Jason Goldsmith

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


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

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Friday, 13th 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

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


Educational game design – breaking the fundamental rules of the craft

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Sunday, 15th 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.

Jürgen Hoebarth

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


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

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Sunday, 15th 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

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


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

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Saturday, 14th 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.

Katharina Mittlböck

  • 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)


Digital Game Psychoanalysis – A Methodical Approach

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Saturday, 14th 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.

Sebastian Felzmann

Sebastian Felzmann, M.A., studied German Literature at the KIT. Together with Adam Rafinski and Jens M. Stober he initiated the HfG GameLab. Sebastian has written a book and several scientific papers about media nostalgia and retro gaming and even held various lectures about that subject. As a book producer he supported Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding in the publication of “The Gameful World”, a 690-pages-thick handbook about Gamification.

Cologne Game Lab // TH Köln


Aptum, Agency & Aggressions – Player Reactions to „That Dragon Cancer“

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Saturday, 14th October, 16:30 – 17:00

„That’s a GAME?“ – „That is NO game!“ Core gamers are criticizing mainly the gameplay and the narrative mediation of „That Dragon Cancer“ – with harsh words and barely hold back aggression. My talk will have a closer look  into the narrative structure of „That Dragon Cancer“, the gameplay mechanics, its abuse of agency and its interconnection with the player experiences gained in prior games. For examining those I’ll use to concept of “scripts” as structured objects representing standardized generalized episodes as a tool to explain the profound unease that the players experienced.

Rudolf Inderst

Rudolf Inderst (*1978) is a third-year PhD student of media studies at the University of Passau and enjoys video games since 1986. He received a master’s degree in political science, American cultural studies as well as contemporay and recent history from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich and holds a PhD in American cultural studies. He is interested in game studies, political theory and the history of ideas.

Follow him on Twitter: @benflavor

University of Passau


Wolfenstein: The New Order as a player-centric continuation of dystopian narrative traditions

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

The developers and publishers of Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014) skillfully use marketing campaigning, in-game as well as cut scene storytelling, and game mechanics to set up a continuation of dystopian narrative traditions established in the 20th century. Media following these patterns focus upon the politics of anti-individualization and the transformation of the political human entity into a agenda-less spectator and heeler.

Rita Santoyo Venegas

Rita Santoyo Venegas studied Philosophy at the UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her main research interests are ethics, epistemology, philosophy of technology, and game studies. She is currently a PhD candidate at the UNAM and is working on a dissertation about computer games as cognitive artifacts and the foundations of an epistemology based on critical digital game play and analysis.

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México


The Intellectual Power of Players: Scientific Collaboration through Digital Play

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Sunday, 15th October, 17:30 – 18:00

In this paper, I examine the notion of collaboration in player communities, for certain games can promote the creation of epistemological communities that work together to create new knowledge. I focus on the fundamental role players have while they play certain computer games that have been specifically designed to address scientific problems, such as Foldit, Play to Cure: Genes in Space, EteRNA, and Eyewire. These games are an outstanding example of the combination of scientific research and digital play as an epistemological experience, as players contribute with innovative solutions to scientific questions, and researchers analyze their contributions to incorporate them in ongoing research.

Miłosz Markocki

A PhD candidate at the Department of Cultural Studies at Nicolaus Copernicus University Faculty of Languages. His main interests are: online games, MMORPGs, players online communities, Internet culture and various cultural mechanisms occurring in the online world of the Internet.

The Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń


Game within a game? – the problem of total conversion mods

Panel talk, FROG main conference | Sunday, 15th October, 16:45 – 17:15

The distinction between indie games and mainstream game mods is a seemingly easy one—one is fully developed and published game, and the other is, in most cases, a set of changes to an already created game. But what about total conversion mods (TC)? Despite the changes in some aspects or elements of the game—and the modders’ choices concerning which inscribed elements to leave and which to replace, some of the original elements and mechanics always remain. The goal of my presentation is to tackle the question of the novelty of TCs and provide arguments for an answer.