Blog of Abstracts

Linda Rustemeier is an eLearning expert and research assistant at Goethe University department of cybersecurity in Frankfurt am Main. She is doing her doctorate and teaching on diversity-sensitive learning games/serious games, game labs and game didactics.

Choosing Together- Play as Collective Orientation: KAZANA and the Bulgarian Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale

FROG 2026 – Talk

The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, “In Minor Keys” by Koyo Kouoh, runs 9 May – 22 November 2026 across the Giardini, Arsenale, Forte Marghera, and venues throughout Venice.

The Bulgarian Pavilion, housed in a church complex at Zattere, presents “The Federation of Minor Practices” — an interactive environment built around the computer game KAZANA and four films. Developed in Unity by the Virtual and Augmented Reality Laboratory at Sofia Tech Labs, in collaboration with artists Veneta Androva, Gery Georgieva, Maria Nalbantova, and Rayna Teneva (development led by Zlatka Uzunova), KAZANA functions as an epistemological interface: presented on touch screens within a distillation complex, it lets visitors enter the four artists’ filmic narratives not as passive viewers but as active participants, with meaning emerging through choices, questions, and the system’s responses.

Within the theme PLAYING ART — From Artwork to Game System, the pavilion offers a concrete answer. It gathers signals from the four films and activates them through play as a practice of collective orientation, turning cinematic material into a navigable, rule-based world. Curatorial selection becomes level design: the films are distributed across paths and encounters the visitor must inhabit rather than simply watch.

Seen from an imagined future, the pavilion appears as an early laboratory of formation — a space where attention, care, and play assemble a post-sovereign political imagination. This is where the theme’s core questions become tangible: how can an archive of moving images become a game system? How does a digitized collection stop being a fixed record and become a resource to be parsed, remixed, and re-entered?

Structured as a navigation between values and possible directions, the game turns participation into a rhythm of discovery, hesitation, and decision. Each choice becomes a minor practice — one that shapes the collective without fixing it, making the game a space for the ongoing, shared construction of meaning.

Sources:
https://bulgarianpavilionvenice.art/en
https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2026/bulgaria
https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/kazana/id6761300269

Dr Felix Schniz is co-founder and director of the Game Studies and Engineering master’s programme at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. An interdisciplinary game studies scholar at heart, Felix has drawn on – and cooperated with colleagues in – philology and literary studies, theories of modernity and cultural studies, philosophy, pedagogy, and psychology. He currently operates from the Department of Information Technology at the University of Klagenfurt. After asking ‘What is a Videogame Experience?’ in his dissertation, his current research focuses on the meaning of experience, genre theory, and the importance of subjectivity in research on video games, analogue games, and virtual worlds.

Self/Exploration in the Ludic Atelier: Consistency and Immersion in the Experience of the Artist-Avatar

FROG 2026 – Talk

While we tend to understand the avatar in terms of an artwork – one imagines avatars as character portrays or a blank canvas, for instance (cf. Schallegger 2016, 44-45) – we rarely acknowledge them as artistic entities themselves. This is, in fact, a double oversight: the player-avatar compound, central to a video game’s immersive quality, is a node of creation and manipulation.

The artistic capabilities of players as artist-avatars are the focus of this presentation on the player-avatar compound. Based on Mirt Komel’s philosophical-aesthetic befinding of games as the 8th art (cf. Komel 2024), we explore the hypothesis that avatars as artists allow for a better grasp on aesthetic video game experiences. Defining the video game experience as one of self-realisation and potential (cf. Feige 2015, 173; cf. Schniz 2025), we explore the nuances of this relation in three case studies. Layers of Fear (2016) exemplifies the trop of the protagonist as artist. In THE AWKWARD STEVE DUOLOGY (2017), the solo developer embeds himself as his own in-game avatar. The meditative geometry game Engare (2017), finally, represents a video game in which the triangle of artist, protagonist, and player fades into a canvas-like game-state.

Subsequently, we extrapolate our insights gained from these case studies and apply them to the challenging artistic creation of virtual play spaces. Central to the player-avatar compound are the state of immersion and the coexistence with the world (cf. Jerald 2018, 45-52), rendering it not just a technical achievement but an aesthetic one. The rules of digital and real worlds differ, which raises the question of coherence in aesthetics: how is consistency defined in art, and where does visual fidelity help or break the player-avatar experience? By highlighting how NVIDIA DLSS 5 pushes towards ultra-realism while risking fracturing the designed immersive experience rather than deepening it, we explore how ‘closer to reality’ does not automatically translate to a ‘closer to authenticity.’

These showcases serve as basis for meaningful inquiry and discussion about the artist-as-protagonist relation to video games. A final discussion ought to question the role of subjectivity and the crackles of imperfect technologies in these aesthetic assumptions, and to draw a picture for further artistic inquiries.

Prof. Dr. Benjamin Beil teaches media studies and in digital cultures at the Department for Media Culture and Theatre at the University of Cologne. His research interests focus on game studies, inter- and transmediality, and digital media in museums. He is the principal investigator of the GRF-funded project “Videogames in the Museum” and has co-curated several exhibitions, including “Im Spielrausch” (Museum of Applied Arts Cologne, 2017/18) and “Games-Geschichte(n)” (University and City Library of Cologne, 2025; Toy Museum Nuremberg, 2026/27).

Isabelle Hamm, M.A., is a research associate in the GRF-funded project “Videogames in the Museum” at the Department for Media Culture and Theatre at the University of Cologne. Her research focuses on museology, digital art mediation, AI, media art, and the intersections of these fields with video games. She is currently pursuing a doctorate on virtual exhibitions. She also works as an art mediator at the 61st Venice Biennale. As a co-curator, she has been involved in several exhibitions, including “Captured in Code – Virtuelle Fotografie” (Depot Dortmund, 2026) and “Games-Geschichte(n)” (University and City Library of Cologne, 2025; Toy Museum Nuremberg, 2026/27).

Playful Cooperations: Video Games, Museums, and the End of the World

FROG 2026 – Talk

In the postapocalyptic world of the action-adventure game Horizon Forbidden West (2022), players encounter – rather surprisingly – a museum: a collection of paintings and sculptures by Old Masters, that Tilda van der Meer, one of the game’s antagonists, rescued from the collapse of the world. The artworks are not merely decorative props; as part of a tour through the virtual exhibition, players can engage in conversation with Tilda about Rembrandt’s Night Watch (1642), Vermeer’s Woman Reading a Letter in Blue (c. 1663), and other objects on display. Moreover, beyond the game world, paratextual materials reveal a collaboration between the Dutch game developer Guerrilla Games and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, whose collection provided the artworks exhibited in the game. In a promotional video, the game developers and the museum curators discuss the selection of the artworks and their significance to the game’s story. Additionally, visitors of the Rijksmuseum can experience the artworks in their ‘original form’ as part of the Forbidden West Tour.

The talk seeks to take a critical look at the collaboration between museums and game developers by comparing the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ Horizon museum tours. Is this collaboration more than a marketing campaign? What happens when the Old Masters clash with the relatively young art of video games? Is there an interplay between the virtual and the real-world artworks? Do players learn something about art (in a video game) or about video games (in a museum)?

Literature:
Beil, Benjamin (forthcoming 2026): Vom Spielplatz zum Metamuseum. Über das Spielen in Ausstel-lungen und das Ausstellen in Spielen. In: Bojahr, Philipp et al. (eds.): Spielräume: Museen und Games als Medien der Welterzeugung. Bielefeld: transcript.
Hamm, Isabelle (forthcoming 2026): Ausstellen im Computerspiel. Vom kuratorischen Eingriff bis zur künstlerischen Aneignung. In: Bojahr, Philipp et al. (eds.): Spielräume: Museen und Games als Medien der Welterzeugung. Bielefeld: transcript.

Laura C. Schmidt is a curator for games and digital art at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe where her practice focuses on the intersection of media art, gaming and digital culture. She holds a B.A. in Fine Arts from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, and an M.A. in Multimedia and Visual Arts from the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain. She also studied Interaction Design at the University of Applied Sciences Joanneum in Graz, Austria, and Public Interest Design at the University of Wuppertal, Germany.

Exhibiting games at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

FROG 2026 – Talk

The ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe is a public cultural institution which since its founding in 1989 stands worldwide for an open concept of art in the digital age.
Whether through exhibitions, symposia, publications, concert programs or digital formats, the ZKM promotes a program of interdisciplinary projects and international collaborations at the intersection of art, technology, society, science, and politics.

With the opening of the exhibition »The World of Games« in the of fall 1997, video games became an integral part of this work, making ZKM one of the first art institutions worldwide to offer video game culture a permanent public platform within an artistic context.

Since that time, the presentation of games and game-related projects has been repeatedly redesigned in a series of different exhibitions, leading to the current edition, »zkm_gameplay. the next level«. With around 80 exhibits from 1972 to the present day – most of them playable – visitors are invited to experience the cultural phenomenon up close.

But what does it actually mean to work with such an interactive and digital medium in an exhibition context? Drawing on concrete experiences from the institution’s practice, the talk offers insights into the day-to-day work with games and the challenges of exhibiting and collecting them. The focus here is less on providing universally applicable answers and more on offering an open look into processes, decisions, and everyday negotiations.

My current research investigates tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and their relationship with the nuclear age. Proposing new methodological approaches towards the nuclear age, my research adds fresh dimensions to knowledge of how the Cold War and the arms race affected the everyday lives and experiences of those who lived under the ever-present threat of nuclear war. I have also worked as a TTRPG designer. My games include the dystopian science fiction game a|state (Contested Ground Studios, 2004), the Cold War meets the occult Cold City (Contested Ground Studios, 2006), and the post-apocalyptic Hot War (Contested Ground Studios, 2008), and a|state 2nd edition (Handiwork Games, 2022). I have also contributed material to other games such as the 1970s Germany themed Red Front playset for Bully Pulpit Studios’ Fiasco!, Cubicle 7’s Cold War Cthulhu, and many others.

Histories of Wars That Never Were: Tabletop role-playing games and the Cold War nuclear threat

FROG 2024 – Talk

This talk will explore the history and impact of post-apocalyptic tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) of the 1970s and 1980s. Popular memory and scholarly study of the first two decades of TTRPGs are understandably dominated by Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). D&D always has been the most famous and widespread of all such games. There were many other games, though, that did not hew to high fantasy settings and instead offered much darker, more immediate worlds for gamers to explore. Amongst these were games that dealt with one of the period’s most pressing global issues: the threat of nuclear devastation. Such games dealt with the contemporary prospect of fiery annihilation in diverse ways. From the visceral post-World War Three landscape of Poland in Twilight: 2000, through the surrealist grotesquery of a mutated far-future in Gamma World, to the Marxist (Brothers, not the father of communism) absurdism of Paranoia, the nuclear age and its terrifying ultimate consequences were present in a diverse range of different game experiences. What was implicit or explicit in all of these were the acknowledgement of the fragility of the world around them, the threat posed by the Cold War nuclear standoff, and their implicit invitation to players to somehow deal with this through play. Through documentary analysis and accompanying oral history, this talk will assess how the history and impact of these games significantly add to our understanding of Cold War ‘nuclear culture’, positioning them as a means for imagining, reacting to, and potentially coping with all-too-possible futures.

David J. Cross is a doctoral researcher and lecturer at the University of Stuttgart. His research revolves around apocalyptic thought in contemporary literature, media, and culture. Beside his academic research he also composes sound and music installations for exhibition as well as composing the OST for the folk horror adventure game, The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow.

Walking Towards Extinction: Pyschogeography and Détournement in the Fallout Series

FROG 2024 – Talk

This paper explores the concepts of dérive and psychogeography to analyze and enhance the experience of open-world games, with a specific focus on the Fallout series known for its expansive post-apocalyptic world and narrative layering. Derived from the Situationist International’s theories, dérive involves drifting through urban spaces to uncover hidden psychogeographical patterns and influences, while psychogeography examines the interplay between environment and psychological experience. By activating the mechanic of walking and engaging in deliberate acts of détournement within game environments, players may be able to actively subvert and recontextualize the game’s spatial and narrative elements.

Through minor détournements – such as the reinterpretation of mundane objects or in-game snapshots – and deceptive détournements – where significant narrative elements or major game landmarks are placed in novel contexts – players can challenge and redefine the intended meaning and experience of the game. Deceptive détournements might go as far as manipulating major plot points or iconic game elements to generate alternative interpretations or critiques of the game’s inherent ideology.

This approach interrogates how open-world games like Fallout can be engaged with critically through the walking mechanic while highlighting the potential of détournement as a tool for players to actively reshape and interrogate the immersive worlds and stories presented in apocalyptic games. By reimagining the game’s space and narrative through psychogeographical exploration and détournement, new imaginaries can be created through a ludo-affective dissonance which potentially allows the player to reflect on their own socio-cultural experiences beyond the playing experience.