Eugen Pfister

Project Lead of the SNF Ambizione research project “Horror – Game – Politics”. Researches the History of Political Ideas in Video Games. Studied History and Political Sciences at the University of Vienna and at the Université de Paris IV- Sorbonne. Wrote his Ph.D. in History of the Political Communication at the University of Frankfurt am Main and at the University of Trento.

The Austrian games industry and the free market economy 1991-2006. A political history of ideas.

FROG 2020 – Keynote

The Austrian games industry was particularly successful with business simulations and construction games. In these games we got to know the beautiful new economic world of the post-cold war period in a playful way: Capital had to be increased, production expanded, profits maximised and competition eliminated. During their heyday, the Austrian developer scene were honoured with state and federal awards, and Austrian politicians presented themselves to the press together with “their” shooting stars. After various bankruptcies, takeovers and company dissolutions, the young model entrepreneurs disappeared just as quickly from the collective memory. It is remarkable that this peak phase of Austrian game production took place at the same time as a political transition phase of Austria, which has not yet been studied much. After the end of the Cold War, Austria joined the European Union. In addition to the paradigm shift in foreign policy, there were also far-reaching changes on the social and economic policy side. For example, the privatisation of Austria Tabakwerke, Telekom and Post took place between 1991 and 2006. In addition, Austrian federal governments have adopted several austerity packages since 1995. It can therefore be said that the development of the Austrian game industry took place in a time of political and social change. In this sense, it is necessary to examine whether the games that emerged can also be read as a sources of direct contemporary Austrian history.


Doris Rusch & Andrew Phelps

Dr. Doris C. Rusch is a game designer / researcher with a humanities background who holds a position as Senior Lecturer in Game Design at Uppsala University. Her games have won numerous awards and she has been an international keynote speaker and presenter including Clash of Realities, DiGRA, Game Developers Conference, Meaningful Play, Nordic Game Conference, FDG and TEDx. She authored Making Deep Games – Designing Games with Meaning and Purpose (Taylor & Francis 2017).

Andrew “Andy” Phelps is a designer and professor at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory NZ (HITLabNZ) within the College of Engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand where he explores virtual and augmented reality, games and education, and art and interactive media experiences. He is also a professor in the Film & Media Arts division of the School of Communication, holds a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science, and is the director of the AU Game Lab at American University in Washington DC, USA. Prior to these appointments he served as a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology where he was the founding director of the School of Interactive Games & Media, the RIT Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity, and MAGIC Spell Studios. Phelps is also currently president of the Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA), and his work in games is recognized internationally, has been presented at numerous academic conferences, published in multiple books and journals, and is supported by grants from multiple federal agencies as well as industry. His latest game is Fragile Equilibrium (XBOX, Steam, Itch.io 2019), and he maintains a website of his publications, popular
writing, artwork, curriculum development, and more at andyworld.io.

Games of the Soul

FROG 2020 – Keynote

This talk explores a design framework for creating existential, transformative games – games that directly engage the player in the contemplation of life – with the ostensible goals of reflection, awareness, empathy, and growth.  Through this work, we seek to re-contextualize games as experiential, expressive works of art that can move us profoundly and evoke lasting inner shifts. These existential media experiences engage their players directly in the consideration of the human condition writ large, our position in the universe, the role and meaning of our lives and relationships in ways that are complex and at once both deeply personal, and resonant across the human experience. In considering a design framework for creating games of this type, our work draws from the theory and practice of existential psychotherapy and its main themes and goals to inform the conception of game ideas and gameplay experiences. In examining the design of these games with the goal of theorizing a design framework, several elements emerge:

The first is that several of these games use myth to communicate existential ideas in a way that speaks to the unconscious and encourages self-reflection and environmental awareness.  In this manner these games can be said to ‘resonate’ with their players in ways that use a shared culture, vocabulary, and societal backdrop to convey ideas well beyond and below the surface of the initial role of myth as a social, cultural, narrative, or aesthetic tool in game design.  These games use myth as a shortcut to the contemplation of the spiritual, to questions of existence.

The second is that, often in combination with myth, these games are deeply rooted in ritual (both in their play and, in a certain sense, their creation).  The repeated patterns of game play speak to the way repeated patterns, symbols, and practices draw players into channels of thought and reflection in ways so deeply human.  These games use myth and ritual as existential navigation and personal calibration tools, and in this manner exhibit similar characteristics to the practice of psychotherapy.

Third, these games can be said to be a form of ‘experiential’ game in which the true narrative and purpose of the game is never overtly stated, and indeed is rarely an explicit narrative at all, but rather seeks to be felt rather than read.  These games focus on the experiential nature of the game itself as it is played, seeking to convey their messages and resonances through this very act, to be evocative, and to invite emotional reflection and response via metaphor.

Given these elements and understanding their criticality, how do we go about creating new myths, in creating new resonances?  What practices can help designers create more and better work in this area? This talk explores these questions in depth, presents early work on our theory of design for effective games of this type, and ponders the nudge that games can give us, when we listen, for meaningful, transformational change.


Sonja Gabriel

Sonja Gabriel has been a professor for media literacy at KPH Vienna/Krems since 2017. She teachers pre-service and in-service teachers for all kind of schools. Apart from using digital media for teaching and learning and media literacy her focus is on digital games and their potential for education. Moreover, she also researches and teaches on media ethics with a special focus on the potential of teaching values via digital games and the darker sides of games and gaming communities like hate-speech.

Hate Speech in Digital Games – Are Online Games a Place of Discrimination and Exclusion?

FROG 2020 – Keynote

The last years have shown various incidents of hostility, racism and hate-speech in many (online) games. Hate-speech always includes verbal attacks in writing or speaking or other kind of behavior that attacks a certain group of people. Discriminatory language, stereotypes and abuses are often used referring to a person (or a group of persons) because of their religion, ethnicity, gender, nationality and so on. Especially, multiplayer games which include a lot of communication as part of their game mechanics are a source of hate-speech. As these games are becoming more and more popular among players of all ages (also among very young gamers), you can find numerous examples of so called toxic environments, meaning game-communities or affinity spaces where certain groups of people are insulted, excluded or discriminated against. But not only in-game communication provides examples of verbal attacks but also in forums and community-spaces which are often provided for popular (online)games are a source of hate-speech. These affinity spaces are based upon communication and social interaction. Also platforms like YouTube or Twitch provide many examples of videos and streams containing hate-speech. Game companies and providers of gaming platforms always provide a code of conduct which is obligatory to obey by players. If these rules are violated, however, consequences for players are quite different – depending on the provider. Sometimes violations are not punished at all. Many platforms already have included mechanisms to report incidents of hate-speech. However, there are still many steps to go to make gaming more inclusive and less toxic.


Agata Waszkiewicz

Image from Agata Waszkiewicz

Agata Waszkiewicz is a PhD candidate researching independent video games. Their two main areas of interest include the formal experiments in metareferential games and the representation of non-normative identities in them. They published in several international journals including Game Studies, Journal of Game Criticism, and Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. They are currently working on the upcoming book Delicious Pixels: Food in Video Games to be published in 2022 as part of Video Games and the Humanities series by De Gruyter.

Playing with Identities in Metareferential Video Games

FROG 2020 – Keynote

Although metareferential games still remain a niche, there has been a significant raise in their popularity over the past decade. Often created by individual creators or small studios, these games employ a range of formal devices through which they point to their own materiality and fictionality, confronting players with their preconceptions of the genres and subverting their expectations towards the play experience. It can be argued that, like postmodern literature and film which often used the experiment for its own sake as means of pushing the boundaries of the medium, these titles aim at defamiliarizing the players in order to force them to engage with the text in a more critical manner. Although it would appear that the majority of these experiments are formal or aesthetic in nature, in this presentation I will scrutinize the cases in which developers utilized them to represent the marginalized, oppressed, and non-normative identities.