceiving it. In Arctic Eggs, we never see the avatar; we do not get to know what is left of them. Can they perceive a face of the Other without having one? Can we face another without facing ourselves? Can I fry eggs on top of Mount Everest? Try me.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how glitching objects in narrative games mediate hyperobject temporality, environmental forces such as petrochemical contamination that exceed human comprehension through vast spatial and temporal distribution. By examining five mundane objects in NORCO (Geography of Robots, 2022), the study shows how malfunction enable players to experience slow violence (Nixon) that resist direct representation. Drawing on Morton’s hyperobjects, Brown’s thing theory, Ingold’s materials ecology, Shklovsky’s defamiliarisation, and Fisher’s weird and eerie, the analysis shows that glitching objects produce “troubling pleasures”: experiences that are simultaneously destabilising, as uncertainty persists, and engaging, as interpretive labour yields productive meaning-making. In NORCO, glitching objects make pervasive environmental violence tangible through persistent malfunction. These troubling pleasures illustrate how games can mediate the temporal experience of environmental forces, supporting prolonged engagement with complex temporalities and enabling players to explore collapsed futures without reducing crises to solvable mechanics.

ABSTRACT. This contribution proposes digital games as immersive lifeworld laboratories for social work education. Drawing on intersectionality and Thiersch’s concept of lifeworld orientation, it argues that games offer situated, affectively charged encounters with power, discrimination, and agency. While the triple mandate demands that social workers navigate normalisation, empowerment, and ethical critique, traditional teaching formats lack the experiential immediacy to practise such shifts in perspective. Commercial games—such as 'Papers, Please' enable students to analyse structural inequalities, experiment with positionality, and reflect-on-action in safe, reversible scenarios. A conceptual framework is proposed, framing the discussion of intersectionality in post-heroic gameplay.

ABSTRACT. This paper attempts to analyze how Black Tabby Games’ horror adventure game Slay the Princess (2023) echoes the search for identity within immutable system through metamodern lens. It situates meaning as something continuously renegotiated within the tension between structural constraint and individual agency.

Slay the Princess (2023) is a psychological horror visual novel in which the player interacts primarily through selecting dialogue options that shape the direction of the story. The narrative unfolds according to the player’s choices, introducing a branching and looping structure in which earlier decisions continually reshape subsequent events. This system of recursive choice-making positions the player as an active participant in determining the flow and tone of the narrative.

Slay the Princess (2023) exemplifies metamodern narrative design through its use of space and branching narrative. The setting of the game is a temporally unanchored place, stripped of identity, which functions as a tool of recursive storytelling and mitigation of agency. This paper explores the game’s portrayal of spatial liminality and looping narrative, with particular emphasis on the symbolic and affective role of one of the two spaces available within the game – the cabin. It is a mutable, looping space that anchors the player’s cyclical return to a fractured narrative. The setting of the game, a cabin, may be considered a simulacrum (Baudrillard, 1981) of a fairy-tale environment, fulfilling a comparable role to that of the fairy tale itself: it operates as an allusive and metaphorical device, constructing an “as if” space wherein the player engages in a journey of self-reflection (Barsotti, 2015). The space in the game acts as a critical tool as it reacts to the Player’s decision and accordingly changes its form. These spatial transformations echo the metamodern oscillation between sincerity and irony, construction and deconstruction, evoking Deleuze’s (1990) notion of becoming—a process of changing in form, identity, or nature as a result of experiencing external factors and entering a relation with them. By treating the cabin as an object imbued with agency and considering its ability to impact the narration, this paper engages with object-oriented ontology (Harman, 2005) to suggest that space in Slay the Princess is not merely a setting, but a narrative agent—one that mirrors the instability of identity and meaning found within the story. This liminal space, constantly shifting and resisting fixed interpretation, produces an affective disorientation that destabilises the player's sense of progression and authorship. Furthermore, each loop stages a confrontation with an ostensibly immutable system in which roles such as the Princess, the Hero, the Monster, and Narrator appear predetermined. Yet the game persistently invites its characters to renegotiate these roles, emphasizing the metamodern commitment to rebuilding meaning from within a fractured or constraining structure. Viewed through a metamodern lens, Slay the Princess underscores the necessity of continually renegotiating meaning within seemingly fixed systems so that individuality is not subsumed by their inescapable logic. Characters repeatedly redefine their identities, resist prescriptive narrative trajectories, and reconstruct their relationships to the story world, while the player’s agency becomes a dynamic force that transforms, but is negotiated and undermined by the cabin.

Within this context, the cabin may be seen as a site of metamodern affect, where the interplay of choice and consequence is dramatized as both real and illusory. The game's procedural rhetoric (Bogost, 2008) positions the player as a co-author navigating a pre-structured but susceptible to change narrative landscape, while agency is simultaneously granted and manipulated, distributed among the narrator, the player, and the Princess, all of whom function as competing storytelling agents. This layered construction foregrounds the metamodern tension between structure and improvisation, fictionality and self-awareness. Drawing on the theoretical framework of metamodernism (Vermeulen and van den Akker, 2010; Huber, 2014, Gibbons, 2017; Radchenko, 2023), alongside Deleuzian philosophy of becoming, this paper argues that Slay the Princess reconstructs the fairy tale genre through a metamodern lens centred around the liminal space of the cabin. It creates a spatial poetics where choice, identity, and narrative unfold in recursive loops, and where space itself participates in the story as a liminal and affective force.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this talk is to examine a corpus of independent video games that directly or indirectly feature Janosik, a folk hero associated with the Polish–Slovak borderlands and emblematic of a broader trend of employing and commodifying the culture of the Górals – Highlanders of the northern Carpathians – for aesthetic and political purposes. I investigate how these games mobilize the Janosik legend in its various iterations, which elements of Góral cultural tradition they select or omit, and how such representational strategies can be situated within the longstanding political instrumentalization of both the character and Góral culture by the nation-states surrounding the Beskid and Tatra mountain ranges.

ABSTRACT. Two titles portray West Virginia as zombified: Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Fallout 76. Although media association with the paranormal is not new to the region, through the lens of the opioid epidemic in which the state leads overdose deaths, a commentary appears on necropolitics—"subjugation of life to the power of death . . . conferring upon them the status of living dead."

ABSTRACT. This paper examines which qualities of mancala Bao la Kiswahili contain eco-conscious affordances adapting into new games. While Bao has been documented within ethnographic and game-studies research, its literature lacks eco-conscious design analysis. This study considers Bao's mechanical, tactile and cultural qualities, identifying features resonant with environmental management: sowing and harvesting cycles, finite shared resources, recursive loops, and rules encoding communal justice. The paper foregrounds the tactile pleasures of Bao's material form, positioning embodied interactions as sites of ecological understanding. Drawing on Graeber and Wengrow's custodianship and Kimmerer's reciprocity, the analysis explores how Bao expresses eco-consciousness through player interdependence, cyclical seed motion, and the board as an object shaped by communal use. These findings are abstracted into a design framework for eco-conscious game development. By highlighting how pleasurable, rhythmic, materially grounded play emerges from a majority-world tradition, the paper contributes to discussions of cross-cultural and non-Western pleasures in game design.

ABSTRACT. While Western arcade culture was anchored in fixed architectural typologies (malls, boardwalks), the Eastern Bloc relied on the nomadic infrastructure of traveling showmen (světští). This extended abstract reconstructs this "grey" history, bridging the gap between the well-documented "bedroom coders"—defined by their necessity to tinker—and the public entertainment sector. Drawing on material analysis of a preserved arcade caravan (maringotka), collected arcade cabinets and oral histories, we demonstrate how this DIY ethos was industrialized to sustain a unique interface for Western consumer pleasure. We analyze the specific bricolage practices of technicians like Tomáš Smutný, who maintained this fleeting experience using hybrid cabinets built from smuggled PCBs, industrial buttons, and shower-diverter-based joysticks.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents the critical creative processes of a practice-based research project developing a system-agnostic tabletop role-playing game (TRPG) setting that imagines a possible future for a non-Western city. Grounded in the critical potential of RPG spaces to interrogate social and political power structures, the project investigates how TRPG worldbuilding can support reflective engagement with ecological, socio-economic, and political uncertainties shaping underrepresented urban futures.

ABSTRACT. This research investigates how the material and social affordances of analogue games influence players’ engagement with cultural and political representations, with particular attention to memetic strategies that blend the pleasures of recognition and deviation. Using Brancalonia and Turbopopulisti as case studies, the analysis explores how analogue games remediate cultural symbols and activate memetic pleasures across varying production scales and aesthetic registers. Employing multimodal textual analysis, production context analysis, and situated play observation, the study argues that pleasure in analogue games is a negotiated process shaped by materiality, cultural proximity, political sensitivities, and the embodied co-presence of players.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines 1980s Nintendo Family Computer fandoms, considering how the specificities of childhood inflected the politics of these fandoms through metagames.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines intergenerational tabletop role-playing, focusing on Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), as a site where pleasure is collaboratively produced through co-authorship, yet also constrained by uneven access to rules literacy, time, and interpretive norms. We report findings from a mixed-methods study of such play, drawing here on an online survey with 19 respondents. The majority reported playing TTRPGs intergenerationally within the past two years with a range of motivations: ‘bonding’ is the most frequently cited reason, followed by creative expression and collaborative storytelling. Onboarding practices tended to prioritize “as-needed” explanation of rules, often supported by session-zero conversations, short tutorial encounters, pre-generated characters, and other scaffolds.

We argue that intergenerational D&D produces intersectional pleasures not only through representational identity categories but through the lived intersection of age, communicative norms, platform literacies, and relational roles at the table. We conclude by proposing ‘infrastructures of pleasurable inclusion’ as a lens for analyzing how groups design conditions for shared joy, and how those conditions can fail.

ABSTRACT. When Sid Meier’s Civilization VII (Firaxis 2025; Civ7 from hereon) launched, something unusual happened: for the first time in 35 years, a mainline game in this acclaimed series was released to decidedly mixed player reception. How did this momentous shift in Civilization’s fortunes occur? This experimental exploration of player reception in a long-running, slow-to-change, popular game series, seeks to provide answers to this question by using a ‘distant-to-close reading’ approach of a large corpus of Steam reviews. In the conclusions, this reading is connected to the series’ conservative — culturally speaking — theory of game design. This paper aims to be of interest for those interested in historical game and nostalgia studies and in particular addresses mixed-methods approaches to player reception and value systems.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how marginalized players conceptualize representation and identity in digital games through a mixed-method analysis of discussions across LGBTQ+, disability-focused, and neurodivergent gaming subreddits. While representation is often framed as demographic visibility, our findings show that players experience it as a multilayered process shaping access, self-expression, and meaning-making in play. Using theory-driven keyword clustering and reflexive thematic analysis, we show how identity-focused communities articulate accessibility needs, identity desires, emotional longings, and imaginative futures for more inclusive games. We introduce the Representation Triad to describe how structural, aesthetic, and experiential design layers collectively shape identity exploration and integration. Our findings demonstrate that meaningful representation emerges not only through visual similarity but through accessibility structures, expressive customization, and resonant narrative and relational systems.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores player engagement with games designed to intentionally cause discomfort and frustration, colloquially referred to as rage games, or rage bait games, to understand what motivates players to engage in high friction forms of play, and what affective and behaviour patterns are exhibited by players engaged in rage bait game loops.

ABSTRACT. Video game preservation is now widely recognized as a complex sociotechnical process that depends on sustained cooperation between multiple stakeholders, including players, modders, enthusiasts, archivists, curators, platform holders, and developers (Newman 2013; Lowood and Guins 2016). While institutional archives and museums have made significant progress in legitimizing games as preservable cultural artefacts, much of the practical labor of preserving playable experiences, software states, and community-generated knowledge is still conducted by informal, player-driven groups whose practices remain under-examined at scale (Barwick et al., 2011; Pinchbeck, 2009).

We propose a research agenda for investigating player-centric video game preservation practices, guided by an empirical, reproducible, and transparent methodological approach. This agenda is intended to complement rather than replace existing qualitative work that richly documents the cultural and motivational contexts underlying preservation activities (Carta, 2017). Our aim is to model the behaviour of the socio-technical processes that shape preservation practice amongst players, providing conceptual and methodological tools that may benefit broader digital-heritage and archival research. Understanding these practices offers timely insight into increasing interest in retro gaming (Baranuik, 2025; Compton, 2025), and preservation (Dym et al., 2023) which suggests present-day demand, nostalgia, and community distributed labor, significantly influences preservation collectively. Nylund et al. (2021) raises the importance and productivity of player-based archivist communities and their role in video game preservation but also highlights the need for inclusion of minority groups especially within retro gaming where a particular viewpoint may be held authoritatively in contrast to those not aligned with the collective experience. Barwick et al. (2011) suggests that players have the unique characteristic of knowing what is lost when certain aspects of a game are not preserved, which may impact what they choose to preserve compared to formal archival practices. Professional focus on “technological preservation” is seen as losing some of the key characteristics that make games unique: the experience of playing the game is part of its cultural significance and should ideally also be preserved to reflect the full breadth of a game. Video games as such may be considered as "complex digital objects" which, in terms of authenticity and interpretation are defined by interrelated components, such as technical layers, user practice, and experience (Carta, 2017). Recent calls for standardization in video game research further motivates the need for a reproducible, systematic reporting of methodological design and player behavior (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006; Malliet, 2007; Lankoski and Björk, 2015).

Contemporary video game research provides a broad range of analytical methods for the study of video games, in terms of objects, interfaces and their interactive processes. This may be achieved through an applied contextual analysis (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006) and provide a means to consider version and platform variations as independent variables (Malliet, 2007). More formal analyses focus on components, actions and objectives, in consideration of style of play that may be consider equivalent to a researcher or archivists background (Lankoski and Björk, 2015). Consequently, there is no consensus and understanding on how variations between players may impact methodological design and results or the study of possible behavioral determinants and impact on preservation practice.

The Digital Game Analysis Protocol (DiGAP) provides structured guidance for resolving inconsistencies arising from variations in methodological design choices in game research. DiGAP supports transparent reporting of game-selection rationale, player background, decision-making processes, design constraints, and coding strategies (Daneels et al., 2022). Similarly, metric-based approaches can be used to review player performance automatically during play through recorded traces. This may be achieved through internal telemetry (capturing event logs, and input traces) or derived through external audiovisual capture, where source code not accessible.

Our proposed research agenda starts by defining categories of behavioral determinants related to player-centric preservation practice, derived from existing works that acknowledge the role of players as archivists. For each category of behavioral determinants, we create self-reporting items with Likert scales designed to assess level of agreement with statements that describe related motivations and beliefs associated with an individual category. Self-reporting items for each category are used to create a survey tool, where all items are randomized for each participant, including attention checks to check for valid responses based on participants attentiveness. Players who engage in video game preservation practices are recruited to complete the survey, with a sufficient sample suitable for conducting an exploratory factor analysis using principal component analysis.

Following a systematic process of identifying which items are effective for measuring which category of behavioral determinants, which are redundant and whether items load onto new categories, reliability analysis is performed to assess internal consistency of retained items. From this process a reproducible transparent model is created which can be used to test hypotheses in future studies designed to identify how individual player characteristics may influence preservation practice. We anticipate that such studies will reveal insights and greater understanding on how player characteristics influence preservation practice and their impact on authenticity, interpretation and experience.

ABSTRACT. Since the late 2000s, the term ‘gamblification’ originally emerged to describe the gambling industry’s colonisation of sport and sporting culture. Over time, the term has been used to refer to the blurring of gaming and gambling, particular monetisation strategies, and effects designed to steer consumer behaviour (Macey and Hamari 2022). Recent studies in esports and gambling have highlighted the concerns of ‘gamblified’ monetisation methods of streaming platforms (Abarbanel and Johnson 2020), esports betting, skin betting, and lootboxes, all of which involve purchasing unpredictable in-game virtual items using real-world money (Brock and Johnson 2021). This paper considers a critical analysis of the ideological work performed by such discourses and reveals the tensions underpinning current debates on gamblification and consumer protection in the United Kingdom. Particular attention is given to how probabilistic reward mechanics are normalised, how uncertainty is framed, and how responsibility is discursively shifted between industry, players and regulators.

ABSTRACT. Player creativity in commercial games is often framed through external measures rather than players’ own accounts of creative experiences. In this paper, I explore how Animal Crossing: New Horizons becomes a site of situated, sociocultural creativity by conducting in-game, ethnographically-informed interviews with eight players during “island tours.” I examine how players conceptualize creativity as a process of worldbuilding, negotiation with/against game constraints, and co-creation with both human and nonhuman audiences. My findings show that ACNH affords small-scale creative labor that is expression and relational, shaped by the game’s material and aesthetic conditions. By positioning ACNH as a meaningful site for understanding digital creative practice, this paper offers a qualitative account of in-game creativity grounded in player narratives and demonstrates the value of in-game interviewing for game studies research.