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Anthropocene Temporalities in Climate Change Video Games
This extended abstract, presented at DiGRA 2020, proposes a temporal framework for analyzing climate change video games, arguing that the notion of "Anthropocene temporality" offers a productive way to understand how these games address the abstract and pervasive nature of climate change.
- The paper is a theoretical and conceptual proposal, not an empirical study, and reports no survey data, sample sizes, or quantitative findings.
- It uses the notion of 'Anthropocene temporality' as a chronotope, drawing on environmental humanities scholarship by Barbara Adam, Michelle Bastian, and Mary Louise Pratt, to analyze how climate change video games handle the abstract and pervasive nature of climate change.
- Its central argument is that climate change games produce a 'thickening of time', with examples ranging from SimEarth (1990) and Fate of the World, Anno 2070, and Civilization VI: Gathering Storm to independent works such as The Stillness of the Wind.
Disciplined Play: Finding Foucauldian Architecture in Virtual Worlds
This paper, by Lawrence May of the University of Auckland, examines how virtual architecture in videogames both reinforces and destabilizes ideological positions, drawing on Michel Foucault's writings on space, power, and governmentality.
- The paper argues that videogame spaces discipline players both inside and outside the game, with environments, rules, interactivity, and narrative working together as a discursive circuit rather than as separate elements.
- Through textual analysis of Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018), the author reads its late-nineteenth-century American frontier settings through Foucault's panopticon, arguing that invisible surveillance by programming and AI systems creates permanent visibility that regulates player conduct.
- The analysis suggests the game's spaces reinforce its thematic critique of a collapsing cowboy masculinity, linking architecture directly to the title's ideological content.
Cowboys, Outlaws, Ghouls and Spacefarers: The American Frontier within and without the United States
This paper examines how the American Frontier, understood as an ideologically charged trope, shapes the construction of national and non-national identities in video games.
- The paper's central thesis is that games set in the historical American Far West, post-apocalyptic Earth, and outer space share a common logic of space, power, expansion, and personal worth inherited from frontier mythology.
- The author argues this frontier logic is repurposed across time periods and settings, so wastelands, alien worlds, and historical landscapes reproduce similar discourses of conquest and moral agency.
- The study traces how Western tropes such as civilization versus savagery and the valorization of individual agency migrate into video game mechanics and storytelling.
Playing Disney: Experience and Expression in the Land of Curation
T.L. Taylor's paper examines how regular, everyday visitors to Disney theme parks transform heavily curated commercial spaces into sites of playful agency, self-direction, and social experience.
- Regular Disney park visitors develop their own forms of play that operate alongside and sometimes against the commodified structure of the parks, raising the question of whether this constitutes meaningful agency or play captured within a media company's economic framework.
- The study is based on qualitative fieldwork at multiple Disney parks worldwide, supplemented by analysis of online forums, archives, and interviews with attendees, rather than quantitative measurement of visitor behavior.
- Once novelty fades for repeat visitors, play modes include commercially dependent activities such as pin trading and the Sorcerers of the Magic Kingdom card game, alongside no-cost activities like locating hidden Mickey designs.
A Discipline is Always Born Twice: Is There Room for Interdisciplinary Humanities Methods in Game Studies Scholarship Today?
This paper, presented at DiGRA 2020 by Caroline Bem of the Université Saint-Paul, argues that game studies has grown distant from humanities disciplines such as literature, film, and art history, and that this distance limits the field's theoretical and methodological range.
- The paper argues that game studies has grown distant from humanities disciplines such as literature, film, and art history, and that this distance narrows the field's theoretical and methodological range.
- The author proposes a "humanistic sensibility" with three components: contextualizing objects within cross-disciplinary and cross-medial lineages, treating aesthetics and form as the primary carriers of a work's philosophical and affective positions, and acknowledging an interpretive element (drawing on Derrida's "supplement") that resists quantification.
- The paper positions this approach as a response to game studies' perceived overreliance on empirical methods, its handling of historicization, and the consolidation of a canon of games and scholarship.
Lichenia and Climate Crisis: Feeling Dark Rhythms in the Longue Durée
This paper offers a critical reading of Lichenia, a browser-based environmental strategy game by Molleindustria (2019), as a model of climate history grounded in dark ecology and object-oriented ontology.
- Lichenia (Molleindustria, 2019) is analysed as a browser-based environmental strategy game that rejects the linear, growth-oriented, and nationalist narratives of Age of Empires, SimCity, and Civilization in favour of looping rhythms of flood, drought, growth, and decay.
- The paper's theoretical framework draws on the Annales School's longue durée (Fernand Braudel's view of climate as a slow but omnipresent historical force), Henri Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis, and Timothy Morton's hyperobjects and ecognosis.
- Lichenia's procedural rhetoric restricts player power and foregrounds the unpredictable, opaque interactions among rain, fire, vegetation, and urban development, presenting infrastructure as perpetually vulnerable and ecosystems as capable of renewal.
Farting on the Front Lines: Playing with Flatulence during World War II
This paper by Jaakko Suominen and Elina Vaahensalo examines farting games played by Finnish soldiers during World War II, drawing on the "Dugout Tradition" archive, a collection of over 12,000 pages of veteran oral histories gathered in 1973 by the Finnish Literature Society.
- The study draws on the 'Dugout Tradition' archive, over 12,000 pages of Finnish WWII veteran oral histories collected in 1973 by the Finnish Literature Society, to argue that farting games were a neglected form of self-organized bodily and social play on the front lines.
- The archival evidence falls into three categories: Thursday pea soup meals that sparked loud farting contests, 'fart flames' in which a notable participant could ignite expelled gas, and timed or rhythmic competitions such as imitating machine gunfire, where the longest 'gunfire' won.
- Veterans treated fart humor as a coping mechanism for wartime hardship, alongside extreme pastimes such as heavy drinking and cold-weather races, and silent farts were disapproved of while top performers were remembered long after the war.
Bride, Demon or Alien? Undressing Stigma in Catherine: Full Body
This work-in-progress paper examines how digital games can foster affective engagement with characters in order to explore social stigma, focusing on the stigmatized theme of infidelity in romantic relationships.
- The paper argues that players' emotional responses to fictional characters are part of wider social practices, and that games can prompt reflection on stigma by letting players act on stereotypical notions of character traits.
- It uses a textual analysis of the 2019 Japanese game Catherine: Full Body, applying a reader-response framework adapted to games' ergodic structure, focusing on the stigmatized theme of infidelity in romantic relationships.
- The game's three female-presenting characters (Catherine, Katherine, and Rin) are examined through its "system of affection," which makes player choices visible as consequences of their engagement.
Predicting the Effect of Violent Gameplaying to Violent Behavior Intention among Females: Indonesia
This study evaluates the predictive relationship between exposure to violent video games and the intention to exhibit aggressive behavior among female players.
- Machine learning models, specifically Decision Tree Regression (DTR) and Adaptive Boosting Tree Regression (AB-DTR), can predict aggressive behavioral intentions in female players with high accuracy.
- The DTR model demonstrated perfect predictive accuracy for hostile intent with an RMSE of 0.0 for both training and testing phases.
- For instrumental intent, the DTR model achieved an RMSE of 0.0 during training and 2.18 during testing, outperforming the AB-DTR model’s testing RMSE of 3.30.
Space as a Structure Defined by User’s Presence: From Heritage to Layers of Liquid Modernity
Technological advancements continuously reshape human environments, creating a fluid intersection between physical reality and virtual experience.
- Gaming environments are transient cultural artifacts that risk permanent loss as the hardware and software sustaining them become obsolete.
- There is an urgent need for systematic, proactive documentation of virtual and physical gaming spaces to preserve the history of digital interaction.
- Spatial automorphism describes how users project their identities onto reactive virtual landscapes, effectively blurring the boundaries between the individual and their digital surroundings.
The Matter at Hand: A Practice-Theoretical Model of Digital Gaming
Digital gaming functions as a situated human practice, defined by the intersection of embodied habitus and the material constraints of hardware and software.
- Gameplay proficiency is structured across three distinct layers: material familiarity with hardware, genre-specific expertise, and title-specific competencies.
- Genre familiarity is a more reliable predictor of player performance than hardware proficiency, indicating that game structure demands outweigh input device influence.
- Digital gaming is defined as a situated practice where performance relies on the intersection of embodied habitus and the material constraints of software and hardware.
Autonomy Motivators, Serious Games, and Intention Toward ISP Compliance
The Decisions and Disruptions tabletop game serves as an effective pedagogical tool for enhancing employee compliance with information security policies by fostering intrinsic motivation through autonomy.
- The 'Decisions and Disruptions' tabletop game significantly increases employee compliance with information security policies by fostering intrinsic motivation through autonomy.
- A study of 30 highly educated, technical professionals demonstrated that scenario-based, collaborative gaming leads to measurable improvements in security awareness and behavioral intent.
- Interactive, consensus-driven learning environments successfully bridge the gap between theoretical security knowledge and practical, proactive workplace behavior.