Blog of Abstracts

Jeremiah Diephuis (US/AT) was born in 1976 and grew up in the great arcades of the American Midwest. After studies in computational linguistics and communication and knowledge media, he turned his focus to the use of games for various purposes in the public sphere. He currently works as a lecturer and researcher in the Digital Media department at the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and is a founding member of the research group “Playful Interactive Environments”.

Playerism – A broken Magic Circle, when the whole world is a game.

FROG 2021 – Talk

Co-Author:
Andrea Aschauer

Even a brief examination of the sacred tome of game design reveals a myriad of apparent contradictions: the mechanics of a game should be easy to learn, but difficult to master; interaction should be simple and intuitive, yet simultaneously challenging and foster problem-solving skills. Yet, perhaps the most elusive of all game design mysteries is the art of emergence, the phenomenon of players interacting in ways that a game’s rule system allows, but was not really intended, or at least not as a main objective. Emergence is often perceived as some form of the Philosopher’s Stone, whose ingredients are not entirely known, but could be the secret to achieving a higher level of play. However, emergent gameplay tends to be more of an ex post facto observation than an actual design methodology, despite a growing number of publications that would suggest it can be harnessed to achieve increased player agency and engagement. Although some basic principles can be addressed in a game’s design, emergence is heavily dependent both on the involved players’ individual creativity as well as the game’s actual setting. Particularly for co-located games, i.e. games played with others in the same physical environment, both Huizinga’s concept of the Magic Circle as well as Juul’s slightly extended metaphor of the Puzzle Piece can serve as useful theoretical models to understand some of the components that can contribute to emergence. In this talk, we will address some of the more-or-less intended as well as some truly surprising emergent gameplay that became part of co-located game installations developed for the Ars Electronica’s Deep Space over a period of seven years. The presentation will examine both encouraging examples of emergent behavior as well as potentially game-breaking — or at least gameplay-inhibiting — actions that were observed in the wilds of public exhibition. The talk aims to provide both an informative analysis of potential pitfalls for co-located game installations as well as postulate a few promising ingredients for the cauldron of emergence.

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Markus Meschik is head of Enter, an NGO dedicated to the counselling of families and institutions on the topic of digital games in education in Graz, Austria. He is a lecturer in the fields of social pedagogy, counseling and digital games at the University of Graz, where he received his doctorate on the topic of digital games in the family, and at the FH Joanneum Graz. He is a reviewer and expert for the BuPP of the Federal Chancellery.

“And for my next trick, I’ll make your wallet disappear!” Adolescents’ use and perception of “free-to-play” games in Austria

FROG 2021 – Talk

Current financing models of digital games such as the “free-to-play” model are generating unprecedented revenues in the video game industry (Wijman 2018). Many games seem to be tailored to and deliberately appeal to an adolescent target group, be it through their audiovisual design or by their easily accessible game mechanics. Other game series have been established for many years and added said financing models later. Due to structural similarities of these financing models with traditional gambling, this poses challenges for legislators as well as educators and gamers themselves. Some aspects are perceived as particularly critical. Lootboxes, for example, have been under investigation for some time and are already regulated in some European countries (Close/Lloyd 2021). However, lootboxes are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to financing models. “Pay-to-win” mechanisms and simulated gambling receive much less international attention, but like lootboxes, they exploit cognitive dissonances in gamers. These dissonances are similar to infantile magical thinking as described by Piaget (1926), where it is assumed that thoughts or actions can cause events that are causally unrelated. This contribution discusses how magical thinking by gamers can lead to increased spending in certain games, which cognitive distortions come into play in this process and how certain financing models take advantage of precisely this magical thinking. The contribution is based on the results of the author’s dissertation, in which 30 adolescents between the ages of 12 and 18 were surveyed about their video game behavior using a qualitative approach.

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Dr.techn. Dipl.-Ing. Alexander K. Seewald has been active in research in the field of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and image analysis/pattern recognition for several decades. He has processed data with self-developed or modified learning algorithms, e.g. spam e-mails, handwritten numbers, biological research papers (from the BioMinT project), EEG data (from Prof. Weiss, Brain Research Institute, Vienna), binary TCP/IP data packets (from a honeypot system operated at the University of Vienna itself, image, audio and video data (various sources including stereo camera video recorded by his robot platform ToyCollect) and depth sensor data (practically all existing depth cameras)

Ten Years of Magic Mirror: I and My Avatar

FROG 2021 – Talk

Co-Author:
Alexander Pfeiffer (Danube University Krems)

Since 2012 we have been building the augmented reality system Magic Mirror based on Kinect V1 and V2’s native API. It relies on the magic mirror metaphor, where a large screen shows a mirrored camera view with overlaid graphical elements. In our case, it shows a different face mesh over the person’s face which reliably tracks face poses in real time while leaving the eyes and mouth of the person visible for interaction and to improve immersion; replaces the background with images that may be changed, smoothly zoomed and dragged; and allows to take screenshots which are automatically printed out on photo cards with an unique QR code linking to its digital image. Control of the system is primarily via easily learned hand gestures very similar to multitouch screen gestures known from mobile phones and tablets. We have demonstrated the system to the public as well as in private (including at FROG conferences 2012, 2013 and 2014, albeit without presenting a paper) in a wide variety of settings, faces and backgrounds. Here, we explain the challenges inherent in creating high-quality face meshes and textures from 2D images, and how we solved them; describe the different versions of the system, how they differ and their limitations; and demonstrate the usefulness of our system in several applications from people counting and tracking to obtaining height measurements without storing or processing personal data.

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Sarah Lynne Bowman, Ph.D. is a scholar, game designer, and event organizer. She is a Senior Lecturer for the Department of Game Design at Uppsala University Campus Gotland and the Coordinator for Peace & Conflict Studies at Austin Community College. McFarland Press published her dissertation as The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity (2010). Bowman has edited for The Wyrd Con Companion Book (2012-2015), the International Journal of Role-playing (2016-), and Nordiclarp.org (2015-). She helped organize the Living Games Conference (2014, 2016, 2018) and Role-playing and Simulation in Education Conference (2016, 2018).

Liminal Intimacy: Role-playing Games as Catalysts for Interpersonal Growth and Relating

FROG 2021 – Talk

Co-Authors:
Kjell Hedgard Hugaas (Department of Game Design, Uppsala University)
Josephine Baird (Department of Game Design, Uppsala University)

One of the most powerful aspects of role-playing games is the ability to slip out of established social frames (Goffman 1986; Fine 1983) and explore identity, whether digital (Bessière, Seay, and Kiesler, 2007; Bowman and Shrier 2018) or analog (Pohjola 2004; Bowman 2010). When a role-playing group supports meaningful self-discovery, it can become a space for magic: a transformational container within which players feel safe to explore new aspects of their consciousness within a liminal space (Bowman and Hugaas 2021). If the group is supportive off-game, that player can feel validated in portraying a new social identity in daily life (Stets and Serpe, 2013), as well as shaping a more empowering narrative of their life story (McAdams, 2011). Furthermore, role-playing games open up new relationship frames related to these identities and the fictions surrounding them. Previous work has addressed the ways in which players may experience such dynamics as erotic (Brown and Stenros 2018), confusing (Waern 2010), or potentially detrimental to existing relationships as a result of bleed (Bowman 2013; Harder 2018). Role-playing is an inherently co-creative activity, where new modes of reality and, thus, relating are experienced, even if these dynamics are fictional. However, we posit that within those fictional dynamics, players can experience sometimes unprecedented intimacy, vulnerability, and connection, which can fundamentally shake not only their self-concepts, but also their understanding of relationships. Integrating principles from transactional analysis (Berne 1996), attachment theory (Levin and Heller, 2011), and other psychotherapeutic concepts, as well as practices in relationship design (Michaels andJohnson, 2015) and authentic relating games (see Authentic Revolution, 2021; Games for Humanity, 2021), this article will explore intimacy within these environments. Role-playing games can hold space for players to catalyze new relationships, practice interpersonal skills such as flirting and sharing, and experience the magic of limerence and integration through connection (Siegel 2010). Furthermore, these containers can help players transform their understanding of intimacy in daily life, whether with specific people or with their own sexual and/or romantic identities. To best harness this potency, this article will conclude with recommendations for exploring intimacy with an emphasis on safety, consent, calibration, transparency, and trust.

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Angshuman Dutta is currently a postgraduate student in his first year at Jadavpur University pursuing MA in English. He has published short stories in a couple of anthology compilations and in journals. He has a deep interest in the cultural impact of video games and his recent paper, titled “Playing in Space: Outer Wilds and sound”, was presented at Affecting Game Space: Theory and Practice organised by Game Worlds Cluster, Centre for Data, Culture and Society, the University of Edinburgh 2021.

Designing Space: Outer Wilds and its non-linear immersion

FROG 2021 – Talk

Open-world games are tending to become more and more massive as time goes on. The map is seemingly endless and teeming with myriad sets of objectives, collectables, interactives and NPCs. Players are given directives and hand-held through the mechanics as they traverse from one level to another. Mobius Digital’s Outer Wilds lies in contradiction to this trend. The game echoes on the surface the extreme fascination humanity has towards exploring space. Each planet, it feels, has its own essence, and audio cue, and the protagonist, finally becoming an astronaut, is to explore them all. Rather than putting an immense-almost-infinite world at the fingertips of the player, Outer Wilds puts them in a contained solar system stuck in a 22-minute time loop ending in the sun going supernova. The game is designed in such a way that interaction with it is not forced. Players can choose their own way to play each loop. They can visit wherever they want to and nothing other than the endgame actually requires a prior key to be collected or latch to be pulled. The immersion of the game resides in the uniqueness of the different planets, the accompanying music pieces, and the existentialist question of life and the self in a space that is dying. The game takes on a heuristic approach rather than helping the player with clear cut clues. The game is not meant to be or designed to be played in any one linear way. This paper wishes to examine how the design of the world in the game helps in the immersion of the players in its gamespace, while not binding the players to any certain way of playing.

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Dr. Mario Donick has studied German language & literature and history at the University of Rostock. He has a PhD in Communication Studies. He works as independent author and researcher. Books and articles on human computer interaction & society, as well as computer games. CV and publications.

Doing Magic for a Living: About the “Mages Guild” in The Elder Scrolls as Professional Organization

FROG 2021 – Talk

Many fantasy games present mages, wizards and witches as a fairly common part of the game world and its society. Magic exists objectively and even common people know about it. Still, magic is often regulated by special organizations. In the „Elder Scrolls“ series of games, many mages are organized in the Mages Guild. In my talk, I start by explaining the guild‘s purpose, both in term of gameplay and narrative – the guild not only structures the quest-based gameplay of the series, but also builds, strengthens and confirms the player’s assumed identity as mage, witch or wizard. It is therefore a tool helping the player to suspend disbelief. However, by doing so, the actually fantastic endeavour of casting spells or doing magic research becomes surprisingly mundane – magic quests are presented as jobs with payments and deadlines to meet. Members are organized in ranks, have to follow rules, and guilds are managed, just like every other company in our normal world. At first this seems to be a contradiction to the fantastic setting of the game world. However, I will show that elements of every-day bureaucracy actually increase the credibility of the fictional guild and further strenghten the player’s impression of really being a mage, witch or wizard.

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Katarzyna Marak, Ph. D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland; she is the author of Japanese and American Horror: A Comparative Study of Film, Fiction, Graphic Novels and Video Games and the co-author of the monograph Gameplay, Emotions and Narrative: Independent Games Experienced, as well as a number of texts discussing independent games, game mechanics, player experience, and storytelling aspects of games. Her research interests concern game studies, with particular emphasis on independent game texts, horror fiction, testimonies of reception, and elements of American and Japanese popular culture.

Magic as Mechanics and Narrative in Independent Horror Games

FROG 2021 – Talk

This paper will attempt to outline and examine the medium-specific ways in which magic is portrayed and used in independent digital horror games. The two most important factors taken into consideration will be the practical employment of magic, discussed in terms of mechanics, and the fantastical employment of magic, discussed in terms of the narrative. Both these components are particularly significant in horror fiction in general, where magic is primarily depicted as a source of harm and peril, and only occasionally as the means to defend oneself—depending on the culture-related politics of magic. Such portrayal of magic does conform to the medium of digital games, but also breaks with the strict long-established convention of typical literary and film horror narratives by empowering and strengthening the protagonist. Using a number of selected examples, the paper will examine a number of varied representations of magic in game texts, with particular emphasis placed on the relationship between magic and immersion, as well as magic and agency. By placing games in a broader context of other horror texts, the paper will demonstrate how through a complex interplay of mechanics, narrative, and gameplay experience independent digital horror games allow the players to obtain and use the power to make impossible things occur in and impact on the game world.

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Dr. Tobias Unterhuber studied modern German literature, comparative literature and study of religion at LMU Munich and at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2018, he earned his PhD with his thesis on the works of Swiss author Christian Kracht. He is a post-doc for literature and media studies at the Leopold-Franzens University Innsbruck. In addition to pop literature, literary theory, discourse analysis, literature & economics and gender studies, his research interests include video game research in the field of cultural studies. He is an editor of the game studies journal PAIDIA.

A magic dwells in each beginning? – Game Studies, its rhetoric rituals and mythos of being a young field

FROG 2021 – Talk

Looking at Game Studies publications at large researchers frame themselves and their studies often very similarly: – Game Studies is a young field and a young discipline. – The research topic is young as well and underappreciated. – This research is the first of its kind. – We happy few are the only ones interested in researching games. And so on. This rhetorical positioning might have been appropriate 20 years ago, when Espen Aarseth declared the Year One of Game Studies (even though there was already a lot of research before). However, in the year 2021 it seems rather strange to still uphold these sentiments. Especially if you look at the amount of Game Studies publications which can make the entrance into the field a rather daring endeavor. These declarations might originate in the structure of Game Studies itself. Game Studies is caught in a paradoxical situation. It is a prolific field, but still lacks the appropriate institutionalization and embedding in academic structures. Therefore, the interest in the study of the history of Game Studies itself is rather underdeveloped, as researchers seem to have to prove their worth repeatedly. Because of this lack of interest, the field lacks a central technique of self-reflexivity and self-evaluation. However, beside these structural problems, there might be a third reason. Keeping the mythos of a young field and of being the first in a field alive immunizes research against certain critiques and creates exclusivity and thus Game Studies’ own magic circle.

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Dr. Doris C. Rusch is a professor of game design with a special focus on Transformative Play at Uppsala University, Department of Game Design. She is the author of “Making Deep Games” and numerous journal papers and book chapters as well as lead designer of numerous award-winning games about the human experience. She is collaborating with Prof. Andy Phelps on the Existential Transformative Game Design Framework which draws on existential psychotherapy, depth psychology as well as myth and ritual to create experiences which can ignite change in a self-directed and uncoerced manner.

Andrew Phelps

Andrew “Andy” Phelps is a designer and professor at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory NZ (HITLabNZ) within the College of Engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand where he explores virtual and augmented reality, games and education, and art and interactive media experiences. He is also a professor in the Film & Media Arts division of the School of Communication, holds a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science, and is the director of the AU Game Center at American University in Washington DC, USA. His latest games include Fragile Equilibrium (XBOX, Steam, itch.io 2019) and The Witch’s Way (itch.io 2021). He maintains a website of his academic publications, popular writing, artwork, curriculum development, and more at andyworld.io.

The Magic of The Witch’s Way

FROG 2021 – Talk

Co-Author:
Prof. Andrew M. Phelps, American University (Washington DC); University of Canterbury (NZ), guest prof. at Uppsala University

This talk discusses the design of The Witch’s Way, focusing on its conceptualization and creative rendering of magic. In this interactive text adventure game, you play a middle-aged woman named Lou, who decides to take a time out from her busy and outwardly successful but inwardly unfulfilled life, and move to the cottage in the woods her aunt has left her. There, she establishes contact with nature, the Unknown Forest behind the cottage, and the mysterious beings that dwell within it. Guided by animal spirits, a wise and quirky bookshelf and her aunt’s magical clues, Lou learns about the Witch’s Way and how to live in greater alignment with herself and the world around her, tapping into a pervasive and powerful magic that changes her and her life forever. The Witch’s Way is part of a bigger research endeavor that aims to articulate a theoretical framework for existential, transformative game design (Rusch, 2018; Rusch, 2020; Rusch and Phelps, 2020a; Rusch and Phelps, 2020b). Its driving research question is: how can we create games that address existential concerns – death, identity, isolation, freedom and purpose (Yalom, 1980) – and contribute to a meaningful life, i.e. a life where we are as much in alignment with our true self as we possibly can be (Bugental, 1990; Campbell, 2004). Drawing on anthropology (Davis, 2009), archetypal psychology (Hillman, 1996) as well as mythology and ritual studies in the context of (existential) psychotherapy (May, 1991; Larson, 1996; Goodwyn, 2012, 2016; Greenwood and Goodwyn 2016; Jodorowski, 2010), it harnesses four technologies of magic (Beck, 2012), 1) Wordlessness, 2) Oneness, 3) Imagination and 4) Forming, which are ways to access the unconscious self and sync it up with the energy of the conscious self as well as the energy world that surrounds us. Rather than remaining purely in the mystical realm, The Witch’s Way and its underlying framework further create a bridge to neuroscience and neuroanatomy. Because the magic of inner alignment requires access to our felt sense, research on embodied consciousness (Varela, Thompson & Bosch, 1993; Blake, 2019; Fogel, 2009) and whole brain living (Taylor, 2021) provides a fascinating and insightful scientific complement to our theoretical and creative explorations.

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Pascal Marc Wagner is an M.A. cognitive and cultural linguist with a B.A. in English Studies and German Media and Human Rights Law from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. His theses concerned gaming-specific language in online settings and spell name neologisms in JRPGs. Currently, he works as project referent at the Goethe-Institut Munich and teaches English linguistics at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. He founded the website languageatplay.de to further advance the field of linguistics into the study of digital games. In 2020, he co-founded the antifascist network “Keinen Pixel den Faschisten!”. Reach him on Twitter as @indieflock and @languageatplay.

“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology” – How Semantics Produces Science from Spellcasting

FROG 2021 – Talk

The line between fantasy and science-fiction blurs in many games. A mage in Skyrim or Demons’ Souls might be able to sling the same fireballs, to shoot similar lightning, to levitate cheese wheels just like the protagonists of BioShock or Prey. In playable effect, the differences between supernatural or science-fictional forces are often marginal, if existent at all. All examples and many fictions beyond them use depletable resources that need to be refilled via consumables to utilise these skills, as well as locking their usage or strength modifiers behind some kind of parameter thresholds. Indeed, seeing that not scientific plausibility, but more likely a “plausible possibility” of science-fictional “technomancy” is the basis for most Sci-Fi examples, the delineation between fantasy and Sci-Fi becomes even blurrier. The talk develops, from a cognitive semantic perspective, that the difference of perception in these examples is one of suspension of disbelief: Fantasy titles like Skyrim or Dark Souls mince no words talking about magic, ascribing its existence to deific intervention or natural spirits. More Sci-Fi adjacent games like BioShock or Prey however choose different, more (pseudo-) scientific explanations, such as gene therapy or neuron transplantation as cause for people being able to “technomance”, to effectively spellcast in a semantic framework of fictional, but nevertheless scientifical, rule-bound definition. The presentation’s outlook on this technomancy is therefore a culturally and cognitively linguistic one, utilising semantic definition to delineate the difference between Sci-Fi and Fantasy – or possibly not to.

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