David Marian Böhm is a Vienna-based game developer, filmmaker, and educator. He holds a Master’s in Creative Media Practice from the University of Sussex (Brighton) and a Bachelor’s in Audio Production from Middlesex University (London). His master’s thesis focused on navigating virtual environments using visual clues. Dave worked 5 years as Academic Coordinator and Lecturer at SAE Institute Vienna, teaching film, game design, and scientific practice. Since 2019, he has worked as a freelance lecturer, consultant, media/content creator, and programmer. His expertise spans video game immersion, human-computer interaction (HCI), narrative design, and game design. He is currently developing Once Upon, a narrative-driven indie exploration game inspired by Disco Elysium.
It Was Always a Game: Reading Archival Operations as Game Mechanics
FROG 2026 – Talk
Archives are usually treated as raw material that game designers translate into playable form. This talk makes the opposite claim: core archival operations already function as game mechanics. Arrangement and description work as systems of discovery. Appraisal and selection work as forms of unlocking. Redaction is a constraint on what becomes knowable, designed into the system from the start. Games did not invent this, they make it visible.
The talk draws on archival theory (Terry Cook’s account of appraisal and arrangement, Wolfgang Ernst’s reading of archives as technical, procedural systems), game studies’ formal vocabulary for mechanics (Miguel Sicart, Ian Bogost), and Espen Aarseth’s concept of ergodic labor to ask: What structural parallels exist between core archival operations and game mechanics? How do archivally-legible games demonstrate whether this parallel is procedural or analogical? And how do these games turn archival interpretation into a designed mechanic?
Three case studies ground the argument. Remedy’s Control renders its Federal Bureau of Control as a literalized bureaucratic archive of redacted case files and catalogued anomalies. Alan Wake 2’s case-board mechanic makes evidence-assembly and finding-aid logic directly interactive. Despelote incorporates real found footage and personal audiovisual material, working as a control case where archival procedure operates on unmediated rather than invented material.
The presentation closes by asking what it means for museums and heritage institutions to recognize the playable systems already latent in their collections, instead of building new ones from scratch.