VGC 2026 Final Programme
full text below, or download a pdf (updated 10 August 2026)
Thursday, September 3
08:30 – 09:00 Registration and Morning Coffe
09:00 – 09:30 Opening Remarks
09:30 – 11:00 Panel 1 – Community, Memory, and Environment
1 – Asynchronous Collaboration and Ludic Literacy in Death Stranding (Sadeghizad)
2 – The Aesthetic Community of Ruis and the Inner Fracture of the Subject in Celeste (Žalac)
3 – The Treatment of and Violence against Non-human Animals (Schütz)
11:00 – 11:15 Coffee Break
11:15 – 12:45 Panel 2 – Literacies, Data, and Complex Systems
1 – Demystifying the Black Box (Tucek)
2 – Exploring the Satisfactory Grid for Applied Data Science and Energy Education (Sinanović)
3 – Building Energy Literacy Through Minecraft (Lux)
12:45 – 13:45 Lunch Break
13:45 – 15:15 Panel 3 – Failure, Endings, and Death
1 – Learning by Falling (Urach)
2 – Abject Failure and the Affective Threshold in Disco Elysium (Arnott)
3 – Why Not Play Until the End (Wang)
15:15 – 15:30 Coffee Break
15:30 – 17:00 Panel 4 – Voices from Afar (Remote Panel)
1 – Thirty Second Mineralogy (Evans, Bess, and Lam)
2 – “You can’t shake hands with a clenched fist”: Designing Long-Form Classroom Games (Christopher)
17:00 – 17:15 Coffee Break
17:15 – 18:45 Workshop: Designing Empathy Through Play (Weißberg, Nikiforova, and Kovalchuk)
19:00 Conference Dinner
Friday, September 4
08:30 – 09:00 Morning Coffee
09:00 – 10:30 Panel 5 – Citizenship, Awareness, and Participation
1 – A Golden Path to Democracy (Hellenbrand)
2 – CD Project RED’s 2020 Cyberpunk 2077 and Informal Civic Education (Buchwald)
3 – Learning Across Playful Contexts for Societal Challenges (Henriques and Riha)
10:30 – 10:45 Coffee Break
10:45 – 12:15 Panel 6 – Pasts, Histories, and Museums
1 – The Politics of Simulated Pasts (de Assis)
2 – Co-Creating Heritage (Runnel)
3 – Ludic literacy, media literacy, and the player/developer-historian (Webber)
12:15 – 13:15 Lunch Break
13:15 – 14:45 Panel 7 – Games, Media, and Culture
1 – Ludic literacy and mediated games: learning about games from television (Stevens)
2 – Authenticity in Games (Bernfeld)
3 – Archaeology of Knowledge from Bloodborne to Elden Ring (Komel)
14:45 – 15:00 Coffee Break
15:00 – 16:30 Panel 8 – Design, Creativity, and Education
1 – Beyond Worldbuilding (Thon)
2 – Lusory Attitudes and the Game of Design (Mallory)
3 – Bridging Teaching Game Development and Invention Pedagogy (Rodrigues de Camargo)
16:30 – 16:45 Coffee Break
16:45 – 18:15 Panel 9 – Play, Experience, and Human Development
1 – Facilitating Play in Crisis (Bergmann)
2 – Developing Empathy Quest (Montalesi)
3 – Land a Hand (Weißberg and Kovalchuk)
19:30 – 21:30 Conference Dinner
Saturday, September 5
08:30 – 09:00 Morning Coffee
09:00 – 10:30 Panel 10 – Game-Centred Teaching Practices
1 – Ethics of Student-Teacher Roleplay (Lendić)
2 – Playable Worlds as Pedagogy: Reconfiguring Single-Player RPGs for Intercultural Learning in Content-Based Instruction (Zhang)
3 – Lab Hazards (Schniz and Größing)
10:30 – 10:45 Coffee Break
10:45 – 11:45 Panel 11 – Best-Practice Teaching
1 – Deliberate Practice in Game-Based Learning to Foster Motivation in Piano-Practice (Thausing)
2 – Exploiting Commercial Games for Extramural English Vocabulary Acquisition (Sabiri)
11:45 – 12:45 Lunch Break
12:45 – 14:15 Panel 12 – My Teacher, Myself?
1 – Ludic Autoethnography (Harshina)
2 – Playing the Body (Unterholzner and Lokhmankina)
3 – Safe Words and Save States (Skubiszewski and Hoi)
14:15 – 14:45 Closing Remarks