Blog of Abstracts

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.