VGC 2024 Presentation Abstracts

Guardians Astray

The Poetics of Parenthood and Othering in the Amnesia Games

There is an unisono core within the (survival) horrors of each game in the Amnesia series (since 2010), connecting the titles across a diverse historiography: Their protagonists are entangled in complex, and complexly troubled parent-child relations. Exploring their fates means interpreting the essential terror of these games through the often neglected perspective on the father, mother, son, or daughter as the sinister other: each protagonist’s relation to the parent/child is guided by ominous forces as much as family concerns and values, which impact their respective game’s ludo-narrative composition.

Our contribution delves into the portrayal of parental and filial spaces, and narratives in the Amnesia series. Drawing from the fields of comparative media and game studies (including Erin Harrington’s concept of Gynaehorror [2018], Barbara Creed’s approach to the Monstrous Feminine [1993], and Bo Ruberg’s understanding of video games as queered spaces [2019]) and topology, we ask how parenthood and its relations to the monstrous are reflected in these games across narrative, agency, character design, and environmental elements.

In the first Amnesia (Frictional Games 2010), Daniel is the abused child seeking redemption by earning the respect of a non-parental mentor. Mandus from Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs (The Chinese Room 2013) navigates a world shaped by industrialisation, sacrificing his biological children to the monstrous creations he has fathered. Tasi is the odd one out in the series (and many survival horror games), being not only the female avatar of Amnesia: Rebirth (Frictional Games 2020) but also pregnant, birthing, and breastfeeding. Henri Clement, finally, represents the ‘lost sons’ of the Great War in Amnesia: The Bunker (Frictional Games 2023).

Through a comparative analysis of the Amnesia games, we ask: ‘Which gendered horrors of fatherhood and motherhood, which body horror of the parental and child’s body do players experience through gameplay?’. We dissect these dichotomies of protagonist and other as a family dramaturgy and highlight the individual contribution to the survival horror genre that each Amnesia game thereby delivers.

Bibliography

Chare, Nicholas; Jeanette Hoorn and Audrey Yue (eds.). 2020. Re-Reading the Monstrous-Feminine. Art, Film, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Routledge: New York.

Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge: London and New York.

Grand, Barry Keith (ed.). 2015. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Harrington, Erin. 2018. Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror. Routledge: New York.

Ruberg, Bo. 2019. Video Games Have Always Been Queer. New York: NYU Press.

Stang, Sarah. 2019. “The Broodmother as Monstrous-Feminine–Abject Maternity in Video Games.” In Nordlit “Manufacturing Monsters,” Vol. 42 (2019), pp. 233–255.

Stang, Sarah. 2018. „Shrieking, Biting, and Licking: The Monstrous-Feminine in Video Games.“ In Press Start 4 (2), pp. 18–34.

DiGioia, Amanda. 2017. Childbirth and Parenting in Horror Texts. The Marginalized and the Monstrous. Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited.

Ludography

Frictional Games. 2010. Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Helsingborg: Frictional Games.

The Chinese Room. 2013. Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. Brighton: The Chinese Room.

Frictional Games. 2020. Amnesia: Rebirth. Helsingborg: Frictional Games.

Frictional Games. 2023. Amnesia: The Bunker. Helsingborg: Frictional Games.

This article explores the production of the racial figure ‘the Russian’ in multiplayer video game cultures. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022 has triggered widespread political and economic sanctions from Western nations and companies. This has sparked a cultural resurgence of imperial narratives about the East that reflect processes of othering of the East by the West across politics, media, and cultural industries. Despite these sanctions and cultural distancing from Russia, both leisure and professional gamers from Western and Eastern Europe still play and compete in the digital spaces of multiplayer video games due to the geographical proximity of game servers. While the culture within these gaming spaces is often characterised as fun, play and sociality, they are – like critiques of the gaming industry at large – also toxic, sexist, and racist. In this article, I examine how the ‘the Russian’ figure is established and positioned as ‘the Other’ in the spaces of gaming. Drawing on theorisations of whiteness and the post-socialist subject, I argue that the figure of ‘the Russian’ illustrates multiplicity and mutation of racism between physical and digital spaces. To do so, I conduct a case study on the subjectivity of Eastern Europeans in the video game Counter Strike. My empirical material draws attention to both the racialised dynamics of everyday gaming through digital ethnography and the current e-sports scene through a large media archive. In the absence of physical bodies, I discuss how the marker of ‘race’ becomes a specific style of playing and communicating whereby Russians are coded as crazed, cold, and calculated through a constant racial profiling based on language, behaviour, and gameplay. The article contributes with insights on how historical imaginaries and geopolitical borders between the West and the East increasingly structure digital cultures of online multiplayer gaming.

This paper demonstrates the value of adopting an affective framework to analyse the transcultural reception of video games. It contributes to ongoing discussions within game studies about the intersections of culture, identity, and gameplay. Through a focus on players engagement with cultural “others” in gaming environments, it seeks to elucidate the role of affect in shaping gameplay experiences. Central to this exploration is the embodiment of avatars from varied cultural backgrounds, serving as a lens to examine how players negotiate cultural differences to form hybrid identities during transcultural gameplay. As such, this paper recognises avatars as mediators of culture, as well as virtual representations or vehicles. The way in which a player encounters cultural affect through avatar embodiment can differ greatly depending on gameplay mechanics and agency manifestation. Affective responses emerge from the emotional resonance players feel while navigating these cultural dimensions through their avatar, wherein they may adopt, challenge or transform cultural norms and practices. These affective experiences contribute to the ongoing construction of hybrid identities that transcend traditional cultural boundaries. To examine these processes, I employ an auto-theoretical method, blending personal narratives with scholarly analysis to examine player-avatar relations and affective engagement. This approach not only sheds light on lived experiences of gaming but also positions players at the forefront of examination. As such, the paper allows for a detailed exploration of how individual experiences and identities intersect with broader cultural and social factors, shaping gameplay experiences and player behaviour. In an increasingly interconnected global landscape, this paper calls for a re-evaluation of how scholars and practitioners conceptualise and evaluate the transcultural reception of video games. By foregrounding the transformative potential of video games as conduits for cross-cultural understanding and identity negotiation, it highlights the need for game scholars and practitioners to adopt more holistic frameworks that account for affective dimensions.

In Portugal, women are significantly underrepresented in esports (Monteiro 2021) and game development (Gil 2022; WPGI 2022). Yet, Portuguese game design students typically hold conservative views towards gender roles and disinterest in prioritising equity (Lima and Gouveia 2020; Lima et al. 2021). These might be attributed to gender stereotypes, which are prevalent in Portuguese culture (Tavares 2020). Non-profit advocates such as AnyKey have recommended practices to help esports to become more inclusive and promote diversity (AnyKey 2015). However, these works often generalise findings without further consideration for cultural differences in attitudes towards social justice and diversity. This work forms part of a larger ongoing project that explores how national esports communities navigate gender diversity. The current work explores the disposition towards gender diversity initiatives in the Portuguese population. Here, we will extend the initial work with a questionnaire to assess the representativeness of the previous findings. Drawing on actor-network theory (Latour 2005), the work follows the actors to explore the views of individuals involved in esports when it comes to incorporating social justice in esports spaces, i.e., representation of women and LGBTQIA+ individuals in games, promoting marginalised individuals in esports, and moderation practices.
This research will yield several insights into the Portuguese esports’ ecosystem, which remains understudied. With recent campaigns promoting esports in Portugal, it is crucial to understand the best way to ingrain gender diversity in an emerging esports scene. This work will also strengthen the esports literature by exploring a local ecosystem, and how its aspects embrace and resist gender diversity. Findings from a cross-section of the data collected in 2024 will be discussed at the conference.

Bibliography
ANDREWS, Sharon K. and Caroline M. CRAWFORD. 2021. ‘Barriers, Issues, and Similarities Among Women in eSports and Similar Mixed Gender Sports: Ascertaining Common Ground’. In Sharon ANDREWS and Caroline M. CRAWFORD (eds.). Advances in E-Business Research. IGI Global, 25–46. Available at: http://services.igi-global.com/resolvedoi/resolve.aspx?doi=10.4018/978-1-7998-7300-6.ch002 [accessed 9 Feb 2023].
ANYKEY. 2015. ‘Women in Esports Whitepaper’. Available at: https://anykey-resources.s3.amazonaws.com/publications/AnyKey%20-%20Women%20in%20Esports%20Whitepaper%20(Oct%202015).pdf [accessed 20 Feb 2023].
DARVIN, Lindsey, John HOLDEN, Janelle WELLS and Thomas BAKER. 2021. ‘Breaking the Glass Monitor: Examining the Underrepresentation of Women in Esports Environments’. Sport Management Review 24(3), 475–99.
FRIMAN, Usva. 2022. Gender and Game Cultural Agency in the Post-Gamer Era: Finnish Women Players’ Gaming Practices, Game Cultural Participation, and Rejected Gamer Identity. Doctoral thesis, University of Turku. Available at: https://www.utupub.fi/handle/10024/176585.
GIL, Ana. 2022. ‘Mulheres Na Indústria Dos Videojogos: “Eu Não Sou Uma Jogadora, Sou Um Jogador”’. A Borda [online]. Available at: https://aborda.pt/2022/04/25/mulheres-na-industria-dos-videojogos-eu-nao-sou-uma-jogadora-sou-um-jogador/.
LATOUR, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social an Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
LIMA, Luciana and Patrícia GOUVEIA. 2020. ‘Gender Asymmetries in the Digital Games Sector in Portugal’. In Proceedings of DiGRA 2020. DiGRA 2020, 2020. Available at: http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/DiGRA_2020_paper_132.pdf [accessed 2 Jun 2023].
LIMA, Luciana, Patrícia GOUVEIA, Pedro CARDOSO and Camila PINTO. 2021. ‘“Never Imagined I Would Work In The Digital Game Industry”’. In 2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG). 2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), August 2021, 1–7.
MONTEIRO, Fábio. 2021. ‘Videojogadoras, unicórnios e streamers portuguesas. Ocomando é delas’. Rádio Renascença [online]. Available at: https://rr.sapo.pt/especial/vida/2021/01/27/videojogadoras-unicornios-e-streamers-portuguesas-o-comando-e-delas/221808/.
TAVARES, Raquel. 2020. A representação do género na publicidade infantil televisiva e a sua perceção por crianças dos 7 aos 12 anos. MAsters Dissertation, Universidade Católica Portuguesa. Available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/29872.
WITKOWSKI, Emma. 2018. ‘Doing/Undoing Gender with the Girl Gamer in High-Performance Play’. In Kishonna L. GRAY, Gerald VOORHEES, and Emma VOSSEN (eds.). Feminism in Play. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90539-6.
WPGI. 2022. ‘About Us’. Women of the Portuguese Games Industry [online]. Available at: https://wpgi.pt/about/.

Screen industry employers report they are unable to recruit graduates with the right skills for entry level roles in film and television (e.g. runners or production assistants), citing a lack of business awareness and various ‘soft skills’ as barriers to employment (Grugulis and Vincent 2009; Carey et al, 2017; Jones, Swords and Brereton, 2022). Traditionally such knowledge and skills are obtained through in-person work experience on set, but work experience is usually unpaid and therefore inaccessible to many students and graduates. However, research in the use of applied/serious games and extended reality technologies for training purposes has indicated that situational skills training can be facilitated using these approaches (Ebner and Holzinger 2007; Connolly et al, 2012). This paper presents an analysis of the design process behind a game-based learning intervention, developed to enable players to experience a day working on a film set and to allow educators to open up discussions about working practices and employability/progression within the screen industry. The simulation gives players the opportunity to take on a junior role in a film studio, respond to typical requests on set, interact with other crew members and observe proceedings. The study draws on interviews with educators and an ethnographic account of playing the game and using the complementary educational resources. We argue that a serious game can function as a meaningful intervention allowing potential new entrants to the screen industry to understand the tasks and duties of job roles in the industry. This approach also improves access to the development of skills and knowledge which are traditionally gained through (unpaid) work experience.

Other ways of playing are everywhere, as players habitually behave in ways that were neither intended nor anticipated by game designers. For instance, players exploit bugs for their advantage, in the sense of Aarseth’s transgressive play, they repurpose spaces and game mechanics through modding, or they interact in a way that goes against the moral stance or atmosphere of a game by, for example, introducing violence in a game with a young target audience as a form of dark play (cf. Mortensen et al.). These activities are by no means political by default – players often perform them purely out of spite or driven by a picaresque appetite for disobedience and chaos. However, these other ways of playing can become practices of ludic resistance if players actively employ them for political purposes, as for instance Ruberg argues in their conceptualisation of queer play in “Video Games Have Always Been Queer” (1).

Making use of a number of brief examples, my paper explores the processes that are involved when other ways of playing take on political valence. I argue that this is not merely up to the player, but that these resistance practices emerge from the complex relationship between modes and contexts of production, the game itself, and the player’s positioning towards the, especially in the AAA sector, often hypercapitalist, racist, classist, sexist and cis-heteronormative structures they encounter when playing a game the way it is ‘supposed’ to be played. The player’s willingness to critically engage with the world they enter and to question what they are told to do in any given game is not only tied to their own position within dynamics of oppression, but it is simultaneously triggered by the game itself, and by the power structures ingrained in it by its production contexts.

Video games excel at emulating hypercapitalist systems, operating on both representational and procedural levels (Bogost, 2007; Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, 2009). This phenomenon extends to cosy games, despite their seemingly innocuous appearance, as they depict, replicate, and interact with capitalism in varied and nuanced ways. While cosy games challenge conventional notions of gameplay as fast-paced, high-intensity, and success-driven, many still embody neoliberal ideologies and idealised concepts of work-as-play (Bogost, 2011), often centring on pastoral fantasies (NYU Game Center, 2020). In recent years, there has been a surge in indie meta-games—self-aware and reflexive titles that provoke medium-awareness in players (Krampe, 2022). Cosy games, many of which fall under this indie umbrella, increasingly prompt players to contemplate the medium, genre, and gaming culture. This paper looks at Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion (Snoozy Kazoo, 2021) to argue that cosy farming/adventure games serve as unique platforms for players to ponder the nexus of games and capitalism, particularly when infused with humour through meta-references.
Through textual analysis, this paper contends that the metareferentiality in Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion thematically explores and complicates aesthetic elements typical of role-playing and cosy games, such as resource management, dungeon exploration, and verdant settings. Additionally, the game gestures towards its own ontological status by breaking the fourth wall and incorporating intertextual references to similar titles. Furthermore, it addresses broader socio-cultural phenomena related to gaming, such as the “chad” meme and streaming culture. The integration of metareferentiality within the cosy atmosphere of the game enhances its comedic impact. The juxtaposition of metareferences to other games and the exaggeration of capitalist themes within a cosy setting creates humour through contrast, allowing players to reflect and appreciate the wit more comfortably due to the absence of time-critical challenges.

I argue that where blackness has been historically framed as a mediant between the human and the animal, and between person and property, it can teach us to recognize and to parse the abrasive plasticity and weird time that is constitutive of life lived with computational objects. More so, due to how they affectively reorganize their players while extending the reach and capability of their bodies, I argue that videogames produce especially potent and estranging experiences of computation’s abrasive plasticity and strange temporality. I ground my argument in a close-reading of SOMA, a 2015 videogame that is set at the bottom of the Atlantic in a world populated by revenant cyborgs. Within the game’s lore, these bodies are made possible by the black/Black blood that renders all things programmable and interoperable, its touch repudiating the distinction between human and nonhuman, living and nonliving, futures-past and futures-still-present. I read this game together with theories of how blackness has been constructed in connection to the transatlantic slave trade so as to mark the Black body as the hinge between the human and nonhuman, which being both and neither at once, makes their distinction thinkable (Hartman, 1997, Jackson, 2020, Spillers, 1987). Within this framing, a constitutive feature of blackness is an ongoing confrontation with one’s existence as both I and it, simultaneously and irreconcilably. I argue that computation subjects those who interact with and are (re-)organized by it to a structurally analogous confrontation. In this state of indetermination, the player/user waits for resolution whence they will be recognizably one and not the other and they wait because that resolution can never come. Where this indeterminacy is potentially abjecting, SOMA teaches us how videogames tether that abjection to pleasure as they abrade the distinction between the player and their computational objects.

In Inside (Playdead 2016), unnatural narrative devices (metalepsis and second-person narration) are combined with the cinematic platformer genre’s conventions, particularly the bodily characterisation of the avatar. These two aspects allow the game to involve the player beyond the game’s diegesis (see Schallegger 2017; 2023), making her reflect on existential questions about her relationship with the digital world. Using a narratological approach and building on the works on unnatural narratives (Alber et al. 2010; Alber, Nielsen and Richardson 2013; Alber 2016), more specifically metalepsis (Bell and Alber 2012; Bell 2016; Genette 1980; 2004) and second-person narration (Fludernik 1993; 1994), I analyse the dissolution of the literary narrator in Inside’s avatar, game world, and User Interface as well as its effect on the player’s experience (see Schallegger 2017). I focus on the role of the avatar from phenomenological (Klevjer 2022) and cybertheory (Ensslin 2010; Kirkland 2009; Salen and Zimmerman 2003) perspectives with the support of taxonomies developed by game studies scholars (Barnabé and Delbouille 2018; Schallegger 2017; Willumsen 2018) to show its potential to create enriching transformative experience for players through ethical design (see Schallegger 2023).
Video games construct the artificial unity of the player (the self), avatar, and protagonist (the others) using ‘you’ narration. Inside subverts this united ‘you’ by dissociating the avatar (what the player controls) and the protagonist (the agent body shown on screen). A central part of Inside’s dystopia is a mind control mechanic that makes the protagonist transfer the player’s agency to a chain of virtual bodies. In this metalepsis, the different narrative layers intrude on each other, moving the extra-diegetic player mechanically and narratively along the chain of control of the game’s diegesis. With these video game-specific narrative and mechanic devices, players realise that their identity includes otherness. Inside’s subversiveness allows players to understand the artificial nature of video games’ avatars and narratives. Analysing video game-specific unnatural narratives may help creators design games that democratise game design literacy, thus elevating players’ critical thinking about their media.

References:

Alber, Jan, Stefan Iversen, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. 2010 “Unnatural Narratives, Unnatural Narratology: Beyond Mimetic Models.” Narrative 18 (2): 113–36. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40856404.

Alber, Jan, Henrik Skov Nielsen, and Brian Richardson. 2013. A poetics of unnatural narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Alber, Jan. 2016. Unnatural narrative: impossible worlds in fiction and drama. Frontiers of narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Barnabé, Fanny, and Julie Delbouille. 2018. “Aux frontières de la fiction : l’avatar comme opérateur de réflexivité“. Sciences du jeu 9. https://doi.org/10.4000/sdj.958.

Bell, Alice, and Jan Alber. 2012. “Ontological Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology“. Journal of Narrative Theory 42 (2): 166–92. https://doi.org/10.1353/jnt.2012.0005.

Bell, Alice. 2016. “Interactional Metalepsis and Unnatural Narratology”. Narrative, 24 (3): 294-310.

Ensslin, Astrid. 2010. “Respiratory Narrative: Multimodality and Cybernetic Corporeality in “Physio-Cybertext””. In New perspectives on narrative and multimodality, edited by Ruth E. Page, 155–65. New York: Routledge.

Fludernik, Monika. 1993. “Second Person Fiction: Narrative ‘You’ As Addressee And/Or Protagonist.” AAA: Arbeiten Aus Anglistik Und Amerikanistik 18 (2): 217–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43023644.

Fludernik, Monika. 1994. “Second-Person Narrative As a Test Case for Narratology: The Limits of Realism.” Style 28 (3): 445–79. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42946261.

Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Genette, Gérard. 2004. Métalepse: de la figure à la fiction. Poétique. Paris: Seuil.

Klevjer, Rune. 2022. What is the Avatar?: Fiction and Embodiment in Avatar-Based Singleplayer Computer Games. Revised and Commented Edition. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839445792.

Playdead. 2016. Inside. Copenhagen: Playdead.

Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. 2003. Rules of play: game design fundamentals. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Schallegger, René Reinhold. 2017. “WTH Are Games? – Towards a Triad of Triads”. In Digitale Spiele, edited by Jörg Helbig, 14–49. Klagenfurter Beiträge zur visuellen Kultur 5. Köln: Herbert von Halem Verlag.

Schallegger, René Reinhold. 2023. “From High Heroism to Abject Abyss: Ethical Aspects of Highly Aestheticised and Critical Videogames”. Colloquium: New Philologies. https://doi.org/10.23963/cnp.2022.8.1.1.

Willumsen, Ea Christina. 2018. “Is My Avatar MY Avatar? Character Autonomy and Automated Avatar Actions in Digital Games.” In DiGRA 2018. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/DIGRA_2018_paper_32.pdf.

Decades after the release of Final Fantasy VII (1997), its characters remain some of the most recognizable in the gaming medium. I argue, however, that the versions of these characters that exist within collective memory are not exclusively the characters from the 1997 title; rather, they are intermedial and intramedial iterations, constituted by their appearances in other media. Scholars such as Irina Neill Hoch, Zlatko Bukač and Mario Katić (2023) have studied the reconstruction of FFVII in collective consciousness, but existing analysis focuses primarily on the events of the game rather than its characters, and it limits its scope to the gaming medium rather than including other medial perspectives. This paper focuses on the characters of Cloud and Aerith, analyzing how their representations in film (Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children [2005]) and in other games (Kingdom Hearts [2002], Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII [2007], the Remake project [2020-2024]) affect their status within collective memory. Applying an intermedial perspective, in which art forms are viewed not as contained entities but as relational to each other, allows for analysis that incorporates the full scope of FFVII’s influence on culture and vice versa. This approach reveals that Cloud’s development throughout FFVII has grown to be largely ignored in favor of the “anti-hero” persona he falsely construes for himself. Much like how his memories within the narrative result from the disjointed overlap of multiple personalities, collective memory surrounding the game characters has been formed by the overlap of media. I conclude that the characters presented in Final Fantasy VII are no longer the characters that exist in collective memory among fans, but are constantly evolving across and in-between different media.

My practice-based research explores the use of immersive/interactive technology to tell stories and experimenting with the sensorial to heighten user experience. For this conference I would like to contribute to the theme of ‘other space’. From a pure documentarian background, my research has led me to conduct experiments using new technology in more creative ways. I have used publishing software’s ‘Klynt’ and ‘Wonda VR’ to create interactive documentaries (iDocs) whilst investigating “new ways of seeing”. These projects are published on public domain for users all around the world to interact with.

Although iDocs are not necessarily classed as video games, there is technically a ‘gamification’ element through the power of design and control of stories and therefore provides an ‘other’ kind of video game experience. From a designer’s perspective, the piece is crafted with interactive buttons to create a ‘world’. The space is therefore an infinite canvas providing ample opportunities for experimentation i.e archive. The method of sensorial praxis has been approached in rethinking visual mediums by recognising the sensorial to create visceral experiences that can be best expressed in practice. I would expand on the notion ‘experience in itself’ as conceptualised by Sarah Pink and ideas of ‘the absolute’ by Herzog.

I would like to speak about the interdisciplinary approach of digital storytelling whilst providing a live demonstration of the sites highlighting user experience. My research has stemmed from creating collaborative projects with MA students at Coventry University. With my role as curator/designer, I had the responsibility of creatively shaping the site, understanding the hardware, functioning interactivity, and simultaneously teaching the software. Wonda similarly is a VR interactive publishing tool to create non-linear stories. A project that I led was to capture experimental 360-degree filmmaking to portray the forestry land of Raasay Island. Through the interplay of interaction and visuals, the two provoke viewers intrinsic sensations and feelings through the layers of visceral film and sound, influenced by Leviathan (SEL).

Appendices

Anti-Isolation Zones (Klynt iDoc made during lockdown). Available at: https://www.kinopraxis.com/AIZ

360 Earth (Wonda experimental VR iDoc made on Raasay Island Scotland). Available at: http://kinopraxis.com/360Earth

Other iDocs

Palestine Returned (Klynt iDoc) https://palestinekino.com/
Land and Poetry (Klynt iDoc) http://www.kinopraxis.com/land_poetry/index.html#Raasay_Menu
Ethereal 360 (Wonda iDoc) http://kinopraxis.com/Ethereal360/

References

Pink, S (2015) Doing Sensory Ethnography. SAGE Publications Ltd

Castaing-Taylor, L and Paravel, V (2012) Leviathan. Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), Harvard University.

Snyder, H (2013) Visual Anthropology Review: Leviathan. American Anthropological Association. Volume 29, Number 2.

Herzog, W (2010) On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth. Boston University.

Tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs) of all kinds often struggle with the sense that new players may not truly understand what they are, or how to play them. TRPG makers have long provided instructions on how to (role)play, often through play examples expressed in the form of scripts presented as vignettes of game sessions. More recently, they have employed video or audio play examples, or directed prospective players towards ‘actual plays’, podcasts and video series such as Critical Role, The Adventure Zone and Happy Jacks (Marsden and Mason 2021: 181-2). All of these interventions present heavily mediated forms of TRPG play, typically bearing only a limited resemblance to the experience of most TRPG players. The unrealistically fluid and charismatic expectations of play created by actual plays are pronounced enough to have a name within the fan community (the Mercer effect: Girdwood 2019). Printed play instructions, conversely, are often stilted, presenting a melange of rules and formulaic dialogue.

This paper explores play examples from TRPGs as forms of mediated play, drawing on a range of actual plays, guidance videos, current and historical TRPG materials, and player comments and discussions. We reflect on the way that such representations of roleplaying imply or construct gameplay norms, which function to ‘other’ everyday TRPG play experiences, shaping player expectations and activities. Grounded in perspectives drawn from film and media studies, we pay particular attention to the form of mediation in each case, seeking to understand how different presentations of play afford different interpretations of what roleplaying is and might be – as well as what it might not be – and the implications of this for the present and future of this game form.

Other is a concept that is fundamental to sports: the other team, other player(s), other fans. Football fans share a camaraderie and can enthuse a tribalism (Mangan, 1996) that is difficult to understand and replicate in the virtual world. Yet, that identity and fandom are expressed in virtual spaces. Who is a virtual footballer? What is fandom in virtual football? How is that fandom represented and expressed? How do real-world identities translate to the virtual? What does fandom mean in the virtual footballing context?

Football fans are commonly viewed as passionate, vociferous, and loyal (Bradley, 2003). Though often portrayed negatively due to sporadic violent incidents they also represent a peaceful and positive way for fans to connect with ‘otherness’. Fans can entertain (for good and bad reasons), act as ambassadors for their respective club/country and through their behaviour break down stereotypes. We are interested in how that manifests itself in the virtual world.

This paper examines virtual football players to explore expressions of identity and loyalty (club or country) amongst those who regularly play major football simulation games, EA Sports FC and eFootball. As current incarnations of longstanding popular franchises (FIFA and PES respectively), we consider how ‘otherness’ affects the player base through popular perceptions and misconceptions of real football, franchise rivalry and platform popularity (Guins et al, 2022). We also reflect on ‘other’ player agencies, audiences, and experiences between different types of football games. Lastly, we examine how these games act as a gauge in representing real football fans and how they are used to portray different notions of self, other layers of identity and what these might mean in understanding gamer identity. We then consider how these provide comments on some of the political, social, religious and national nuances involved in football more generally.

How is fatness afforded within character creator interfaces? Is the central question I seek to outline and address in this analysis. Previous work towards this goal has relied on value judgements and on what fatness within the interface is and the Avatar Affordance Framework, this focus leaves the analysis unable to uncover nuanced player-oriented readings of the interface. Other work on fatness within games has focused on NPC and non customisable character representations. Introducing the affordance framework of Davis and Chounard, which invites us to consider a cultural & critical dimension when analyzing affordances and opens up for a too-close playing of game interfaces. This is especially useful when fatness is considered as a floating signifier. I analyze how Dragon Age Origins, Pillars Of Eternity & Baldurs Gate 3 come to afford the creation of fat characters in their respective character creation interfaces, considering fatness to always be afforded. I found that they all share a commonality in refusing characters that could be read as both fat and tall, and by extension demanding players to read the Dwarf racial option as fat, except for in the case of BG3 where the Halfling became the only fat option through the masculine option with a beer belly. These races come to perform fatness through their negative relation with the other options, and this is most evident in BG3, as the existence of the Halfling changes the affordance of the Dwarf to that of a strongman when the halfling presents more fat. By expanding our perception of affordances, and of what fat could be, we are able to find it represented in a myriad of ways. Further, we are able to find the ways in which games come to afford fat embodiment, archival of fat experiences, and finally, transform the players perspective on fat people.

Popular Western culture has long depicted gamers as masculine, socially awkward, shy, and sexless (Shaw 2012; Kowert et al 2014; Massanari & Lind 2017). While stereotypes may persist, contemporary research calls what we know about the sex lives of videogame nerds into question. For example, past studies have found that gamers fall in love with characters in the games they play (Waern 2015), consume ‘thirst traps’ of people cosplaying as favorite videogame protagonists on social media (Ask & Sihvonen 2023), and indeed create thirst traps themselves (Tompkins & Guajardo 2024). While it is outside of the scope of this presentation to definitively prove that videogamers do indeed have sex, we will instead examine how some nerds express their desired characteristics in romantic partners through the media they consume.

This abstract proposes a playful and interactive talk which asks audience members to reflect on whether they’ve experienced romantic attraction to a videogame character and why, before presenting preliminary research findings on the nuanced desires of nerds. These reflections will be done synchronously via an anonymous web-based participation platform Mentimeter. Attendees will be asked to visit the Mentimeter website on their mobile devices and input responses to prompts anonymously. In turn, these responses are shared in real time via a ‘slide’ (similar to a Powerpoint). These responses will then be discussed as a group and compared to research results. Responses will not be saved or used for research purposes, rather only to spark discussion.

The research underpinning this paper comes from observational data from a cosplay/LARP event in the south western United States as well as 25 in-depth interviews from English speaking participants in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Preliminary analysis reveals that, despite their hypersexualized bodies (Tompkins and Martins 2022), players fall in love with videogame characters who exhibit emotional depth and strength of character. Audiences at the Video Game Cultures conference will leave this presentation a little flustered, and perhaps embarrassed, but with a greater understanding of what videogame nerds find romantically appealing.

Works Cited
Ask, K. and Sihvonen, T. (2023). Horny for Ghost: The Sexualized Remediation of Call of Duty Modern Warfare II on Tiktok. Digital Games Research Association Conference 2023, Seville, Spain, June 19-23, 2023.
Kowert, R., Festl, R. and Quandt, T. (2014) ‘Unpopular, overweight, and socially inept: reconsidering the stereotype of online gamers’, Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, 17(3), pp. 141–146.
Massanari, A.L. (2017) ‘Damseling for Dollars: Toxic Technocultures and Geek Masculinity’, in Race and Gender in Electronic Media. 1st edn. Routledge, pp. 312–327.
Shaw, A. (2012) ‘Do you identify as a gamer? Gender, race, sexuality, and gamer identity’, New Media & Society, 14(1), pp. 28–44.
Tompkins, J. E., & Martins, N. (2022). Masculine pleasures as normalized practices: Character design in the video game industry. Games and Culture, 17(3), 399-420.
Tompkins, J. and Guajardo, A. (2024). ‘Gatekeeping the Gatekeepers: An Exploratory Study of Transformative Games Fandom and TikTok Algorithms’. Games and Culture, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120241244416
Waern, A. (2015). ‘I’m in Love With Someone Who Doesn’t Exist!’ Bleed In the Context of a Computer Game. In Enevold, J. and MacCallum-Stewart, E. (2015). Game Love. MacFarland: London.

This communication and its results stem from an ongoing thesis on the social history of videogame practices in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, between 1970 and 2010. It aims to offer another understanding of the medium’s History through two alternative perspectives.
First, it seeks to observe the video game history not through the dominant discourse of those who produced it, i.e. the industry, but through those who have experienced it. Based on an oral history methodology around previous players’ testimonies, this presentation seeks to question how the video game has become part of some people’s daily lives. In doing so, the presentation will emphasize the importance of routines, sometimes without passion, practices of video gaming in understanding its historical diffusion. It thus moves away from analyses of fan practices to document more everyday practices.
Secondly, the presentation aims to relativize the global, monolithic, American-centric narratives of videogame histories, which presuppose that video game practice has been identical everywhere and all the time. By zooming in a local context : the Canton of Vaud between 1970 and 2010, it will show how the spread of video games was supported by very local structures: that local café, that teacher who integrated video games, those cousins whose parents were less strict, that arcade that enabled people from the suburbs to get together on Wednesday afternoons.
So, while testimonials often tell us about shared, even hegemonic practices, they also shed light on the personal, even intimate dimension of video gaming. Experiences sometimes forgotten by the participants themselves only to resurface at the time of the interview, and which would otherwise be doomed to oblivion. In conclusion, this presentation will address the role of video game memory for those who saw its emergence, highlighting the limits of such an approach, and showing how today’s individual souvenirs can be ossified around some topos of a collectively constructed memory.

Indicative Bibliography :

Blanchet, A., & Montagnon, G. (2020). Une Histoire du jeu vidéo en France. 1960-1991 : des labos aux chambres d’ados. Pix’n’love.
Coavoux, S., Gerber, D (2016), « Les pratiques ludiques des adultes entre affinités électives et sociabilités familiales », Sociologie 7,2, pp.133-152
Descamps, F. (2015). « Conférence de Florence Descamps à l’université de Sherbrooke le 10 avril 2015. En guise de réponse à Giovanni Contini : De l’histoire orale au patrimoine culturel immatériel. Une histoire orale à la française » (en ligne). 41, pp. 1-10. Sherbrooke: Bulletin de l’AFAS. https://journals.openedition.org/afas/2948
Donovan, T. (2015). « Rewriting History: Keynote address to the 2014 Game History Annual Symposium, Montreal ». Kinephanos, 8-24.
Hall S., CCCS, Albaret M,, Gamberini M-C. « Codage/décodage ». Réseaux, 68, 12, 1994. Les théories de la réception. pp. 27-39;
Leavy, P. (2011). Oral History – Understanding Qualitative research. Oxford University Press.
Prost, A. (1996). Douze leçons sur l’histoire. Seuil.
Ritchie, D. A. (2010). The Oxford Handbook of Oral History. Oxford University Press.
Swalwell, M. (2021). Game History and the Local. Palgrave Macmillan.
Ter Minassian, H et al, (2021). La fin du game ? Les jeux vidéo au quotidien. Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais.
Triclot, M. (2011). Philosophie des jeux vidéo. La Découverte.
Wolf, M. J. (2014). « Unrepresented and Under-reprsented Video Game History ». Kinephanos, 156-161.
Zabban, V. (2012/3). « Retour sur les game studies. Comprendre et dépasser les approches formelles et culturelles du jeu vidéo » Réseaux, 173-174, pp. 137-176.

Historically, public discourse has critiqued fast-paced, shooter-style video games as sources of anxiety, violence, stress, and loneliness. Yet, in recent years, the growing popularity of slower-paced Role Play Games (RPGs) such as Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing, Minecraft, etc., have changed these perceptions of games as sources of negative emotions and experiences. These RPG games have been lauded for their relaxing, therapeutic, escapist qualities, with many players now viewing their gameplay as acts of ‘self-care’. Accordingly, these slow-paced games have recently been integrated into mental healthcare and therapy services, creating new commercialized gameplay spaces that exist between traditional practices of play and therapy.
This paper examines how digital games are imagined and adopted as therapeutic tools in the twenty-first century by analyzing the social media presence and promotional materials of the newly-developed online therapy portal, Hero Journey Club. Hero Journey Club places paying subscribers into small groups with a licensed and accredited therapist, who offers mental health support to users while players play Minecraft and other slow-paced RPGs together. Our analysis draws on affect theory, politics of care, and wider critiques of medicalization and neoliberal healthcare structures, to consider the care-giving potentiality of digital games and explore how therapy is being reimagined and commodified in a digital age.
Overall, we find that Hero Journey Club presents video games as both an escape from everyday troubles, and as a therapeutic space in which to ‘process’ life under neoliberalism. However, we argue that the care-giving potential of commercial RPG gameplay therapy will remain limited, so long as the Hero Journey Club, and the games it hosts, continue subscribing to logics of commodification and the neoliberal affects of anxiety and productivity.

Astrid Ensslin in an essay describes video games to be fundamentally ‘unnatural’ in their core features: Their narratives, spatiality and temporality are alienating, defer from cultural conventions and are explicitly ‘different’ – they are, holistically, the Other. Nevertheless, or precisely for this reason, this ‘unnaturality’ is specifically ludic, becoming in many ways a canon to games’ narratives and spatio-temporalities. Restarting, respawing and replaying are thus all well accepted modes and features in and of digital games.
Time loop games, on the other hand, deviate from this now canonized ‘unnaturality’ yet again by making a games’ inherent recursive structures an explicit part of the experience. They experimentally transcribe the fundamentally unnaturalistic experience of playing a game into the foundation of their own ludonarrative systems – it becomes both the game-making rule and an obstacle to be overcome. Games like ‘Outer Wilds’ (2019), therefore, become yet again ‘othered’ within the conventions of digital games as a whole.
I, therefore, argue that time loop games make games’ inherent ‘unnaturality’ uniquely palpable and playable. Thus, games’ cycles are here an overarching structure of gameplay loops and repeated instances of gameplay, as well as an intradiegetic feature. The multiple and heterogeneous recursive elements of time loop games, their spatiality and temporality, are therefore not only influential to their ludic systems, but also their narrative ones.
As such, accessing time loop games’ narrative through their game world becomes almost diagrammatical – or quantum: only ever one narrative strand can be viewed and fulfilled at once. All others are then only accessible through the completion of one or more other loops.
In an examination of these spatio-temporalities as productively ‘unnatural’, queer and fundamentally ludic and game-like at once, this paper strives to closely analyze ‘Outer Wilds’.

In video games, therefore, the recognizable qualities of political Otherness – exploitation and oppression, as well as the resistance against it – are (too) often transposed onto non-human entities. In Overwatch 2, for example, a simultaneously feared and oppressed robotic race is depicted to have two leaders, modelled after Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X respectively: one robot is a religious advocate for non-violence, the other a violent revolutionary who wants “peace at any cost” and by “any means.”

As such, ‘the minority’ as a political entity too often ceases to be fully human in games; the political dimensions of that existence are instead explicitly transfigured to be ‘inhuman,’ fantastical, and alien. In examples like Overwatch, Blackness therefore either exists as the skin color of ‘apolitical’ human characters or is allegorically encoded as the reference point for the political resistance of non-human characters – never both.

In my proposed paper, I want to further illustrate this point and tie it to my ongoing research into the political potential inherent within the ‘identity tourism’ that games can afford to the player. Specifically, my doctoral project is interested in the ways that video games can, through their interactivity, ‘translate’ political forms of being and resisting which are typically codified and generally understood to be exclusive to certain identities.

Games like Mafia 3 or Watch_Dogs 2, in creating digital simulacrums of a racist America, invite any player to experience life as a Black man in a society that is antagonistic simply to who ‘you’ are in this world. I argue that this form of ‘experiential racism,’ along with your ability to directly fight back against the systems and individuals that create that antagonism, serves as an ‘empathic gateway’ to such identities. Through ludic recreations of inherently political existence and resistance, the player and their actions become in the eyes of the game almost indistinguishable from their protagonists – regardless of any perceived or present differences in identity or politics.

This research focuses on the intersection of gaming, culture, and geopolitical sanctions in the context of Iran, shedding light on non-buyers due to circumcises yet consumers of games, which has led to the phenomenon of “ghost players” of Iran.

Iran as a nation has been facing international sanctions and governmental regulations on internet access and censorship of media for years. Despite these hurdles, the gaming scene remains vibrant and active among Iranians; according to official statistics from 2022 provided by DIREC (Iran’s governmental official digital games research organization), there are approximately 34 million gamers in Iran, with 41% female players.

However, despite this sizable demographic, they are overlooked and dismissed globally. Firstly, using VPNs to access games resulting from international and national restrictions makes them untraceable. Secondly, as they are cut off from the international banking system, they cannot officially purchase games, making them not potential buyers and less valuable as a consumer in the gaming industry. As they are not potential buyers, their cultural needs as gamers are vastly neglected, including language accessibility, localization, representations, etc. As a result, the term “ghost players” can be referred to them as it is hard to trace their data (location and money transactions). Also, they are not seen and acknowledged globally, yet signs of their existence and interaction with gaming content manifest in other contexts, such as culture.

Although these ghost players are not officially considered consumers, they have been consuming gaming content for years, influencing their culture in various ways. This presentation will research these impacts, such as gaming cultures created to obtain games, from buying games from third parties to modding and hacking culture. It will also highlight the socio-cultural implications of playing as a ghost player, being cautiously aware of consuming media you are not being considered and represented in, and how that can shape national identity.

Particularly since the early 2010s, postapocalyptic video games have been a popular subgenre, that have often been combined with the focus on paternal and family relationships. Especially female-identifying and maternal characters have not fared well in the post-apocalyptic genre or the medium of videogames, having been portrayed as Draycott put it, as less “aspirational or flattering (e.g., [as] sex objects, damsels in distress)” (11), and, as Schubert adds, lacking “representation of non-normative gender identities” (36). Particularly since the early 2010s, postapocalyptic video games have been a popular subgenre that frequently merges engaging narratives of survival with the focus on parental (often paternal) relationships. And although many games play with the idea of the maternal as a subtle or explicit symbol that furthers the plot or atmosphere of the story, many representations of maternal characters have been limited to, as Stang states, as “generally absent, deceased before the story begins, killed off during the game, or portrayed as villains or monsters” (“Broodmother” 237-8). Stang observes that mothers in games are often “generally absent, deceased before the story begins, killed off during the game, or portrayed as villains or monsters” (“Broodmother” 237-8). The experience of motherhood in postapocalyptic discourse has thus often been depicted as and experience of ‘otherness’. From exclusion from narrative engagement to the sacrifice of mother or maternal characters postapocalyptic games reveal many intersectional issues that are part of maternal discourse, concerning notions of race, gender and sexuality. In this paper I suggest a ludo-textual close reading of three popular postapocalyptic game franchises, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part II, Guerilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn and Kojima Production’s Death Stranding that discuss complex representations of motherhood that try to negotiate and actively shape a world after global catastrophe, while highlighting the difficulties of mothering as a cultural and political practice in newly reevaluated imagined futures.

Avatar creation and customisation in video games ideally give players full agency in how they construct the character they want to play with. An avatar creation menu is most often found in AAA games that are choice- and narrative-driven, but can sometimes be included in smaller-scale indie games, such as Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe 2016). Problems arise when players realise that they do not have full control over the “build” of their character – as soon as they choose the avatar’s sex or gender, the customisation menu locks a lot of sex-specific options (e.g. voice, body type, clothing, hair). Players are not only restricted in the choices they make about their character’s appearance and personality, but can likewise observe what the game deems a “suitable” protagonist; most often, they include strict binaries and gender stereotypes, such as highly athletic and muscular men in combat- and action-heavy games, and lack meaningful and intersectional representation.

This begs the question – where do non-hegemonic bodies fit in? Some games, like the Mass Effect series (BioWare 2007-2017) and Tell Me Why (Dontnod 2020), already include characters who are disabled, trans/queer, or otherwise non-typical depictions found in video games, though these examples are few and far between. Intersectional representation and diversity do not inherently have a negative impact on games; however, purposeful inclusivity can result in a more positive and engaging experience for players who seldom see themselves represented in media.

Two case studies – The Sims 4 (Maxis 2014) and Arcade Spirits (Fiction Factory Games 2019) – highlight how video games, both high-budget and indie, have been dealing with an inclusive avatar creation menu. Common practices that stifle these efforts – like the aforementioned preferred depiction of hegemonic bodies and identities prevalent in most games – need to be disrupted in order to make way for more diversity, and to provide players with a more comprehensive avatar creation system.

This paper explores the Little Sisters of Bioshock as contributing to the title’s prestige status, positioning players as adult agents in relation to the othered child. Computer games, despite being enjoyed by people of all ages, are often stigmatised as a juvenile medium. Many historical accounts suggest parallels between maturing games technologies, game content and player communities. As with comparable formation such as ‘art cinema’ and ‘quality television’, the ‘prestige game’ is synonymous with adult audiences. Entrenched in such cycles of production are various hegemonic, hierarchical, binary structures of age, adulthood and childhood. In asserting their status as artistic endeavours, these titles construct the consumer as adult player, involving the symbolic abjection or othering of the child with whom the medium is historically associated. In Bioshock, a classic prestige game, the Little Sisters contribute to this process. The game’s horror content, implicitly othering various monstrous identities along lines of gender, class and disability, serves to define Bioshock as a mature title. Little Sisters reflect a tradition of monstrous children, variously ethereal, wraith-like, vampiric, ambivalently positioned between angel and demon. As creepy, eery, uncanny figures within the repertoire of Gothic and horror media, their otherness is contingent upon players adopting the privilege position of adult self in contrast to child other. This is further enhanced through a core choice mechanic, also contributing to the title’s quality status, where players adopt an authoritative position of power in choosing either to ‘harvest’ or ‘save’ the young girls. Consequently the child is othered, as a non-playable character, as a figure who requires saving, as a thing without agency. In so doing Bioshock makes clear that Rapture, the game’s underwater setting, is not a place for children.

From survival and FPS games to open world adventure games to small-scale cozy games, video games are drawn to the post-apocalypse. The world after the end retains a hold on the medium and suggests an intricate interplay of narrative, environment, and interaction. While tropes are often familiar in their depiction of decaying urban spaces slowly reclaimed by nature, our response to these environments tends to be marked by not only anxiety but also a reflective nostalgia in which affect triggers a broader contemplation of the state of humanity and our world. The crossing and re-crossing of the boundary of the apocalyptic moment triggered by this reflection renders us time-travellers, observing, exploring, making sense and revaluing the past through a negotiation of memory and forgetting.

The apocalyptic moment of destruction thereby forms the axis upon which the imagination of this genre turns, the boundary between here/there, present/future, self/other, two worlds, separate yet the same, the site of what Berger calls a ‘semantic alchemical process’, … a study of ‘what disappears and what remains and of how the remainder has been transformed (1999, 7). The apocalypse here is a destructive but also purifying event, replacing the moral and epistemological murkiness of our reality with a new world that is pared back to basics, a ‘reset’ of identities and values. While this positions the post-apocalypse as a new beginning, before and after remain ambivalent, haunted by each other, as encapsulated by the ruin aesthetics that this genre favours.

Looking at the ruin and the notion of dark tourism, and utilising both Foucault’s notion of heterotopia and Zizek’s notion of the Real as a glimpse at an authentic truth beyond the veil of mediated reality, I will examine the visual narratives and the construction of affective and interactive ‘other’ realities in two post-apocalyptic games, Horizon: Zero Dawn (2020), and The Last of Us (2013).

Realistic Role-Playing Games (RRPGs) feature characters with similar appearances and proportions to real humans, focus on the realism of characters’ appearances, actions, and behaviors to enhance players’ gaming experience. Such games typically have preset NPCs, and for the player-controlled protagonists, they are sometimes pre-designed, but can also be determined by players through provided parameters or mods. Due to RRPGs often satisfying the desire for exploration and adventure, male players are traditionally considered the majority. Consequently, from the perspective of traditional heteronormativity, female characters in these games are often portrayed as companions, challengers, or supporters of the characters players control. However, due to some players’ specific preferences, they may create characters resembling females in appearance, obtaining emotional satisfaction or resonance.
Yet, in recent years, with diversity, fairness, and inclusivity increasingly emphasized in the global society, a series of issues regarding gender, race, and appearance are sparkled. In terms of video games, as a popular cultural medium, the concept of beauty and ugliness also raised moral dilemmas. Sweet Baby Inc., founded by former Ubisoft developers, offering consulting service to promote diversity, fairness, and inclusivity in game development. However, with their influence, more games are featuring seemingly intentionally uglified female characters or receiving criticism for using conventionally beautiful female character designs. For example, despite “Horizon” using real-life modeling, the character is pale in comparison to the real actor. The recently released game “Stellar Blade” received criticism for its overly flawless, petite, and conventionally beautiful female game designs, being accused of catering excessively to heterosexual male players. These discussions have sparked moral paradoxes regarding inclusivity and feminism: If beautifying women is seen as objectifying them, is uglifying women protecting them? In the current context where ugliness is equated with disrespect, where is the boundary between beauty and ugliness, and does RRPG need to deviate from characters resembling ordinary human appearances? This article aims to analyze mainstream RRPGs on Sony’s Play Station 5 as case studies to discuss to what extent and how game developers and players should support diversity and inclusivity. It also explores how to remove the labels of game players being predominantly male and heteronormativity in games. Additionally, it questions whether the advice and influence provided by Sweet Baby Inc. are ethically correct.

Drawing inspiration from the phenomenological investigation of empathy and intersubjectivity (Husserl 1960, Stein 1989), this project proposes to apply empathy, intended as the ability to perceive a foreign consciousness (Stein 1989), to the analysis of players’ actions towards other agents in gameworlds.

In the past few decades, scholars have explored the potential of phenomenological conceptualisation to analyse videogames, suggesting how players maintain their status as subjects in gameworlds, including their identity, agency, and projectuality (Gualeni & Vella 2020). This implies the possibility of recognition and intersubjectivity with other in-game agents (Leino 2015, Carter & Allison 2018, Ntelia 2020) – therefore suggesting the presence of empathy. While the latter has been discussed in terms of emotional understanding and/or perspective-taking (Jerrett et al. 2021, Schrier & Farber 2021), it has seldom been considered from a phenomenological standpoint within game studies. I argue instead that such interpretation (Stein 1989) allows for a reflection on the medium specificity of videogames in enabling and informing the relation with others.

To support this claim, this article presents case studies in which empathy is employed strategically, through game design practices that emphasise the subjective capabilities of in-game others – as in DayZ or Vampyr, where players tend to perceive the others as co-subjects and to act accordingly. Such effect is often obtained by weighing more the consequences of players’ in-game actions (Carter & Allison 2018). Conversely, in computer games that do not actively design empathy, players tend to diminish the perception of subjectivity of other possible agents, reducing them to game-objects.

Selected references:
Bohemian Interactive, 2018. DayZ.
Carter, M., & Allison, F., 2018. Guilt in DayZ.
Dontnod Entertainment, 2018. Vampyr.
Gualeni, S., & Vella, D. 2020. Virtual Existentialism.
Husserl, E., ed. 1960. Cartesian meditations.
Leino, O. T., 2015.“‘I know your type, you are a player’.
Jerrett, A., Howell, P. and Dansey, N., 2021. Developing an empathy spectrum for games.
Ntelia, R.E., 2020. “In the Mood for Love: Embodiment and Intentionality in NPCs”.
Schrier, K. and Farber, M., 2021. A systematic literature review of ‘empathy’ and ‘games’.
Stein. E., ed. 1989. On the Problem of Empathy.

Games regularly represent fictional and real-world cultures through narrative and environmental design. This representation is sometimes designed and considered, and other times is an unintended outcome of creating an interactive game world. For real-world cultures, this can result in experiences that acknowledge and spotlight elements of culture but are often skin-deep representations. This paper examines games, and the development practices, where cultural representation is the core design pillar. For this, I introduce the concept of cultural fragrance (Pepe, 2015), distilling cultural identity into an essence, which drives all design decisions. This paper defines and contextualises cultural fragrance through analysis of narrative games that are culturally odourless, lacking in distinct cultural identity, or a mixture of cultural identities which combine to form an identity abstracted from a specific culture of origin. Game development processes and their role in mixed culture creation are also considered. Two case study projects are presented: a Scottish-Gaelic-themed game jam, Kilted Otter, that aimed to inspire game development through the provision of cultural narratives and an experience report of an ongoing game project based on Outer Hebridean cultural heritage, Waulking the Tweed. These games seek to outline key considerations for culture-first narrative game development.
In designing cultural fragrance, developers must first encapsulate a cultural experience — the fragrance, and then examine how this can be embedded in design and portrayed playfully. Developers should then navigate the extent to which they are prepared to abstract culture and as a result, compromise on the project’s authenticity. I examine the lessons from media and case study analysis and share strategies for fellow practitioners to create culturally meaningful, fun games.

This paper discusses how real-world culture is represented in games, and the benefits of adopting a culturally fragrant identity to game development to enable more authentic cultural representation.

Pepe, F., (2015) ‘Odorless, Fragrant and Spicy – The many flavours of foreign culture in gaming’, Game Developer. Available at: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/audio/odorless-fragrant-and-spicy—the-many-flavours-of-foreign-culture-in-gaming (Accessed: 6th May 2024).

Video games have consolidated themselves as a fruitful environment for the inclusion of people with disabilities nowadays. Going beyond its therapeutic and educational role games represent means to socialization, identity and cultural expression to this community (Wästerfors & Hansson, 2017). Although significant advancements have been made regarding the improvement of accessibility for players with disabilities, research and experimentation on audio description (AD) in games are still burgeoning as a tool to enable new forms of access to visual information (Larreina-Morales & Mangiron, 2023). Both academia and industry are already experimenting on ways to match AD and video games, as in the case of audio describing cutscenes in The Last of Us Part I, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s trailer, and countless independent games developed for research purposes. The present study aims to propose a model that guides the AD of characters, scenarios, and objects, contributing to the apprehension of visual and aesthetic information of games and, ultimately, enhancing visually impaired gamers’ experiences. On a methodological perspective, a design thinking process is currently underway, coming from a bibliographic and documental research aligned with theoretical studies, reception studies, and with the participation of disabled players. From media accessibility and technical guidelines for game accessibility and AD we point to the possibility to describe characters, scenarios, and objects in audio introductions that could be accessed by players on the game’s menu. Following the design thinking method, a first prototype of audio introduction script and guidelines for its implementation is in development. Our next step is conducting user-centered tests (Matamala, 2021) with disabled gamers. After gathering inputs on the content of audio introduction and its means of implementation, we intend to proceed with further prototype iterations to reach a model that could be experimented on a larger scale with different game titles and genres.

Larreina-Morales, M. E., & Mangiron, C. (2023). Audio description in video games? Persons with visual disabilities weigh in. Universal Access in the Information Society.

Matamala, A. (2021). Qualitative research methods in Media Accessibility: Focus groups and interviews. LEAD ME Summer Training School.

Wästerfors, D., & Hansson, K. (2017). Taking ownership of gaming and disability. Journal of Youth Studies, 20(9).

This paper examines the cultural alienation of death to read and analyse mourning and remembrance as framed in single-player RPG (role-playing game) videogames. Death is alienated in Global-North societies ruled by informational-capitalist abstraction. The dead are othered; no longer participants in accumulative-consumptive capitalist practices (Baudrillard, 1993). Through the lens of interpassivity (Pfaller, 1996) the research will argue that grammarised moves of and around mourning can persist in the alienation and othering of death in RPGs by delegating death-awareness away from the player.
The paper will analyse games that thematically prioritise grief including Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus, 2020) and Fragments of Him (Sassybot, 2016), considering what it means for a game to invite death-awareness, and asserting that even games which centre affective death experiences still risk situating a passive player. Reflecting on intersections between grief, affect, and interpassivity in RPGs, I argue that mourning is often outsourced onto the game itself. As such, death remains alienated, and mourning becomes a technical mechanic. I argue that many RPGs disengage gameplay from death in mourning moves. While players interact with computer/console hardware in the execution of these moves, they can remain passive as the game takes on the reflective and affectively complex aspects of mourning (Žižek, 1997). The paper will ask how videogames may present engaging and affective mourning experiences; considering how player complicity in game design may offer insight into how affective player experiences may be used in a move towards un-othering the dead (Bogost, 2011; Smethurst, 2015). This ultimately culminates in analysis of game design in Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall, 2017). While NitW has little to offer regarding mourning moves specifically, I argue that moves around Mae’s (the player-character) deteriorating wellbeing feature participatory moves which may prove insightful into how games may invite player death-awareness beyond passive delegation.

In Rules of the Father (2022: 3), Jesse J. Ramirez argues that Naughty Dog’s videogame The Last of Us (2013) “encodes patriarchy, the rule of the father, in its procedures and conventions”, instantiating its protagonist Joel Miller as the symbolic embodiment of heroic masculinity. In the opening chapter of The Last of Us Part II (2020), Joel is violently murdered by PC Abby Anderson, who is avenging the death of her father by Joel’s hand in Part I. In killing Joel, Abby symbolically eliminates the ‘rule of the father’, in a sense cutting the game loose from the ‘procedures and conventions’ of heteropatriarchy. In this paper, I will ask to what degree is the game truly free from some such procedures? Does the shadow of a hegemonic, heroic masculinity still loom large over the game, and how? I will begin with a reading of Naughty Dog’s development of her body presentation and its role in the game’s ludic and narratological strategies. Unusually for women PCs in triple A videogames, Abby is physically very strong and, in this, her muscular body superficially problematises sedimented tropes of masculinity in mainstream gaming. And yet, players are still asked to use her body in gameplay, particularly during combat, in a way that centres a dominantly violent and pointedly corporeal heroic masculinity. This, I will argue, is the only way Abby is able to enter into, and is granted legitimacy within, the symbolic order of Part II. As Jack Halberstam (1998: 2) has long noted, dominant masculinity achieves symbolic power precisely in how it others non-normative expressions of masculinity. This othering finds a complex, tautological expression in Abby, as her representation in the game simultaneously troubles and repeats tropes of dominant masculinity. What issues, I will ask, does Part II thus raise about representations of masculinity in triple A videogames? And what can a critique of the game do to respond to this?

By the onset of the 19th century, gothic literature had spawned a distinctive blend of the ‘hero-villain’ or ‘villainous hero’ archetype (Thorslev, 1962: 6). Influenced by these tales, Lord Byron crafted his ‘Byronic Hero’ – a shadowy, introspective figure, yet imbued with depth and humanity (8). Byronism continually resurfaces throughout two centuries of fantasy fiction.

Larian Studio’s RPG Baldur’s Gate 3 features a roster of companion characters linked by their ‘otherness’; the band of would-be heroes must learn to work together to remove tadpoles forced into their heads. Astarion is markedly different from the variety of races in the Dungeons & Dragons lore because he is a vampire. Not living but not dead, he straddles the well-worn theme of ‘in-between,’ amalgamating inspiration from other pop culture vampires, such as Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) or Lestat from The Vampire Chronicles (1976-2018) that stretches back from John Polidori’s rich and rakish reimagining of Byron in The Vampyre (1819). This paper will explore the game narrative’s interrogation of this archetype through Astarion.

Throughout the game, this ostentatious veneer is revealed to be an act, calling into question what is real. He ‘performs’ the Byronic vampire because it attracts victims to feed his master. This links to theories of gender performativity as his look, behaviour, speech patterns and even the vampiric state itself explicitly seek to capture a gendered fantasy weaponised for desire. The player determines the trajectory of this archetype: will the character remain a brooding yet charming Byronic hero, or succumb to becoming a gothic villain, perpetuating the cycle of masculine dominance and cruelty? In my analysis, I’ll explore Astarion through three intertwined threads: as a Byronic vampire hero, the lens of gender performativity, and the player’s influence on these aspects.

Recently, ‘big tech’ companies have expanded their interest in buildings and urban environments, to extract data not only from online datasets that make architecture and cities thrive but also from individuals and communities who work, live and play in those real, digital and hybrid spaces. For example, in the summer of 2023, Method Studios released an opening sequence for Marvel’s new TV series “Secret Invasion” using generative artificial intelligence (AI), more specifically Stable Diffusion, a text-to-image model based on diffusion techniques and deep learning, written in Python and using a Creative ML OpenRAIL-M licence, developed by Stability AI. At that time, on social media, there were significant discussions not only about its quality and novelty but especially about AI ethics concerning the datasets used to train Stable Diffusion’s models, infringing copyrights for the work of visual artists. As the release of that opening sequence for Marvel’s “Secret Invasion” was also involved in some secrecy, there were also calls concerning workers’ rights from the artists normally working for Marvel and other big companies. More or less at the same time, Stability AI organized the “Stability AI Animation Challenge” with Peter Gabriel, promoting their new AI models and receiving hundreds of animations from artists worldwide. With this background, our paper searches for and reflects on AI text-to-video landscapes as other. On the one hand, these new tools seem to offer new design and industrial practices of video games worth exploring, and potentially new research practices to be considered. On the other hand, the development of generative AI in video gaming cultures may bring future socio-cultural impacts, particularly in the communities of developers, device builders, and users. Finally, we suggest important considerations to overcome the current challenges and develop new strategies through cross-disciplinary partnerships and innovative datasets, at local and international scales.

Don’t Nod is a French videogame developer that has made itself a name with their highly affective and intellectually stimulating mid-tier designs. The studio’s most recent game, Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden (2024), continues their tradition of tackling large social, cultural, and political issues through the lens of interpersonal relationships. Set in 1695, it tells the story of the Cuban woman-of-colour Antea Duarte and her lover and apprentice, the Scot Ruaidhrigh mac Raith, who come to the (failed) English colony of New Eden. As ghost-hunters and our player avatars, we resolve the many hauntings they encounter through them. When Antea dies, we must decide whether to let her ascend, separating the lovers forever, or resurrect her at the sacrifice of countless lives. However, as Antea warns us: “There lies perdition.”
Playing two colonial subjects, who are part of the colonial endeavour and enforcers of hegemonic power, we encounter the other in its many guises: the dead haunt the living, women of power haunt patriarchal society, aboriginal and queer people haunt the Puritan worldview. The central role of ghosts in the game suggests a hauntological approach (cf. Gordon 2008, Rahimi 2021, and Good, Chiovenda, and Rahimi 2022), questioning imperial ideas of an end to time and history. Going beyond those, theories of Empire (cf. Hardt and Negri 2001, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009, and Mukherjee 2017) allow us to understand how Banishers challenges and deconstructs dysfunctional imperial conceptions of space, culture, and society with its hauntological design logic and systemically de-centred narrative, mechanical, and ethical perspectives. Affectively working through networks of complex but everyday relationships (cf. Ahmed 2014, Anable 2018, and Stewart 2007), we as players are given the opportunity to ludically banish the ghosts of Neo-Colonialism and Neo-Imperialism haunting our world: The personal is thus truly political in Banishers.

Bibliography
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Anable, Aubrey. 2018. Playing With Feelings: Video Games and Affect. Minneapolis/MN and London/Engl.: University of Minnesota Press.
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Videogames exist within a network of ancillary material known as “paratexts” (Genette 1997, 2; Consalvo 2017), extending from conception to sale (Kerr 2006, 4; Gray 2010). These paratexts, though distinct from the game itself, play a crucial role in its presentation and reception (Švelch 2020; Seiwald and Vollans 2023). By looking at videogame paratextuality, this paper addresses otherness from two perspectives: firstly, how paratexts are other to the game in their form and function; and secondly, how playful paratexts are other in comparison to non-ludic paratextual structures.

To understand how this other space between the game and the player is configured, it is important to understand what paratexts are. By determining their spatial and temporal relationship to the game (Genette 1997, 7), their functionality (Seiwald 2023b, 139–45), authorship (Fiske 1987; Caldwell 2011, 2014; Re 2016; Seiwald 2023a), substantiality and materiality (Van Leeuwen 2005; Kress 2010; Švelch 2017, 71; Seiwald 2023a), it will be possible to consider how the margins of videogames are constructed and how they relate to the player. This analysis is underpinned by the argument that paratexts make the game visible to the player, defining its appearance and reception (Rockenberger 2014).

By being playful, videogame paratexts may differ from the conventional function of paratexts, i.e., framing a videogame to present it as an artefact to the world (Brookey and Gray 2017). This playfulness, defined as free and unproductive (Caillois 2001, 9–10), contradicts the idea of paratexts serving a specific purpose. Nonetheless, playful paratexts, reflecting the game’s ludic nature, strengthen the player’s connection with the game while requiring playful engagement from them (Liebermann 1965; 1966). Analysing forms of ludic paratexts of various selected games illustrates this dynamic and sheds light on how surrounding material influences the perception of the game and the act of playing (Seiwald 2021).

Ludic paratexts are therefore other in two ways: they are different from the game, albeit strongly linked to it, and they are different from the traditional functions associated with paratexts, although their form may be the same. My discussion will uncover the tight relationship between playful material within and outside of the game by emphasising its otherness and existence in the margins between the game and the player.

References

Brookey, Robert Alan, and Jonathan Gray. 2017. “‘Not Merely Para’: Continuing Steps in Paratextual Research.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 34 (2): 101–10.
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Gray, Jonathan. 2010. Shows Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts. New York: New York University Press.
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Kress, Gunther R. 2010. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London: Routledge.
Liebermann, J. Nina. 1965. “Playfulness and Divergent Thinking: An Investigation of their Relationship at the Kindergarten Level.” In The Journal of Genetic Psychology 107: 219–24.
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Re, Valentina. 2016. “Beyond the Threshold: Paratext, Transcendence, and Time in the Contemporary Media Landscape.” In The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media: Permanence and Obsolesce in Paratexts. Edited by Sara Pesce and Paolo Noto, 60–75. New York: Routledge.
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Seiwald, Regina. 2021. “The Ludic Nature of Paratexts: Playful Material in and Beyond Video Games.” In Paratextualizing Games: Investigations on the Paraphernalia and Peripheries of Play. Edited by Benjamin Beil, Gundolf S. Freyermuth, and Hanns Christian Schmidt, 293¬–317. Studies in Digital Media Culture, vol. 13. Bielefeld: transcript.
—. 2023a. “Beyond the Game Itself: Understanding Authorial Intent, Player Agency, and Materiality as Degrees of Paratextuality.” Games and Culture 18 (6): 718–39.
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Švelch, Jan. 2017. Paratexts to Non-Linear Media Texts: Paratextuality in Video Game Culture. PhD Thesis. Prague: Charles University.
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Modifications (mods) have long been an integral part of video game culture, serving as a platform for participatory culture, creative expression, and the enrichment of gaming experiences. They have been heralded for their potential to foster inclusivity by rectifying representation gaps and addressing problematic portrayals within gaming narratives. However, a troubling trend has recently emerged: the deliberate removal of diverse representation from video games through modifications.

This paper seeks to comprehensively examine this phenomenon, shedding light on the landscape of modifications aimed at reducing diversity and homogenizing representation within fictional worlds. These modifications, designed to erase elements perceived as “other,” manifest in various forms. Be it by whitewashing video game characters, reinforcing traditional gender roles, removing romances or characters that do not adhere to heteronormativity or changing trans coded characters so they appear cis gendered.

Drawing on data sourced from alternative aggregate platforms that developed in opposition to moderation policies of mainstream modding communities, this paper delves into the functionality, recurring themes, and broader cultural contexts surrounding these modifications. Through an analysis of the motivations driving the creation and dissemination of such mods, as well as the communities that foster their development, this study aims to unravel the underlying dynamics contributing to this concerning trend. Also diving into the connection and utilization of modifications by right wing actors.

By contextualizing these modifications within the broader discourse on representation and diversity in video games, this paper contributes to a nuanced understanding of the evolving nature of modding culture and its implications for gaming communities.

This paper builds upon preliminary research conducted as part of the author’s master’s thesis in social sciences.

Refugees are the ‘absolute outsiders’, claims Zygmunt Bauman (2004), noting the extreme othering of refugees in relation to migrants. While much has been written on the depictions of migration, refugees and asylum seekers in film, such as in the works of Nacify (2001), Marks (2000), Elsaesser (2005) or Berghahn and Stenberg (2010), the study of portrayals of refugees in computer games is underrepresented. Some studies have explored the potential of video games to engage audiences and influence attitudes towards refugees, in particular in games that specifically approach a narrative of refugees (Sou, 2017; Sirin, Plass, Homer, Vatarnartiran and Tsai, 2017), but also in the context of metaphorical otherness, such as depictions of zombies in the context of the refugee crisis (Zaborowski and Georgiou, 2019). Yet, fewer studies have explored the depiction of refugees in popular AAA computer games and the implications of these portrayals. This paper analyses the portrayals of refugees in Baldur’s Gate 3 as a contemporary narrative that integrates current populist discourses against refugees in, however, a context that dismantles this rhetoric and presents it as unsympathetic to their plight. The paper engages with Stuart Hall’s theories to discuss the way in which the video game constructs depictions that, whilst allowing different levels of identification, take the interactive audiences towards an oppositional view. Despite the multiple choices and rewards that the interactive audiences might experience through the narrative, the refugee is ultimately presented as in need of protection and assistance. The paper is part of a wider project approaching the portrayal of migration and otherness in computer games.

Disability has long been a focus for studies examining it as a cultural and social ‘other’. Only in the last decade or so has the discussion of disability and accessibility come to prominence in the gaming sphere through conversations and initiatives that aim to foreground it in (often controversial) public discourse about games and their development.

This paper discusses the journey of the author to overcome a debilitating bilateral hand injury, coinciding with the beginning of the first UK COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. As a result of the injury, the author was left disabled and functionally unable to play most games but, through a long period of testing different rehabilitation treatments and accessibility solutions, worked back up to playing fighting games (a favourite genre) only in mid 2023-2024. This autoethnography charts their, often frustrated, journey through rehabilitation and its intersection with the prevalence of control schemes and in-game options for players of fighting games in recent years, specifically those geared towards approachability and accessibility. This account helps to communicate first-hand insight into personal experience with disability, game design, and accessibility options through direct personal narratives tempered by an academic perspective.

This account moves towards discussion of a case study: the implementation of ‘Classic’ and simplified ‘Modern’ controls in Street Fighter 6 and the first year of the game’s life cycle. Alongside this the discourse around control scheme in the fighting game community and the plurality of ergonomic controllers emerging in the fighting game scene as alternatives to traditional ‘arcade sticks’ and ‘console gamepads’ (first beginning in 2010 with the first ‘hitbox’ controllers) is also covered.

Thus, a narrative of the personal and communal response to these changes is presented in parallel to help foreground the ‘other’ and open up discussion about how motor accessibility concerns intersect with a highly input-dense game genre, its design, and its community (including its competitive esports scene).

This presentation explores the complexity of game mechanics by applying Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory. It aims to establish a framework for understanding and teaching game design. The research is organized into three key sections: a detailed literature review, the development of a theoretical framework, and an investigation into the genesis and evolution of gameplay mechanics.

The literature review critically examines influential textbooks in game design, such as Chris Crawford’s The Art of Computer Game Design, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman’s Rules of Play, and Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design. These works, while foundational, often lack a clear parameter for defining complexity in game mechanics. This study seeks to address this gap by identifying the “pure form” or building block that constitutes complexity in game mechanics. This could then inform a progressive curriculum in game design education.

In developing the theoretical framework, the research integrates Luhmann’s systems theory with Hegelian dialectics to analyse game systems as autopoietic, meaning they are self-sustaining and capable of evolution. Unlike traditional views that consider games as closed systems, this perspective sees games as dynamic, complex systems made up of interacting subsystems. By applying Luhmann’s concept of functional differentiation, the study proposes that the complexity of game mechanics can be measured through the structural couplings and interactions within these systems.

The final section delves into the genesis of gameplay mechanics, suggesting that message passing event, a concept from object-oriented programming, is the fundamental operation that forms the basis of game mechanics. By examining how these events extend, expand, and interact, the research provides a scalable framework for designing and teaching complex game systems.

This presentation aims to offer a revolutionary approach to game design education, paving the way for a more structured, theory-based curriculum that reflects the intricate nature of digital games as complex systems.

In Hardly Working, a poetically bleak short film by Berlin-based art collective Total Refusal that follows the lifecycles of NPC laborers in Red Dead Redemption 2, it is a moonlit evening when a woman in a tattered dress joins a beer-drinker under the lee of an old building. About the couple, the film’s narrator makes the following observation: “Even while they are next to each other, every one of them stands there on his or her own. A relation of relationlessness. They form no such thing as a community.” This article motivates what Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, in his studies of the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky, calls the “dialogic imagination” toward an understanding of both the increasing verisimilitude of the awareness of the other in digital games and its foreseeable limits. Bakhtin’s writings on the nineteenth-century novel identify a dialogical shift from the “self-enclosed and deaf” to the polyvocal, a representational leap I attempt to map onto the increasingly sophisticated depiction of other-awareness among digital games’ non-player characters, or the degree to which ludic subjects appear to recognize each other as well as the player. Conversely, characters in the premodern novel, as one might readily admit of hapless bystanders in Grand Theft Auto or Cyberpunk 2077, “do not hear and do not answer one another. There are not and cannot be dialogic relationships among them. They neither argue nor agree.” Drawing together these distinct contextual domains, the degrees to which non-player characters appear to interact among themselves and their environments is considered at length before culminating in a discussion of the future of digital games in their capacity for what Bakhtin, in his classic study of French Renaissance author François Rabelais, refers to as “grotesque realism,” or the hyper-participatory aesthetic of the carnivalesque.

Drawing on different lenses of critical posthumanism and inherent questions from ecofeminism, this paper questions how videogames begin to grapple with issues of “Zoe-centred egalitarianism [as] the alternative political ecology to universalist human rights” (Braidotti 2022).

In Scars Above (Mad Head Games, 2023) we follow scientist Kate Ward, member of the Sentient Contact Assessment and Response team, as she and the rest of her crew are drawn onto an alien planet. Here we encounter a variety of “others” – aliens, different embodiments of artificial intelligence, and mutants. Mutants are created by the A.I. that was created by the aliens to discover the “Code of Life”, a hidden message within the DNA of all creatures – thus demonstrating a constant blurring between boundaries that acknowledges the entanglement of these entities.

Braidotti (2022) argues that “a form of zoe [animal/non-human life]-related empathy becomes constitutive of ecofeminism and through it of posthuman feminism.” In some respects, Kate demonstrates this zoe-related empathy, as she does not summarily dismiss these “others” as enemies. However, Scars Above fails to deliver on this initial promise. We see how these various mutations across the technologization of nature (Graham 2002), are nevertheless demarcated into others that must be destroyed, vs. those “others” who are considered more palatable, and are allowed to live. Here, then, the “otherness” and lines of demarcation, difference, and the decision on whether others should live or die, lies in the others’ ability to aid humanity, and human-based moral codes. Ultimately, these demarcations serve anthropocentric aims, and therefore fail to demonstrate much “otherness” at all, retreating instead into the humanist safe-space of framing those positives and negatives in terms of actions in the interest of the human protagonists. It remains a story about human struggle, rather than emancipatory, ecofeminist empathy.

Loot boxes are controversial mechanics in video games. Players buy them with real money to obtain random prizes. Desirable prizes are often rare, forcing players to purchase many loot boxes when trying to get ‘chase’ items. Spending on loot boxes has been linked to problem gambling, and many hold the opinion that loot boxes are gambling or at least gambling-like. However, generally, the gambling laws of most countries cannot regulate loot boxes because the strict legal definition for ‘gambling,’ requiring that the prizes be convertible into real-world money, cannot be satisfied. In nearly all countries, loot boxes are not regulated by governments at present. Instead, the industry is trusted to police its own behaviours. Previous research has identified many failings. For example, companies are required to disclose the likelihood of getting different potential rewards from loot boxes (so-called ‘probability disclosures’). However, despite Apple requiring this, more than a third of the best-selling UK iPhone games did not comply. An alternative or, responding to the conference theme, ‘other’ approach to industry self-regulation is to actually adopt legislation. South Korea (an ‘other’ country from the perspective of Western game studies) has stopped relying on industry self-regulation and taken this legal approach. The law has required probability disclosures from March 2024. Unlike the vague industry rules of Western countries, the South Korean Government published clear rules as to what companies must do. We conducted an empirical study examining the 100 highest-grossing South Korean games to check their compliance with various specific requirements: such as disclosing the probabilities of obtaining each individual item, rather than just for rarity categories (e.g., ‘Epic’ tier items). We also report the prevalence of loot boxes in South Korean mobile games (how it is slightly higher than Western countries’) and what Western countries and companies can learn from Asia.