Category: FROG Talk 2022

Katrina Keefer is a scholar of African identity and slavery with particular interest in how individuals situate themselves within broader communities and groups. Her major research projects are in the digital humanities, and she has developed a method of discerning the origins of enslaved individuals by ‘reading’ the body and facial marks they were given in the continent. Keefer presently leads an international team which is reconstructing a visual catalogue of known slave brands to understand the complex economic relationships which drove the slave trade. Keefer is also a game developer– she is fascinated by how Africa and its past are represented within virtual worlds, and works to develop games which challenge stereotypes.

Freedom and Slavery: Navigating Player Experiences in the 18th century Sierra Leone Estuary

FROG 2022 – Talk

Bunce Island: Through the Mirror is set during the 18th century in the Sierra Leone estuary at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade within the region. Developed to bring players into a carefully reconstructed historical past, we have been developing the project to meet multiple audience needs through a process of collaborative co-authorship. Through this process, two major drives have become apparent based on audience: the desire to learn more about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the desire to foreground precolonial African nations and systems. For stakeholders within Africa, the conflation of the African continent and the trans-Atlantic slave trade can be grating and a reduction of complex heritages into one major trauma, while for the descendants of that trade, the desire to reconnect with the courage of their ancestors who survived the trade is central. This binary has shaped our process of development and decision making as we build branching narratives and broad story arcs. This paper will explore that process and the ramifications around it, offering a case study into development and scholarly inquiry around freedom within a game’s narrative. With a game which so explicitly revolves around a period of intense slave trading, managing these two major audience pressures is complex. This paper will discuss strategies to allow players a sense of perceived autonomy and decision-making within the game space, facilitating both exploration and narrative. We will also explore the approaches we are bringing to prohibit bad faith users from enacting violence against enslaved characters while balancing player immersion and historical accuracy. The topic of this game is one which evokes strong emotions and engages with a complex past of oppression and resilience – how we engage with the freedom of our players is the foundation of a dignified representation of a painful history.

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Samuel Poirier-Poulin is a PhD candidate in film studies at the Université de Montréal, Canada. His doctoral research investigates trauma in horror video games and draws on affect theory and phenomenology of media. His other research interests include sexuality studies, queer desires, and autoethnography. His work has appeared in the journals Loading… and Synoptique, and in the anthology Video Games and Comedy. Samuel is also the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Press Start.

Trust, Confidence, and Hope in A Summer’s End—Hong Kong 1986

FROG 2022 – Talk

Building on Eve Sedgwick’s (1997) reparative reading, this paper offers an analysis of the theme of trust and its variations (reluctance, confidence, intimacy) in the visual novel A Summer’s End—Hong Kong 1986 (ASE hereafter; Oracle & Bone, 2020). More specifically, this paper examines how trust takes place (1) between the game characters, (2) between the player and the characters, and (3) between the queer player and the video game medium. ASE tells the unlikely love story between Michelle Fong Ha Cheung, a disciplined office lady who lives with her mother, and Sam Ka Yan Wong, an independent and free-spirited woman who owns a video store. The story is set in Hong Kong, in the summer of 1986, two years after the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed. ASE offers a reflection on the difficulties of being a queer woman in uncertain times. It explores themes of desires, freedom, and hope in a time and space “where Asian traditional values and Western idealism clash and converge” (Oracle & Bone, 2019, para. 2).

My analysis starts from the premise that video games, like literature or cinema, provide an ideal opportunity to study trust—its formation and its fragility—and to broaden our knowledge on the subject (Leboyer & Vincent, 2019). As noted by philosopher Michaela Marzano (2010), trust is closely tied to human existence. It creates strong relationships where dependence and vulnerability meet; it changes our relationship to the world and to ourselves, and makes us realize that we are never completely independent (Marzano, 2010). Trust is in opposition with fear, and more precisely with the fear of the future, “reintroducing into the world the possibility of hope, [and] pushing everyone to bet again on oneself, on others and, more generally, on the future” (Marzano, 2010, p. 61, my translation). ASE ultimately provides an interesting case for studying trust from a humanities perspective, a theme underexplored in game studies and in English-language scholarship in general.

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Fiona Schönberg is a novelist, script writer and narrative designer from Germany. She graduated from Mainz University and holds a Master of Arts in Mediendramaturgie (Media Studies), as well as a Bachelor’s in Film Studies and English Literature and Culture.

All Work and No Play – The Narrative Potential of Formal Gameplay Elements and Economic Alienation in Neo Cab

FROG 2022 – Talk

When we consider representation in video games, we are most commonly concerned with what might be considered primarily narrative elements: the visual depiction and design, the dialogue, the various sources of diegetic information, as well as the tropes and relations that inform framing within a scene or the narrative at large.

This presentation on the other hand, aims to interrogate what Clara Fernández-Vara dubbed the ‘formal elements’ of a video game – its mechanics and gameplay loops – for their potential to represent subaltern experience; not by painting a picture, but by creating an experience.
To that end, the presentation will examine how Chance Agency’s 2019 game Neo Cab uses each of its gameplay mechanics in tandem to engender the experience of economic alienation and marginalization experienced by the game’s protagonist, and will argue for the potential that this method holds.

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Kübra Aksay is a lecturer, researcher, and Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at the University of Freiburg. She holds a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and a master’s degree in British and North American Cultural Studies. Her current research and dissertation project focuses on games as performance. Her research interests, other than game studies, are digital media, narratology, virtual spaces, heritage studies, and Star Trek.

“Work, Play, Escape: Freedom and Submission in Video Games about Office Jobs”

FROG 2022 – Talk

Video games, due to the diverse virtual spaces they can present in detail and their ability to allow their audiences to perform various roles in those spaces, are often associated with escapism. While other narrative media can also offer absorption into a fictional world, games are not only escapist because they are works of fiction, but also because of the “common perception of play and games as opposite of seriousness and work” (Calleja 2010). However, if virtual environments are designed to be a form of escape from everyday life, boredom, or environments that the players are grounded in, it is difficult to consider the non-navigable, lonely, constrained office spaces and stories about labor and submission featured in a number of recent video games such as Her Story (2015), Papers, Please (2013), and Orwell (2016), as popular images of a world many players dream about escaping to.

This study aims to analyze how representations of constrained environments and stories about labor can be attractive and engaging for the audiences of digital games. The study focuses on setting and narrative themes in digital games about office work. The concepts of familiarity with certain spaces through “transmedial storytelling” (Jenkins 2011) and the presence of the audience in the actual and virtual space at the same time are discussed, in order to show how the themes of work and responsibility, and restricted workspaces can create an engaging interactive storytelling experience, in a medium that is known for providing freedom and entertainment. The aspect of freedom, or rather the lack of it in the mentioned video games, is also examined in relation to the current discourses of metaverse and immersion.

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My name is Gunnar Gräsbeck and I am currently doing my Ph.D in the German Sport University Cologne. My main interests of research are nonlinear pedagogy and how it can be applied to different fields, particularly in Olympic fencing which is my passion. Outside my research and sport practice I am an avid gamer. I am heavily inspired by game series like Final Fantasy and other games with deep story-telling and strong character development. I believe games like these can be linked to education in order to inspire new learning habits for future generations.

Co-Authors:
Swen Körner, Ph.D supervisor
Mario Staller, collaborator and partial supervising in Ph.D projects

Nonlinear Pedagogy in Olympic Fencing – do video games offer a new dimension for its elaboration?

FROG 2022 – Talk

Fencing is an Olympic sport that has so far been dominated by linear teaching methods. Nonlinear Pedagogy (NLP) offers a new field of research due to fencing not having any nonlinear elements defined, despite being characterized a sport of high dynamical complexity. The Constraints-Led Approach (CLA) proposed by Davids et al. (2008) is a manner to apply NLP in practice to manipulate learners as dynamical systems. Learning is an individual process, characterized by extrinsic and intrinsic dynamical changes of learners leading to change in behavior that aims for a new learning outcome. Due to learning being a complex individual process, the CLA has been proven efficient in steering this in the right direction. By defining constraints in the learning environment, their manipulation functions as this steering activity to guide the learning process by either limiting or loosening the constraints of learning, depending on the outcome desired by the learner. Being applicable to any field where learning is affected by constraints, defining right constraints for a CLA approach is crucial. This paper aims to elaborate on constraints present in fencing, however proposing the dimension of video games as a new field of their recognition. Many sports are adapting to the field of e-sports and VR/AR technology to take performance into new levels, advocating fencing to do the same.

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Wolfgang Hochleitner (AT) is a lecturer and researcher in the Digital Media department at the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. Within the research group Playful Interactive Environments, his research interests lie in large-display floor-based games and social and persuasive impact games.

Co-Authors:

Jeremiah Diephuis, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria
Anke Schneider, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH
Julia Himmelsbach, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH
David Sellitsch, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH

Designing Game-based Moral Courage: A Postmortem

FROG 2022 – Talk

Games are continually being utilized for purposes other than pure entertainment, from various uses in education to approaches that help foster behavioral change. The ability to structure an interactive experience that is motivating, repeatable, allows for variable outcomes and provides some measures for performance also makes games an excellent tool for research activities. However, the actual employment of games for more “serious” purposes presents specific challenges that need to be addressed. Games heavily rely on mechanics that both define and incentivize player interaction. For so-called “impact games,” this can potentially overshadow the intended content or purpose. In addition, each player needs to learn the rules of the game world and the controls for the game. Unfamiliarity with common game modalities and specific controller setups can severely complicate the learning process. For such impact games that target a larger audience, significant efforts are required to simplify these processes while still permitting a sense of agency and discovery.

The transdisciplinary research project CATRINA endeavors to explore how game-based approaches can be used to inform young adults about situations that require moral courage and encourage their willingness for increased involvement. In the project, three distinct game approaches were developed and evaluated: a mobile-device-supported urban game, a hybrid multiplayer card game and an immersive virtual reality game. Although each of these game prototypes utilized different technologies and game modalities, all were developed with the same guiding principles: the inclusion of specific social identity features, the avoidance of unnecessary stereotypes, and an emphasis on simplified interaction without the need for traditional game controls such as a keyboard or controllers. The development and subsequent evaluation of these games resulted in a few valuable lessons that are of interest to other game-based research projects, particularly within the context of the global pandemic. This postmortem will address issues such as the usage and avoidance of stereotypes, universality vs. salience and the importance of in-game analytics.

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Dr Felix Schniz is the co-founder and programme director of the master’s programme Game Studies and Engineering at Klagenfurt University. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English and American studies from the University of Mannheim, where he subsequently joined the master’s programme Cultural Transformations of the Modern Age: Literature and Media. After asking ‘What is a Videogame Experience?’ In his dissertation, his contemporary research focuses on the meaning of experience, peripatetic meaning-making, the genre theory of virtual worlds, and the subjective quality of the medium videogame.

Co-Author:
Christoph Kaindel – Wiener Bildungsserver (Vienna Education Server)

A Walk in the Park? Designing a Very British Gaming Experience

FROG 2022 – Talk

AI-generated content is the most recent trend in procedural, computer-powered art. Set the parameters and let the voice of the machines answer any muses calling – but is it really that easy? This talk challenges the limits of (self) generated content by focusing on a particularly British creation: The landscape garden in the tradition of Lancelot “Capability” Brown and other 18th-century landscape architects.
In order to triangulate the love/hate relationship between humans, computers, and interactive art, we approach the topic from two counterpointed philosophies. On the one hand, we provide the perspective of the landscaper, architect, and designer. It intends to take the audience from the concrete rules of gardening and landscape to the adaptation of these virtual environments and into the hypothetical field of procedurally generating such landscapes in video games for playful exploration. On the other hand, we enter these playgrounds from the perspective of these very explorers: the real and virtual flaneurs. We provide an overview of British walking traditions, the concept of flaneurism, and how far it may help us understand the appeal of video game genres such as the walking simulator.
Our thesis, which serves as a leitmotif through this back and forth, is that landscapers and flaneurs are equally artists, striving to achieve beauty in their deeds. At the same time, however, they are equally entangled in freedoms and oppressions due to their relationship. Our talk juxtaposes the freedoms and strict rules of landscape creators to the free will – or the lack thereof – of the promenading explorer setting out to make specific experiences. Through these interplayed observations, we ultimately challenge the concept of artistic creation of the human being in the digital age and ask, in conclusion, and together with the audience:
How can we quantify the logical rulebook of virtual landscape gardens – and if yes, would we even desire to do so?

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Rebekah Tumasus and Alon Kfir are graduates of the M.Des degree in Digital Game Design and Development at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art In Ramat-Gan, Israel.

They are both also graduates of the Open University of Israel’s Video Game Design certificate program. Rebekah has a B.Sc in Biology from Tel-Aviv University and is currently employed at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Alon has a B.A. in Economic and East Asian Studies from Tel-Aviv University and currently works as a game designer in the mobile gaming industry.

Further Discussion on Companion NPC Design: Narrative Hierarchies, Ludic Affordances, their Evolutions and the In-Game Impact

FROG 2022 – Talk

Past works have been published about non-player characters in digital games, as well as specifically about companion characters that accompany the player throughout the majority of the game. Design characteristics that promote companion believability have been proposed and iterated upon. This work proposes two new design aspects that describe the dynamics between the companion and player characters and, thereby, with the players themselves. First is the Narrative Hierarchy describing the power balance and strength of the bond between the player character and the companion from a narrative perspective. Second are Ludic Affordances representing the level of control the player has over the companion. These two design aspects can change or remain static throughout the game. The level of intersection of these aspects, as defined by this work, is the Ludo-Narrative Co-Evolution. Upon examining the proposed aspects and their potential development throughout seven selected case studies of existing games, two additional design aspects relating to the Ludo-Narrative Co-Evolution have emerged. These aspects are Correlation and Synchronicity. Correlation determines whether or not the Narrative Hierarchy and the players’ Ludic Affordances over the CNPC evolve in a similar direction. Synchronicity examines the game moments when either the Narrative Hierarchy or Ludic Affordances change (or both together) and whether those moments of transformation are shared by the narrative and gameplay or not. Finally, a new case study was designed with two scenarios, positive and negative evolutions, where the Narrative Hierarchy and Ludic Affordances evolve in tandem. It presents a Ludo-Narrative Co-Evolution which is both positively Correlated and Synchronous.

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Lulamile Mohapi is a Games Developer/ Entrepreneur/ Educator, and an Accidental Techno-activist. In 2019, his docu-tribute 2D game on Winnie Mandela was presented at The NEoN RE@CT Digital Arts Festival in Scotland, where he, and various academics from across the globe demonstrated how video games and immersive techno-Art cultures (VR/ AR/XR, etc) play a role in critical thinking and social change. Between 2018-2019 he taught Game Design at Wits University.

He is the Founding CEO of Fishknife Gamelab, a Game Studio based in Johannesburg. Lulamile consults on Intellectual Property; Digital Entrepreneurship; and Cultural and Economic Policy for video games.

Video Games and the New Apartheid: Algorithmic Toyi-toyi; Press “T” to Toyi-toyi; Theorizing vernacular game design frameworks from the virtual margins

FROG 2022 – Talk

This article applies Sizwe Mpofu Walsh’s theory on “The New Apartheid”; combines Lindsay Grace’s Critical Game Design concepts with Miguel Sicart’s literature on Political Games, to discourse on the digital embodiment of the marginalized people in video game design; and to propose or formalize what I shall term “algorithmic toyi-toyi” and “Press ‘T’ to Toyi toyi” as resistance-based game mechanic(s) design framework from the oppressed. Toyi-toyi is a procedural interchange of song; dance; and resistance slogans performed in South Africa’s political protests. Such performances convey participatory and liberatory forms of expression which I argue, should not only find algorithmic interpretation as techne (through game mechanics/ systems design or in Ian Bogost’s Procedural rhetoric) but also in using games as a catalyst in the struggle against the New Apartheid (The perpetual privatization of apartheid in social engineering) ; and in using games for promoting dialogue and freedom.

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Dr. Mario Donick has studied German language & literature and history at the University of Rostock. He has a PhD in Communication Studies. He works as independent author and researcher. Books and articles on human computer interaction & society, as well as computer games.

Playing differently. How to escape the limitations of Designed Games

FROG 2022 – Talk

Many commercial games allow for just one or just a few possible ways of playing. They present problems to solve, and the methods for solving these problems are constricted by the affordances of game design (which in itself has to adhere to other contraints, such as economic ones). Gaming media reinforce the intended ways of playing (by presenting ways to “beat” a game or by teaching how to play in the most efficient way).

This talk invites to reject this traditional way of playing. The talk will follow 3 main differences:

1) the player as subject (in contrast to seeing the player as system in a socio-technical relation to the game environment) (This difference arises from my own PhD thesis (2016) which had partly the perspective of social systems theory on human computer interaction)

2) being creative (instead of being just “busy”). (This difference goes back to Erich Fromm’s thoughts about “Geschäftigkeit” vs. “Tätig-sein”)

3) experiencing a full gaming “situation” (instead of just a “constellation” of parts) (This difference is influenced by neo-phenomenological concepts / Hermann Schmitz)

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