Blog of Abstracts

Wolfgang Rebernik studied documentary filmmaking and cinematography at “Zelig” School for Documentary, Television and New Media in Bolzano, Italy. Since his graduation in 1993 he has made documentary films all around the world and lectured seminars on „the language of audiovisual media“. To extend his storytelling-horizon he enrolled at Donau University Krems to study Medien | Spiel | Pädagogik in 2019. Through living in Asia (India & Vietnam) for more than 10 years Wolfgang developed a special interest in the history and impact of migration and colonialism.

Wherever I Go Is My Future

FROG 2022 – Talk

In my past work in documentary film, topics such as migration and flight already played a central role. Be it the film „Tara“, about a young Austrian woman who grow up in rural India, or when thousand’s of East-German refugees climbed over the fence of the West-German Embassy in Prague in autumn of 1989 and forced the GDR government to let them leave for the West, in the documentary „The Heros from Prague“. While the medium of documentary film is a wonderful tool for a general overview, it lacks the immersive engagement of the audience. So I had the idea to tell the life of a refugee through a multi-platform story to be able to pay respect to as many perspectives as possible.

„Wherever I Go Is My Future“ is the concept of a documentary trans-media story, based on the memoirs of the Austrian Jew, Ernst Frey. A documentary film, a graphic novel and a game retell his escape from Nazism to Vietnam and link it to historic circumstances. While the documentary highlights the historical background and introduces the main characters, the graphic novel tells the story trough the eyes of the main character, Ernst Frey, based on his 1200 pages of memoirs.

In the game players will then be confronted with the emotional reality of a refugee. They have to take the right decisions and face the immediate response. Their decisions have to be made spontaneously and are decisive for survival. The players are thus actively involved in the destiny of the protagonist and experience the consequences their actions have for the person escaping.

The idea behind this documentary trans-media story intends to give digital consumers new access to historical content, emotionally connect them with the characters and create an understanding for historic context. Through this concept of multi-level storytelling the recipients shall be enable to fully engage in the story. Further more it shall serve as a template for other historic portraits.

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James Baillie is a historian who specialises on digital methods for the study of medieval history, on the history of the Caucasus region, and on the representation of history in games. He is also a game modder and developer whose work has been featured in Rock Paper Shotgun, the co-founder of the Exilian game development community, and the convenor of the Coding Medieval Worlds workshop series which builds connections and idea-sharing between medieval historians and game developers.

From Vardzia to Val Royeaux: Identity, Oppression and Power between Medieval Caucasia and Modern Games

FROG 2022 – Talk

Role-playing games tend, regardless of implied setting, to represent underlying dynamics of power and oppression that are familiar to modern audiences. This may mean importing analogous factions and beliefs, or othering problems of power and oppression to create a more fantastical setting where the player is discouraged from engaging with those societal dynamics. In the case of medieval and medieval-fantasy settings, this poses two risks: it risks absolving modernity of the horrors the player witnesses by reassuring them that they are engaging only with a distant past imaginary, and it can also risk portraying such dynamics as eternal and thus inevitable.

In this paper, I will unpack these problems by examining a real medieval society, that of the 12th century Caucasus. In doing so I will compare its historical dynamics of power and identity to those presented in modern medieval-fantasy games, both bringing in examples from major published CRPGs and using reflections from my own game design work. Through examining how people in its medieval past navigated their religiously and ethnically diverse world, the Caucasus can show us alternative ways that state and royal power, factionalism, and identity can function in our ludic imaginings of the medieval. These, in turn, potentially transform our play with the imagined past – reshaping medievalist games from systems that portray these dynamics as inevitable into routes through which they can be questioned and reimagined.

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Hossein Mohammadzade has a master’s degree in English Language and Literature. He is currently an independent researcher, and he studies television and videogames. His main area of interest is the relationship between ideology, narrative, and videogames.

Co-Author:
Atefe Najjar Mansoor (Independent Researcher)

Democracy or “Tyranny by Morons”? Oppression Through Exploiting the Undereducated

FROG 2022 – Talk

Oppression is not always direct or explicit. For instance, oppression by economic means and oppression by or through the majority are two strong forms of oppression. Rather than being openly taken away by one political power, people’s freedoms can either be made unaffordable and unimaginable through market policies or be taken away indirectly by creating an oppressive, undereducated majority incapable of dialogue even in the same socio-economic class. Moreover, gameworlds are capable of promoting oppression, criticizing it, or providing freedoms that cannot be experienced in the physical world – at least not without consequences. For example, two major videogames, Grand Theft Auto IV and Grand Theft Auto V, give the player various freedoms – which have clearly made them popular – and make implicit and explicit references to the aforementioned forms of oppression, certain neoliberal values, popular beliefs, and contemporary forms of democracy. Therefore, through a close reading of the two games, we try to see if and how these games criticize or promote each of these concepts. We also try to see if these games have their own way of oppressing the player. In addition, such an analysis can help discuss the relationship between ideology, oppression, and freedom in a democracy under neoliberal policies and capitalism, and discuss how such a system might have the potential to provide the means for oppression by economic policies and majorities – contrary to the popular “democracy versus oppression” dichotomy.

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Katrina Keefer is a scholar of African identity and slavery with particular interest in how individuals situate themselves within broader communities and groups. Her major research projects are in the digital humanities, and she has developed a method of discerning the origins of enslaved individuals by ‘reading’ the body and facial marks they were given in the continent. Keefer presently leads an international team which is reconstructing a visual catalogue of known slave brands to understand the complex economic relationships which drove the slave trade. Keefer is also a game developer– she is fascinated by how Africa and its past are represented within virtual worlds, and works to develop games which challenge stereotypes.

Freedom and Slavery: Navigating Player Experiences in the 18th century Sierra Leone Estuary

FROG 2022 – Talk

Bunce Island: Through the Mirror is set during the 18th century in the Sierra Leone estuary at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade within the region. Developed to bring players into a carefully reconstructed historical past, we have been developing the project to meet multiple audience needs through a process of collaborative co-authorship. Through this process, two major drives have become apparent based on audience: the desire to learn more about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the desire to foreground precolonial African nations and systems. For stakeholders within Africa, the conflation of the African continent and the trans-Atlantic slave trade can be grating and a reduction of complex heritages into one major trauma, while for the descendants of that trade, the desire to reconnect with the courage of their ancestors who survived the trade is central. This binary has shaped our process of development and decision making as we build branching narratives and broad story arcs. This paper will explore that process and the ramifications around it, offering a case study into development and scholarly inquiry around freedom within a game’s narrative. With a game which so explicitly revolves around a period of intense slave trading, managing these two major audience pressures is complex. This paper will discuss strategies to allow players a sense of perceived autonomy and decision-making within the game space, facilitating both exploration and narrative. We will also explore the approaches we are bringing to prohibit bad faith users from enacting violence against enslaved characters while balancing player immersion and historical accuracy. The topic of this game is one which evokes strong emotions and engages with a complex past of oppression and resilience – how we engage with the freedom of our players is the foundation of a dignified representation of a painful history.

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Samuel Poirier-Poulin is a PhD candidate in film studies at the Université de Montréal, Canada. His doctoral research investigates trauma in horror video games and draws on affect theory and phenomenology of media. His other research interests include sexuality studies, queer desires, and autoethnography. His work has appeared in the journals Loading… and Synoptique, and in the anthology Video Games and Comedy. Samuel is also the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Press Start.

Trust, Confidence, and Hope in A Summer’s End—Hong Kong 1986

FROG 2022 – Talk

Building on Eve Sedgwick’s (1997) reparative reading, this paper offers an analysis of the theme of trust and its variations (reluctance, confidence, intimacy) in the visual novel A Summer’s End—Hong Kong 1986 (ASE hereafter; Oracle & Bone, 2020). More specifically, this paper examines how trust takes place (1) between the game characters, (2) between the player and the characters, and (3) between the queer player and the video game medium. ASE tells the unlikely love story between Michelle Fong Ha Cheung, a disciplined office lady who lives with her mother, and Sam Ka Yan Wong, an independent and free-spirited woman who owns a video store. The story is set in Hong Kong, in the summer of 1986, two years after the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed. ASE offers a reflection on the difficulties of being a queer woman in uncertain times. It explores themes of desires, freedom, and hope in a time and space “where Asian traditional values and Western idealism clash and converge” (Oracle & Bone, 2019, para. 2).

My analysis starts from the premise that video games, like literature or cinema, provide an ideal opportunity to study trust—its formation and its fragility—and to broaden our knowledge on the subject (Leboyer & Vincent, 2019). As noted by philosopher Michaela Marzano (2010), trust is closely tied to human existence. It creates strong relationships where dependence and vulnerability meet; it changes our relationship to the world and to ourselves, and makes us realize that we are never completely independent (Marzano, 2010). Trust is in opposition with fear, and more precisely with the fear of the future, “reintroducing into the world the possibility of hope, [and] pushing everyone to bet again on oneself, on others and, more generally, on the future” (Marzano, 2010, p. 61, my translation). ASE ultimately provides an interesting case for studying trust from a humanities perspective, a theme underexplored in game studies and in English-language scholarship in general.

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Fiona Schönberg is a novelist, script writer and narrative designer from Germany. She graduated from Mainz University and holds a Master of Arts in Mediendramaturgie (Media Studies), as well as a Bachelor’s in Film Studies and English Literature and Culture.

All Work and No Play – The Narrative Potential of Formal Gameplay Elements and Economic Alienation in Neo Cab

FROG 2022 – Talk

When we consider representation in video games, we are most commonly concerned with what might be considered primarily narrative elements: the visual depiction and design, the dialogue, the various sources of diegetic information, as well as the tropes and relations that inform framing within a scene or the narrative at large.

This presentation on the other hand, aims to interrogate what Clara Fernández-Vara dubbed the ‘formal elements’ of a video game – its mechanics and gameplay loops – for their potential to represent subaltern experience; not by painting a picture, but by creating an experience.
To that end, the presentation will examine how Chance Agency’s 2019 game Neo Cab uses each of its gameplay mechanics in tandem to engender the experience of economic alienation and marginalization experienced by the game’s protagonist, and will argue for the potential that this method holds.

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Kübra Aksay is a lecturer, researcher, and Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Freiburg. She holds a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and a master’s degree in British and North American Cultural Studies. Her current research and dissertation project focuses on games as performance. Her research interests, other than game studies, are digital media, narratology, virtual spaces, heritage studies, and Star Trek.

“Work, Play, Escape: Freedom and Submission in Video Games about Office Jobs”

FROG 2022 – Talk

Video games, due to the diverse virtual spaces they can present in detail and their ability to allow their audiences to perform various roles in those spaces, are often associated with escapism. While other narrative media can also offer absorption into a fictional world, games are not only escapist because they are works of fiction, but also because of the “common perception of play and games as opposite of seriousness and work” (Calleja 2010). However, if virtual environments are designed to be a form of escape from everyday life, boredom, or environments that the players are grounded in, it is difficult to consider the non-navigable, lonely, constrained office spaces and stories about labor and submission featured in a number of recent video games such as Her Story (2015), Papers, Please (2013), and Orwell (2016), as popular images of a world many players dream about escaping to.

This study aims to analyze how representations of constrained environments and stories about labor can be attractive and engaging for the audiences of digital games. The study focuses on setting and narrative themes in digital games about office work. The concepts of familiarity with certain spaces through “transmedial storytelling” (Jenkins 2011) and the presence of the audience in the actual and virtual space at the same time are discussed, in order to show how the themes of work and responsibility, and restricted workspaces can create an engaging interactive storytelling experience, in a medium that is known for providing freedom and entertainment. The aspect of freedom, or rather the lack of it in the mentioned video games, is also examined in relation to the current discourses of metaverse and immersion.

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My name is Gunnar Gräsbeck and I am currently doing my Ph.D in the German Sport University Cologne. My main interests of research are nonlinear pedagogy and how it can be applied to different fields, particularly in Olympic fencing which is my passion. Outside my research and sport practice I am an avid gamer. I am heavily inspired by game series like Final Fantasy and other games with deep story-telling and strong character development. I believe games like these can be linked to education in order to inspire new learning habits for future generations.

Co-Authors:
Swen Körner, Ph.D supervisor
Mario Staller, collaborator and partial supervising in Ph.D projects

Nonlinear Pedagogy in Olympic Fencing – do video games offer a new dimension for its elaboration?

FROG 2022 – Talk

Fencing is an Olympic sport that has so far been dominated by linear teaching methods. Nonlinear Pedagogy (NLP) offers a new field of research due to fencing not having any nonlinear elements defined, despite being characterized a sport of high dynamical complexity. The Constraints-Led Approach (CLA) proposed by Davids et al. (2008) is a manner to apply NLP in practice to manipulate learners as dynamical systems. Learning is an individual process, characterized by extrinsic and intrinsic dynamical changes of learners leading to change in behavior that aims for a new learning outcome. Due to learning being a complex individual process, the CLA has been proven efficient in steering this in the right direction. By defining constraints in the learning environment, their manipulation functions as this steering activity to guide the learning process by either limiting or loosening the constraints of learning, depending on the outcome desired by the learner. Being applicable to any field where learning is affected by constraints, defining right constraints for a CLA approach is crucial. This paper aims to elaborate on constraints present in fencing, however proposing the dimension of video games as a new field of their recognition. Many sports are adapting to the field of e-sports and VR/AR technology to take performance into new levels, advocating fencing to do the same.

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Wolfgang Hochleitner (AT) is a lecturer and researcher in the Digital Media department at the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Within the research group Playful Interactive Environments, his research interests lie in large-display floor-based games and social and persuasive impact games.

Co-Authors:

Jeremiah Diephuis, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
Anke Schneider, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH
Julia Himmelsbach, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH
David Sellitsch, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH

Designing Game-based Moral Courage: A Postmortem

FROG 2022 – Talk

Games are continually being utilized for purposes other than pure entertainment, from various uses in education to approaches that help foster behavioral change. The ability to structure an interactive experience that is motivating, repeatable, allows for variable outcomes and provides some measures for performance also makes games an excellent tool for research activities. However, the actual employment of games for more “serious” purposes presents specific challenges that need to be addressed. Games heavily rely on mechanics that both define and incentivize player interaction. For so-called “impact games,” this can potentially overshadow the intended content or purpose. In addition, each player needs to learn the rules of the game world and the controls for the game. Unfamiliarity with common game modalities and specific controller setups can severely complicate the learning process. For such impact games that target a larger audience, significant efforts are required to simplify these processes while still permitting a sense of agency and discovery.

The transdisciplinary research project CATRINA endeavors to explore how game-based approaches can be used to inform young adults about situations that require moral courage and encourage their willingness for increased involvement. In the project, three distinct game approaches were developed and evaluated: a mobile-device-supported urban game, a hybrid multiplayer card game and an immersive virtual reality game. Although each of these game prototypes utilized different technologies and game modalities, all were developed with the same guiding principles: the inclusion of specific social identity features, the avoidance of unnecessary stereotypes, and an emphasis on simplified interaction without the need for traditional game controls such as a keyboard or controllers. The development and subsequent evaluation of these games resulted in a few valuable lessons that are of interest to other game-based research projects, particularly within the context of the global pandemic. This postmortem will address issues such as the usage and avoidance of stereotypes, universality vs. salience and the importance of in-game analytics.

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