Blog of Abstracts

Jori Linnamäki is a PhD student at Tampere University, making his doctoral dissertation in Games Research about in-game thinking of players, ethical processes in game design, and understanding the connection between psychodrama and live games. He is curious about the potential of games to help us grow as humans. In his other professional life, he is a teacher (M. Ed.), drama instructor (BTA), Playback Theatre trainer, Psychodrama Director (CP), game designer and a supervisor. In all his fields, Linnamäki works with interaction systems and is searching for creative ways and methods to improve interaction, combining all his different professional fields.

An approach to board game design that centres allyship and empowers trans people

FROG 2020 – Short Talk

Co-Authors:
Josephine Baird (Uppsala University)

The Uppsala University Games & Society Lab started a game project with the Neuroscience Department with the aim to support trans people. During the reflective design and testing process things changed, partly due to ethical processing and partly due to COVID-19. This included changes in the team composition as well the nature of the game from an identity exploration edu-larp to a board game about protecting trans people from microaggressions. The design process was challenging, which inspired us to write an article about the process and its ethics. The article also provided guidelines for other designers working with and for vulnerable target groups. In this presentation, we explore the game design as well as the design and research process it inspired. In the board game, the board represents the trans person facing microaggressions and the players play allies trying to defend the trans person. The game is targeted at allies or the support network of trans people, helping them develop their allyship skills. Our design process was guided by Shaw’s (2011) criteria for ethical representation. We also created a model for an ethical design process, inspired heavily by Frame and Williams’ (2005) model for ethical decision making from a multicultural perspective. The questions we explore in this presentation are, how do we make a board game that has allies as the active party but at the same time it won’t be disempowering for trans people? What skills do allies need to be good allies? And how this led to the model for ethical game design we used and now propose.

Harald is a games researcher, media pedagogue and cultural mediator based in Graz, Austria. He works for the Styrian Government as an expert in digital culture. At Ludovico – an NGO focusing on the culture and pedagogics of play – he is responsible for all activities concerning digital play and organizes the annual button Festival of Gaming Culture. He wrote his doctoral thesis on »Digital Play and the Longing for Agency« and holds a PHD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Graz.

Owning the Stats – Gaming and Neoliberal Subjectivity

FROG 2020 – Short Talk

Digital play, as I plan to argue, uncovers cracks in the theoretical surface of common descriptions of modern societies. Games undermine binary concepts of reality and fiction, presence and absence, heterotopia and utopia. I propose that through these cracks digital games offer opportunities to evade aspects of materiality, especially considering the body and the governmental forces that influence it. And a thorough look at player’s motivation to engage with the medium shows how these opportunities affect games and their communities. Based on an understanding of digital games as experiences that do not end with the game-worlds and the margins of the game’s code, I want to demonstrate how digital games can be used as mirrors, offering a new perspective on neoliberal societies and people’s struggles to deal with the requirements they feel to be expected to fulfill in order to be valuable parts of said societies. In social contexts with strong tendencies to understand individuals as a set of metrics, many digital games offer possibilities to take control of the numbers and to experience a form of agency often lacking in everyday life. Gaming spaces invite us to play with power structures. But whether they stabilize or undermine them remains to be evaluated.

Alesha Serada graduated in Cultural Studies with a specialization in Visual Culture from the European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania). Before that, they gained a Specialist’s Diploma in Oriental Philology (2006) at the Belarusian State University (Minsk, Belarus). Currently Alesha is a researcher and a PhD student at the University of Vaasa, Finland, where they study value and meaning in applications of blockchain technologies. Their research interests revolve around exploitation, deception, violence, horror, Machiavellian ethics and other banal and non-banal evils.

Win the Game by Not Paying: False Consciousness in Free-to-Play Games

FROG 2020 – Short Talk

In this paper, I evaluate the main argument in favor of the freemium monetization model as opposed to a one time purchase and the subscription model. This argument is usually presented as follows: “one can play a free-to-play game for free if they cannot afford to pay”. Firstly, I turn to the available statistics on free-to-play economies (Seufert, 2014) and find out that, indeed, free-to-play games possess a democratizing potential in making gaming experiences available to the widest audience (Clark, 2014). However, such games are still perceived by critics and gamers as morally ambiguous because of their potentially coercive techniques (Nieborg, 2016) and ‘dark patterns’ of game design (Zagal et al., 2013). I proceed with the observation, derived from game reviews on Google Play and the App Store, that players take their pride in achieving their goals in a game without paying. I suggest that a free-to-play game is a game between the player and the publisher of the game: the goal of the publisher is to make a player pay, and the goal of the player is to enjoy as much of the game for free as possible. One possible direction of critique is to apply the Marxist concept of ‘false consciousness’. The starting point is that ‘false consciousness’ is never completely false: ideological claims labeled as ‘false consciousness’ are often based on true facts (Eagleton, 1996). So, if the publishers promise free gameplay, they in fact make the game playable without investing real world money; however, the game is never completely free. The illusion of ‘free play’ results in a situation that Tiziana Terranova calls “a poverty of attention”: the qualitative degradation of attention in overstimulating digital environments (Terranova, 2012). Paradoxically, based on that, I state that only the players who have already paid really play the game for free: they can dedicate most of their time and attention to self-actualization in the game.

Pascal 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 fictional spell names in JRPG games. Currently he works at the Goethe-Institut München, developing a video game-based language diagnosis test for primary school children. He founded the blog and ludolinguistics resource page languageatplay.de to further advance the field of linguistics into the game studies. In 2020, he co-founded the anti-fascist network “Keinen Pixel den Faschisten!” Reach him on Twitter as @indieflock and @languageatplay.

Becoming their target: Anti-fascist gaming network “Keinen Pixel den Faschisten” and its right-wing backlash

FROG 2020 – Short Talk

When over 40 bloggers, podcasters, developers, streamers, developers and other content creators from the German-speaking video gaming space launched their anti-fascist network “Keinen Pixel den Faschisten!” in April 2020, hatred from German speaking right wing outlets was sure to follow. Indeed it did: A counter account on Twitter was formed by German GamerGate-followers to ascribe an anti-free speech stance to “Keinen Pixel”. English translations of antifascist texts were seeded onto international messaging boards of the GamerGate campaign to rile up resistance from the English speaking right. Even a conspiracy theory was fabricated in which the German government allegedly subsidised the network financially to further the censoring of free speech in gaming spaces. This talk from one of the co-founders of the network outlines the steps taken against “Keinen Pixel” and puts them in context of well-known right wing activist methodology. It will lead with a short introduction of what lingering influence of the GamerGate movement in German speaking internet communities remains, why a network such as “Keinen Pixel” was and needed to be founded and what said network does to counter fascist tendencies and influence in gaming spaces. The talk will reference common propaganda theory and relevant linguistic basics as well as fundamentalist strategies of arguing and debating.

Ricarda Goetz is a political scientist with a strong focus on popular culture and gender. She works for the City of Viennain the basic research section of the Women´s Department. As an independent researcher she publishes in different media, gives lectures and workshops in the realm of cultural studies.

Empathy and Inclusivity in Games. The Proteus effect

FROG 2020 – Short Talk

Games have become more varied and inclusive. The hero and protagonist is not only a 30 something white heterosexual CIS male. Protagonists in games, avatars, look and behave different nowadays. Women-avatars can be warriors, men-avatars can be vulnerable, and humanoid looking avatars can have same-sex relationships and follow new narratives. “The Sims” is one game that offered to create gender fluid game characters since 2016. Players can create virtual characters with or without any physical attributes. “The Sims”, released more than 20 years ago, was also one of the first video games to allow characters of the same sex to have a (sexual) relationship. This inclusive attitude toward the appearance of gender and sexuality, once a rarity in video games, is becoming more common as games take on more diverse and also weightier subject matters. There are different reasons for creating these sometimes called ‘serious games’ or ‘empathy games’. Many of the reasons are linked to what is known as the Proteus effect. The Proteus effect proposed by Yee and Bailenson (2007) suggests that the human embodiment in digital avatars may influence the self-perception of the player both online and offline, based on their gaming avatar’s aesthetics or behaviors. Different studies since then focused on how players can be influenced by their avatars. Jesse Fox who has been studying how online interactions with avatars and digital games influence people’s offline attitudes, did a series of studies and publications since 2009. She saw that participants responded better to avatars modeled closely on their real appearances, as opposed to generic-looking ‘perfect’ avatars. She also found out that women may be at risk for experiencing self-objectification and developing greater ‘rape myth acceptance’ when their avatars wore revealing clothing. The latter myth refers to the assumption that women´s clothing is responsible if she is assaulted. In another study, participants who were assigned a more attractive avatar in a virtual environment were found to exhibit more confidence and intimacy in the real world than those assigned to a less attractive avatar. Future studies need to clarify the extent of these effects as well as how different avatars can be used to elicit positive changes in attitudes, game play and self-image.

I am an independent scholar, activist and artist with over two decades experience combining all three in my ongoing study of sex, gender and sexualities. I am a published peer-reviewed academic writer and visual artist as well as a screen writer, producer and actor. I currently work as a game design consultant at Uppsala University and I hope to soon begin my PhD in trans exploration, expression and embodiment in videogame-based-learning. More information can be found on my website www.josephinebaird.com including a list of my recent articles, papers presented and other work.

The Mechanics and Misdirection of The Missing: Trans exploration, expression and embodiment in videogame-based-learning

FROG 2020 – Short Talk

Hidetaka Suehiro’s (Swery), The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories (The Missing) (2018) is a unique videogame in many respects, but especially for the way in which the mechanics are designed to explore a trans narrative that the player is unaware of until the end of the game. I will present The Missing in the context of a number of recent high-profile LGBTQ representations in videogames and I will discuss the ways in which the game uses misdirection at the outset; which understands the wider socio-cultural context of games, politics and tropes that the player may be assuming are being reproduced initially. This misdirect implies that the narrative of the game is about a lesbian relationship exclusively, with one partner seeking out the other in puzzle-platform gameplay employing the abstract imagery that Swery is so famous for. What the player is unaware of is that the game is rather a dreamlike experience of a trans woman near-death exploring her own identity, experience, and trauma. This is achieved through a number of game mechanics that at first obscure the intent of the game, but in hindsight serve as metaphors and analogies for the experience of the titular character as it is conveyed to the player. I will describe how the unique body-horror mechanic of virtual self-brutalisation of the character serves to encourage the player to explore, express and even embody the trans subjectivity that is being communicated. I will examine this in the context of Swery’s own descriptions of the game’s function and goals to show if, and how, his attempts to convey affect and empathy to the player have worked. I will also present this in the wider context of Swery’s other projects, specifically in relation to the games in which he also represents trans experience. Finally, I will position this presentation in the context of my own wider work, which is to examine the exploration, expression and embodiment of trans subjectivities in videogames that forms the basis of my PhD thesis, and my game consulting work at the Game Design department at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Rudolf Inderst (*1978) enjoys video games since 1985. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporary and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds two PhDs in game studies. Your are welcome to follow him on Twitter: @benflavor

„Here comes a new challenger” Will Video Game Essays be the New Champion of Game Critic?

FROG 2020 – Short Talk

In the recent past, various authors have examined the change of tone within games journalism. There seems to be not only a broader portfolio of topics which is covered by representatives of an elder, sometimes described as ‘classic’ games press (meant here: former and current print game magazines and their online outlets), but the medium itself is getting more and more attention beyond the circles of a tech-savy and service-oriented trade as well as specialized press: General press, especially editors of literary and arts sections started to treat digital games as objects / artefacts of cultural and public interest. Video and computer games have become newsworthy – not only because as an industry, video games keep generating billions and billions in revenue or the familiar and well-known ‘admonisher’ discourses about gaming violence as well as gaming addiction. Digital games are getting more editorial space because journalists increasingly understand them as complex, pop-cultural products that bring forth contrasts, tensions and paradox situations that can be read as meta-medial and political comments. My talk will argue that video game essays today are a part of media criticsm. Broadly translated the findings indicate that these essays are an heterogeneous expression and manifestation of artistic ambition, journalistic curiosity as well as academic receptiveness. The present findings suggest that video game essayists who provide clips with a higher production value use the mechanisms of crowd funding platforms as well as revenue income from display, overlag, and video ads in order to support their channel