Blog of Abstracts

Federico Alvarez Igarzábal studied Audiovisual Communications and Visual Arts in Córdoba, Argentina. He has worked as a researcher and teacher at different institutions, including the University of Cologne and the TH Köln (Germany), where he is currently employed. Since 2013 he is working on his PhD thesis on the topic of temporal structures in video games and time perception under the working title of “Time and Space in Video Games.”

University of Cologne / TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences

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Marshmallows and Bullets

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Sunday, 15^th October, 12:15 – 12:45

This talk examines the Resident Evil HD Remaster of 2015 with the psychological notions of delayed gratification, temporal discounting, and time perspective. These concepts describe how players interact with video games in general, but are especially adequate for the analysis of survival horror games. The player’s mental construction of time is connected to decision-making processes related to resource management. Survival horror is characterized by the management of scarce resources in unsettling environments. Psychological studies concerned with the aforementioned notions, i.e. Mischel’s famed “Marshmallow Test”, shed light on mental processes that affect interaction with this genre and Resident Evil in particular.

Gernot Hausar is a Historian based in Vienna, Austria. Interests & research include information exchange & transfer, digital humanities, hackers, net-policy, eLearning, OCR, games & data mining.

University of Vienna / University of Applied Sciences FH Campus

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Being mean in Space – The Player Ecosystem of EVE Online (Suggested track: players gaining power)

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Sunday, 15^th October, 14:15 – 14:45

EVE Online from icelandic CCP-Games has a lot of innovative approaches for including players in the game development process. Through this and their very permissive in-game rule system for play, a lot of player initiatives have developed as an addition to the official channels between players and developers. This results in a lot of innovative play styles and tactics and a thriving eco-system in-and out of game with a faithful player-base.In this talk I give an overview and evaluation of the different channels between developers and players and how this fits into “playing” the game.

Harald Koberg manages the department for digital games at Ludovico, an NGO in Styria/Austria focusing on gaming culture and game education. He conducts educational programs dealing with digital games in the social context, works as an expert for the BuPP and runs a study on differing perceptions of gaming and their social significance as part of his PhD-studies at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Karl-Franzens-University in Graz.

Ludovico; Institut für Volkskunde und Kulturanthropologie der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

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We are still weirdos. Challenging the notion of gaming culture at the “center of society”

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Friday, 13^th October, 15:00 – 15:30

Based on ongoing qualitative research, Harald Koberg argues that gaming as a cultural practice is far from the broad social acceptance it has repeatedly been diagnosed with by scientific and journalistic commentators. Referring to sociological theories of deviant behavior and stigmatization he demonstrates, how and why players might still feel the need to defend themselves against accusations and stereotypes – fostering the formation of strong gaming communities on the go. Attempting to uncover the underlying structures of social powers and protected norms, he draws attention to scarcely researched questions about the significance of gaming in the bigger social context.

PhD in Design, Ilaria is Research fellow at Design Department and Adjunct Professor at School of Design, Politecnico di Milano. She designs, investigates and lectures in games for social change as systems for communication and social innovation. Her research – theoretical and practical – mainly addresses (1) the meaningful negative experiences certain games create to activate reflection and change, and (2) interactive narratives, between ethics and aesthetics. The focus is on games and narratives able to meaningfully challenge players to explore civic, social, political, moral or ethical issues, encouraging an alteration of entrenched attitudes and sometimes even behaviours.

Politecnico di Milano

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Game Designers as Play(er) Experience Divers

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Saturday, 14^th October, 12:15 – 12:45

A part from measuring the artefact usability/playability and its ability to successfully entertain the player, who designs games for social change aims should attempt to verify their communicative effectiveness. Are messages conveyed? How players receive them? To what extent are they understood? Good questions… often neglected.Indeed, as central are players, as it is play(er) understanding.This contribution tells the backgrounds and outcomes of a player-centred framework for designers willing to understand players and its application, and sometime misapplication to about 100 games.

I studied game studies and philosophy on the graduate level in Austria, currently still affiliated to the University of Vienna. My research interests focus on play and game studies in general, play therapy, cognitive theory of play, joint action in games, eSports, aesthetics of digital games and digital kitsch.

Universität Wien

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The Gambler’s and Explorer’s Shared Mental State

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Saturday, 14^th October, 09:00 – 09:30

There is a sharp divide between game and gambling studies. The wager component justifies this separation, although the mediality and content of a gambling game do not preclude negotiable consequences. A player experience based ontology can incorporate betting games into the field of game studies. The gap disappears if shown that the experience of wagering overlaps with an established player type. Gaming players’ mental states resemble the experiences of exploring ones. This hypothesis will be instantiated by a comparison between exploration in Minecraft and 4X games with slot machines and roulette, respectively.

Jason Goldsmith is Associate Professor of English at Butler University, where he is developing a video game lab with funds from an Innovation Grant.

Butler University, Indianapolis, IN, USA

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H.Ed. Games; Or, When the Player Gets Schooled

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Friday, 13^th October, 15:45 – 16:15

What does it mean to play games in the context of higher education? How do a player’s motivations and behaviors change when she is also a university student? We play games but are we still players in the generally accepted sense of that word?This paper will explore the player as learner by drawing on student feedback from, and my experience offering, courses on videogames. I offer a preliminary response to these questions and invite the audience to reflect on the forms and sources of knowledge that inform their experience of gaming.

Jonas Linderoth is a professor in education, currently at the university of Gothenburg. He is most known for his work about game perception from an ecological perspective, where he argues that games have very specific conditions for learning. He teaches courses such as Educational Game Design, Games and Simulations as Learning Environments and Game based learning in educational environments.

University of Gothenburg

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Educational game design – breaking the fundamental rules of the craft

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Sunday, 15^th October, 09:00 – 09:30

Drawing upon experiences from teaching students to design educational games Jonas Linderoth explores the tension between good game design and good educational practices. Jonas points out that what is good for entertainment value, user experience, immersion and flow does not necessarily make out design patterns that are good when you design for education. A popular argument is that education should learn from the world of gaming. The key point of this talk is that game design also have a lot to learn from the field of education.

Juergen Hoebarth (http://juergenhoebarth.com) is the CEO of Haexagon Concepts, which is a digital strategy consulting and transmedia storytelling agency. He is also the digital director at Piccing, Inc., where he is engaged in leading product vision and digital marketing. He holds two master’s degrees from the Academy of Visual Arts of Hong Kong Baptist University and is an avid follower and believer of the cryptocurrency and blockchain movement.

Haexagon Concepts

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E-Sports on the blockchain. How cryptocurrencies and the blockchain influence the e-sport ecosystem.

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Sunday, 15^th October, 11:30 – 12:00

The way e-sports companies are launched and operate is transforming, causing the raise of blockchain technologies, such as smart contracts, and cryptocurrencies, such as Ethereum. As Ethereum gets more and more popular, numerous e-sports platforms are jumping on board to get funding via an ICO and to make use of the blockchain itself. The decentralized structure of a blockchain positively serves e-sports-related services, such as betting, wagering, prediction gaming or anonymously buying and selling digital items and goods. In particular, we will look into four main cases and how they utilize the power of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Katarzyna Marak, Ph. D., lectures at Department of English and Department of Cultural Studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland; the author of Japanese and American Horror: A Comparative Study of Film, Fiction, Graphic Novels and Video Games (McFarland 2015). Research interests: popular culture, horror fiction—including the appropriation of the horror genre to digital media—Internet studies and game studies.

Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Department of English

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Virtual trouble: An outline of the problems of immersion and the question of quality in VR games

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Saturday, 14^th October, 17:30 – 18:00

To some, the VR technology seems like not only a tremendous development, but—more importantly—the natural next step in game design. However, flat, non-interactive screens have been the default display device for digital games for a very long time and the newly emerging VR environment involves problems with immersion/incorporation. The first important issue concerns its emersive qualities. The other issue is the problem of the expected and perceived quality of the games and the resulting situation where non-VR games are still expected to uphold the highest achieveable standards while the VR titles are not.

• Work: “Play & Learn” at the Zentrum für Lerntechnologie & Innovation, University College of Teacher Education Vienna. Several Lectureships.
• Degrees: Education & Special Education, University of Vienna & Educational Technology, Danube University Krems.
• Several publications in the fields of Game Studies & Personality Development, PhD candidate (nearly finished 😉 )

Zentrum für Lerntechnologie & Innovation, University College of Teacher Education Vienna (start: Sept. 2017)

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Digital Game Psychoanalysis – A Methodical Approach

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Saturday, 14^th October, 17:00 – 17:30

The focus of this contribution is on a new methodical approach for the research on the relevance of digital role-playing games for the players’ personality development from a psychoanalytical point of view.Following to some extent Lorenzer’s (1986) and König’s (2001) Cultural Analysis and In-Depth Hermeneutics and Hamburger’s (2017) and Zwiebel’s (2006) Film Psychoanalysis, I apply these two approaches to the act of playing and implement methodical modifications owed to the characteristic of the object of research. In the course of this the following pattern emerged: 1.  Theoretical contexts were 2.  linked to symbols-providing material from a game and 3.  self reflective findings deriving from the act of playing.The theses-generating process of searching and understanding is spiraling along the above-mentioned three recurring stops: theory – game – self-reflection.The submitted contribution shows this methodical approach, gives illustrating examples and raises outstanding issues on the applicability of this approach to gain a broader insight in the impact of gaming.