Blog of Abstracts

Dr. Vered Pnueli is Head of the M.Des in Digital Game Design and Development at Shenkar College, where she established Israel’s first program in games. Her research explores games as cultural media, focusing on gender, fashion, cultural heritage, and social impact. Her research on gender and games has expanded into projects exploring fashion and digital play. Recent work includes Games for the Pluriverse, examining cultural heritage in game design, alongside research and workshops on games in museums and exhibition contexts. She is Content Advisor and Curator for Games for Change Israel, connecting academic research with cultural and public engagement.

Co-Authors:
Miri Nudelman (Shenkar College of Engineering and Design)
Yaniv Sobol (Shenkar College of Engineering and Design)

Dress Codes at Play: From Artistic Expression to Cultural and Historical Learning

FROG 2026 – Talk

Fashion occupies a productive space between art, design, culture, and everyday life. Scholarship examining fashion and art points to shared practices of aesthetic experimentation, performance, cultural critique, and identity-making (McCartney and Tynan). Fashion can be approached as a designed object, a form of artistic expression, and a cultural medium.

Digital games extend these practices into another creative medium, creating new possibilities for expression through fashion. Avatar customization, virtual clothing, and character styling provide spaces in which dress can be performed and transformed. Recent scholarship describes fashion in digital environments as a form of play shaped by experimentation, creativity, and self-expression (Park and Chun). Fashion studies also show how clothing gains meaning through the social and cultural contexts in which it is worn (Entwistle; Lascity; Noris and Cantoni).

Fashion play has a distinctly gendered history. Dressing, styling, and experimenting with appearance have long been associated with girls’ play, from paper dolls to digital dress-up games, practices that have often remained peripheral to dominant accounts of games and gameplay (Fron et al.). This history raises broader questions about gender, creativity, self-presentation, and what counts as meaningful gameplay.
This talk explores fashion play in games and asks whether it can also become a way of learning about culture and history. Clothes reflect ideas about gender, class, religion, and resistance, while their meanings shift through combinations and social contexts. The question is further explored through Dress Code, a research-through-design game in which players create outfits for different social scenarios. Its digital wardrobe pairs garments with short cultural and historical micro-narratives, bringing this knowledge into the act of choosing and combining clothes. Each outfit generates a multidimensional cultural reading shaped by context.

By proposing the digital wardrobe as an interface for cultural fashion literacy, Dress Code brings fashion studies into dialogue with game studies and research-through-design. The project explores digital fashion play as a space for artistic expression and identity-making, as well as a way of engaging with cultural and historical contexts.

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Till Weinhold holds diplomas in Art and Design Education and Fine Art Painting from the University of Applied Arts Vienna. For 12 years, he has taught at a secondary school in Vienna, with subjects including Art and Design, Crafts, Digital Design, Game Design and Game Cultures. He has also taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, exploring digital game cultures as impulses for Technology and Design education. His practice connects artistic and design processes, analogue and digital making, game cultures and education.

Making Space for Games: Twelve Years of Playing with Art Education and Beyond

FROG 2026 – Talk

What happens when an art teacher starts taking games seriously?

This practice-based reflection looks back on more than a decade of bringing games, game making and game cultures into art and design education. Its starting point was an encounter with game studies during teacher education in 2014, including FROG and impulses around games, learning and participation. What began as experimentation gradually developed into different formats across secondary-school teaching and teacher education.

These formats range from playing and discussing games to modifying and creating analogue games, translating artistic work into game worlds, using Minecraft and Minetest as spaces for artistic experimentation and community building, and developing courses dedicated to Game Design and Game Cultures. Rather than presenting a single method or project, the contribution draws on selected examples to reflect on what becomes possible when games are treated as cultural and artistic practices within education.

Game making appears particularly promising as a multidisciplinary activity: it can bring together visual design, storytelling, systems thinking, technology, collaboration and cultural references. Yet its frequently assumed motivational power also deserves scrutiny. Creating digital games poses technical and institutional limitations, and teachers do not necessarily share their students’ gaming knowledge or technical expertise.

The contribution therefore asks what art educators actually need in order to engage meaningfully with games. It argues for an open educational stance that takes students’ everyday experiences with games seriously, allows their expertise and cultural references to enter the classroom, and creates room for experimentation without requiring the teacher to become a game developer. In doing so, games can become not only tools for learning, but subjects, materials and spaces for artistic and cultural education.

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Fiona Schönberg is a queer novelist, game designer and scholar from Germany. She holds a BA in Film & English Literature, an MA in Mediadramaturgy and currently pursues her PhD in Media Studies as an Associate Researcher at Regensburg University’s Digital Area Studies Lab. Her research focus lies on affect and belief, how it is perceived and how it is constructed – and how that knowledge may be used to build a kinder tomorrow.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Replayability

FROG 2026 – Talk

In the past, a great deal of heated discourse has poised games and ‘legacy media’ (used here as per Hartmut Könitz) against one another, both within the field (one need only remember the bitter rivalry between ludologists and narratologists of the early 2000s) and in the public (perhaps most famously in the wholesale dismissal of the ludic medium by the late Roger Ebert and the memetic discussions is spawned).

Building upon contemporary media psychology as well as Walter Benjamin’s foundational 1936 essay evoked in its title, this talk means to propose a yet new understanding of the Aura of an artwork, one that highlights the interactivity inherent to the reception of any artwork, regardless of the semiotic channels involved, regardless whether it be a painting on a museum wall or a modern video game. From this basis, the talk will expand upon where the differences between game and painting do lie – in the differing number of semiotic channels (used here as per Hawreliak 2018&19), and how the conscious employment (and conscious consumption) of procedural semiotic channels can enrich the consumption of art in ways that would be reductive to describe simply as interactivity.
In so doing, this presentation aims to foster both a greater understanding of how art is consumed in the 21st century, and propose this alternate understanding of hermeneutic interactivity to the ongoing discourse that surrounds ‘interactive’ art.

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Lisa Ebner-Kollmann works in the Digital Communication team at the Belvedere Museum in Vienna, where she develops digital editorial formats and online content. With academic backgrounds in Art History and Information Design, as well as professional experience in museum education, her work focuses on the intersection of museums, digital storytelling and game-based mediation. In 2026, she completed the Certificate Program Game Based Education at the University for Continuing Education Krems. Her current practice and research focus on the strategic integration of digital and game-based mediation in art museums, combining practical museum work with conceptual approaches to museum learning and participation.

Beyond Game Design: Structural Tensions of Sustainable Game-Based Mediation in Art Museums

FROG 2026 – Talk

Game-based mediation is increasingly recognized as a promising approach for art museums, offering new ways to activate visitors, lower barriers to participation, engage new audiences and foster meaningful museum experiences. Together, these qualities create new opportunities for participation, engagement and experience-based learning. Yet these same qualities introduce structural tensions that challenge their sustainable implementation within art museum practice.

Existing examples of game-based mediation are often implemented as individual projects rather than embedded within broader mediation strategies, while questions of their sustainable institutional integration remain less explicitly addressed.

Game-based mediation is not just a design challenge – it is an institutional challenge for art museums.

Against this background, the paper asks: What does sustainable game-based mediation require from art museums beyond game design?

Drawing on contemporary theories of museum learning and museum experience, the paper undertakes a theoretically informed comparative analysis of existing game-based mediation formats to identify recurring structural tensions in game-based mediation. It further examines how these become institutional challenges under the organizational conditions of museum practice. Building on this analysis, six conceptual guidelines for sustainable implementation are proposed.

By reframing sustainable game-based mediation as an institutional rather than purely design-oriented challenge, the paper demonstrates that its sustainable implementation cannot be reduced to questions of game design alone but instead requires an institutional perspective on sustainable implementation.

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David Marian Böhm is a Vienna-based game developer, filmmaker, and educator. He holds a Master’s in Creative Media Practice from the University of Sussex (Brighton) and a Bachelor’s in Audio Production from Middlesex University (London). His master’s thesis focused on navigating virtual environments using visual clues. Dave worked 5 years as Academic Coordinator and Lecturer at SAE Institute Vienna, teaching film, game design, and scientific practice. Since 2019, he has worked as a freelance lecturer, consultant, media/content creator, and programmer. His expertise spans video game immersion, human-computer interaction (HCI), narrative design, and game design. He is currently developing Once Upon, a narrative-driven indie exploration game inspired by Disco Elysium.

It Was Always a Game: Reading Archival Operations as Game Mechanics

FROG 2026 – Talk

Archives are usually treated as raw material that game designers translate into playable form. This talk makes the opposite claim: core archival operations already function as game mechanics. Arrangement and description work as systems of discovery. Appraisal and selection work as forms of unlocking. Redaction is a constraint on what becomes knowable, designed into the system from the start. Games did not invent this, they make it visible.

The talk draws on archival theory (Terry Cook’s account of appraisal and arrangement, Wolfgang Ernst’s reading of archives as technical, procedural systems), game studies’ formal vocabulary for mechanics (Miguel Sicart, Ian Bogost), and Espen Aarseth’s concept of ergodic labor to ask: What structural parallels exist between core archival operations and game mechanics? How do archivally-legible games demonstrate whether this parallel is procedural or analogical? And how do these games turn archival interpretation into a designed mechanic?

Three case studies ground the argument. Remedy’s Control renders its Federal Bureau of Control as a literalized bureaucratic archive of redacted case files and catalogued anomalies. Alan Wake 2’s case-board mechanic makes evidence-assembly and finding-aid logic directly interactive. Despelote incorporates real found footage and personal audiovisual material, working as a control case where archival procedure operates on unmediated rather than invented material.

The presentation closes by asking what it means for museums and heritage institutions to recognize the playable systems already latent in their collections, instead of building new ones from scratch.

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Rudolf Thomas Inderst (PhD in Philosophy, PhD in Cultural Studies, PhD in Political Science) is a professor of Game Design and Game Studies at Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences. He heads the Digital Games section at the TITEL cultural magazine, publishes the weekly newsletter Game Studies Watchlist, and is the founder and host of the international Game Studies podcasts of the New Books Network.

From Trophy to Tomb: The Functional Opposition of Art in Payday 2 and Arc Raiders

FROG 2026 – Talk

The conference theme “PLAYING ART” invites speakers to examine how games translate artworks into playful systems and how games themselves operate as cultural expressions. This paper proposes a comparative analysis of two diametrically opposed ludic treatments of art: the active heist in Payday 2’s “Framing Frame” mission and the passive storage of paintings in Arc Raiders’ “Stella Montis” map.

In Payday 2’s “Framing Frame”, art is reduced to its purest capitalist function: a commodity to be stolen, traded, and weaponized for political framing. Paintings are marked with “Sold” stickers, signaling their prior exchange value; the player’s task is to intercept them before delivery. Art here is liquid capital – mobile, fungible, and entirely stripped of cultural meaning beyond its price tag. The gameplay loop reinforces this: stealth, bagging, and extraction transform the gallery into a logistics puzzle, not a cultural space. Arc Raiders’ “Stella Montis” presents the inverse. Described as a “now-defunct facility teeming with humanity’s important treasury” with “rows upon rows of stored paintings meant to preserve art”, this indoor map is a tomb of cultural heritage. The paintings are not loot; they are environmental storytelling, relics of a collapsed civilization’s attempt at preservation. Unlike in Payday 2, these artworks are immobile, worthless in gameplay terms, and functionally inert. Their presence signifies failed preservation rather than successful theft.

This paper argues that these two treatments represent a fundamental opposition in how games conceptualize art’s role: art as trophy (extractable, instrumentalizable, commodified) versus art as relic (immovable, melancholic, witness to extinction). I will analyze how each game’s mechanics, level design, and reward systems produce these opposing meanings and what this reveals about games as cultural mediators of art. The comparison offers a critical lens on how playful formats “are never neutral”: they actively construct what art is and does within their worlds, shaping players’ implicit understanding of cultural value.

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Margarete Jahrmann is a ludic artist, researcher and professor Experimental Game Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. 2025 she received the Austrian media art price 2025, 2020 Media Art Prize of the City of Vienna. 2026 she showed at Chemnitz Kosmos Festival, e-commemorate Berlin. In 2025 she had a major solo-show at the Vienna AIL gallery. Further exhibitions: 2024 Kuandu Museum, Taipei and re:publica, 2023 AMAZE, 2021 invited artist at Biennale Habana. 2026 she published a monograph, KOPFGELD and Other Ludic experiments, neurosciences and art and THE TREE GAME at transcript. In her collaborative and interdisciplinary arts practice, she developed the LUDIC method, explores human and non- human, cognitive and the emotional linked to ecologies, democracy and society.

Co-Authors:
Thomas Brandstetter
Stefan Glasauer

ROBOPSY – An Artistic Examination of Role-play with LLMs in the Museum Context

FROG 2026 – Talk

The easy accessibility and wide availability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is fundamentally changing how people acquire information, especially about historical events. The distortions, limits and errors in the LLMs’ presentation of facts are well known in the academic discourse, but less so in the general public.

In recent times, historical museums have emerged as a vibrant platform for the discussion of questions dealing with the representation of knowledge: they have applied self-critique to the traditional ways of presenting their collections, have introduced new and interactive formats of museum communication and have established themselves as a forum for critical examination of the portrayal of historical events. All of this makes them ideal spaces for bringing a critical examination of LLMs to the public.

We propose that the play and workshop formats developed in our research project ROBOPSY would be a perfect fit for historical museums. ROBOPSY has created a game device that lets participants play a role-playing game with LLMs that is centered on a historical event. It allows a direct comparison between different LLM platforms, such as ChtGPT, Grok, Mitral or DeepSeek, and an easy customization and localization of the topic.

In our talk, we will present the installation, explain how it works and how it already has been used in different contexts. We will examine two different scenarios we have run, one about the murder of Moritz Schlick in 1936 at an exhibition at the AIL in Vienna and one on the so-called “Kirschenrummel” revolt in 1920 at the Atelierhaus Schaumbad in Graz. The latter was the result of a workshop session in which the participants could prompt the LLM and play the game together.
Our most recent experience took place in former Karl-Marx-Stadt about the Wende Prompt in Chemnitz Kosmos Festival, at a historic site work, at Kraftwerk Museum.

We will present our experiences with those formats and show how our device could serve as a ludic incubator for critically engaging museum visitor with the problems and pitfalls of LLMs. We also suggest that a historical museum might be the ideal place for the device, as the museum exhibits would provide a powerful context for a critical examination and comparison of different sources of information.

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Danilo Lieder holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Vienna and is currently an MA (CE) student in Game Studies at the University for Continuing Education Krems. His work in game studies focuses on game design, the philosophy of play and games, phenomenology, and aesthetics. He is also the founder and game designer of the independent game studio LudicOwl, currently being established.

Prompting the Belle Époque: Building a Playable Art History with Generative Assets

FROG 2026 – Talk

Répoque, a solo RPG Maker MZ project in early production, is a coming-of-age RPG set in a fictional Russian-Swedish-inspired spa town around 1900 – a walkable memory rather than a historical reconstruction. Its world is assembled from art-historical styles that operate as playable semantic registers: aged oil realism carries the remembered everyday; rococo gold varnish marks the spa quarter and its class boundaries; ink illustration renders folklore and documents; Art Nouveau belongs to the children’s imagination, where playground battles become pulp-novel sieges. The same scene, shifted through a register, keeps its diegetic content and changes its meaning.

Generative image models turn such registers into controllable production variables. My design work has shifted accordingly – less image-making, more “register curation”: selecting corpora, building prompt scaffolds, enforcing consistency rules, documenting interventions. This, I argue, amounts to a museum analogy in practice: what a museum does with its collection – selecting, framing, recontextualizing – an AI-assisted asset pipeline does with the art-historical corpus it draws on.

The talk presents this practice as a case study – one town, four registers, one pipeline: a restorative workflow that keeps every asset’s geometry from the original, restricts generation to material and style, and unifies the result under a deterministic “varnish” of darkened memory. A transposition method translates 1990s childhood functions into 1900 equivalents – deliberate, disclosed anachronism, set against the anachronism noise the models produce unasked. The project is part of ongoing master’s research on emerging technologies in computer game asset production.

Yet the practice sharpens a question rather than settling it: what does “period-appropriate” mean when the period comes out of a diffusion model? Learned styles arrive without attributable provenance – style as promptable commodity; and a statistical average of stylistic markers is not a work in a style – the kitsch risk peaks precisely where ornament is densest, in Art Nouveau. I propose treating the pipeline as a curatorial instrument rather than an automaton – and “synthetic heritage” as a shared problem that museums and game production may be better off negotiating together.

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Thomas Brandstetter studied philosophy in Vienna and has a PhD in cultural and media studies from the Bauhaus University Weimar. He worked at universities in Austria, Switzerland and Germany as a researcher in the fields of science and technology studies. Since 2022, he is a lecturer and researcher at the Department of Experimental Game Cultures at the University for Applied Arts Vienna. His main research interests are the design and cultural meaning of analogue games, especially roleplaying games and boardgames.

Artistic Games in the Tabletop Gaming Space

FROG 2026 – Talk

My presentation wants to show how analogue games, especially tabletop games, serve as mediums of artistic expression despite finding little regard in the art world.

Most of what is called game art today is done in the field of digital games. This is because media art and its network of institutions, exhibition spaces and grants is, at the moment, one of the few entry lanes for game-making into the world of art.

However, I want to show that experimental and highly innovative analogue game art and artistic games exist outside these institutions, remaining largely overlooked by galleries and museums. The huge renaissance of tabletop games during the last 15 year or so has not only led to an increase in audience and markets, but also to the emergence of a very lively scene of indie designers and publishers (similar to what happened in the sphere of video games).

First, I want to investigate how indie tabletop game designers understand themselves as artists. Who claims the label of art? What are their reasons for that? What does it tell us about their approach to game design?

Second, I want to present two case studies and show what practices and approaches are employed by those game designers. I will argue that the boardgames of Amabel Holland and the roleplaying games of Avery Alder do what is usually considered to be artistic: namely to reflect on, experiment with and break the conventions of their chosen media’s form, probe its limits and thereby create new ways of perceiving the world in- and outside of gaming.

I will address the question of why those designers chose the medium of tabletop games instead of digital games. This is not because they are luddites – the community and distribution networks of indie analogue games would be impossible without the internet, and most designers use digital tools for the creation of their games. However, analogue games allow for different experiences of sociality and tactile aesthetic experiences that offer a counterpoint to the digital environments that dominate professional life as well as leisure time for a huge swath of the population in industrialised countries.

Finally, I will make a plea for taking analogue and especially tabletop games serious as forms of artistic expression and for creating spaces for them in museums and galleries, as well as providing support structures such as grants for innovative game designers working in that area.

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Flavia Mazzanti and Manuel Bonell are media artists and co-founders of Immerea, a Vienna-based indie studio focusing on the development of VR games and interactive installations. Their interdisciplinary practice explores new modes of perception and interaction in virtual and hybrid spaces, with a strong focus on artistic quality and level of experimentation.

Their work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and festivals including Ars Electronica (Linz), DIG Shibuya (Tokyo), Kunsthaus Graz, DA Z – Digital Arts Festival Zurich. Alongside their studio practice, they are both active as university lecturers, speakers, and co-organizers of XR Austria, Austria’s largest community for immersive technologies.

Art, Games, and the Surreal in Times of Socio-Political Rupture

FROG 2026 – Talk

When real-world conditions become incomprehensible, can the surreal offer another way of confronting it?

The talk investigates how artistic practices across literature, visual art, film, and video games construct spaces of possibility in response to socio-political oppression, violence, war, personal and collective trauma. Focusing on surreal and fantastic modes of representation, it asks how departures from realism can offer alternative perspectives through which extreme realities can be perceived, questioned, and reorganized – not by escaping them, but by making their contradictions and disruptions visible.

Starting from the work and life of British-Mexican painter Leonora Carrington and Soviet novelist Mikhail Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita” (1967), the talk examines how imaginary worlds emerge in response to profound experiences of personal and socio-political rupture. Within these worlds, ordinary categories cease to be reliable: humans coexist with supernatural beings, bodies transform, time and space become unstable, and institutional authority itself becomes absurd. The impossible does not try to be a replacement for reality, but becomes rather an artistic means of reflecting conditions that have themselves become difficult to comprehend through conventional forms of representation.

The research expands this perspective across artistic media, from visual art and literature to films such as “Pan’s Labyrinth” (Guillermo del Toro, 2006) and video games including “Pathologic” (Ice-Pick Lodge, 2005) and “Ad Infinitum” (Hekate, 2023), and extending to social and psychological repression as in “Silent Hill f” (NeoBards Entertainment, 2025). Across these works, surreal environments, fragmented temporalities, and unstable perceptions provide parallel perspectives and artistic strategies on different forms: from visual and narrative representations to playable spaces in which surrealism can become embedded in environments, interactions, and rules. Games allow these destabilized realities not only to be observed or imagined, but to be navigated, acted within, and confronted through play.

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