God of War III

Is My Avatar MY Avatar? Character Autonomy and Automated Avatar Actions in Digital Games

Willumsen's paper addresses a persistent question in game studies: when a player-controlled avatar acts, is the action expressing the player's agency or the independent will of a fictional character?

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gamer: Reframing Subversive Play in Story-Based Games

Tanenbaum's analysis challenges a long-standing assumption in game design and interactive narrative research: that players are inherently subversive, seeking out exploits that undermine what designers intended.

• Tanenbaum argues that the assumption that players are inherently subversive is self-reinforcing and creates an artificial conflict between designers and players, which fuels two problematic design approaches, 'Lockdown' and 'Sandbox'.
• The author proposes treating players as collaborators whose behavior shifts across performative stances rather than fitting into fixed player types.
• Players routinely hold multiple, even contradictory, goals and narrative frames at once, drawing on Mackey's 'subjunctive mode' and parallel 'tracks' of engagement.