CEEGS 2023: Meaning and Making of Games
Find the programme here.
Find the programme here.
The workshops and Doctoral Consortium are parallel, choose one.
Room: 214 (Audimax)
Greening Games Education. How to approach environmental issues in video game-related courses?
Organisers: Sonia Fizek (TH Köln), Laura Frings (TH Köln), Andrea Hubert (Charles University), Lukas
Kolek (Charles University)
PART 1: Introduction to the Workshop and Presentation
9:30 “Greening Games” Team: Introducing the project and sharing aspects from the “Greening Games Education” report
Sonia Fizek Making, Researching and Teaching: Insights from the Greening Games Education Report
Laura Frings What Might: Eco-Critical Teaching and its Potential for Application in CG Projects
Andrea Hubert Lessons Learned: Teaching Green Game Production and Development
10:30 Roundtable discussion 1
Room 213
Welcome to Arstotzka! The Ludic ‘Other Europe’ Under Western Eyes
Organisers: Tomasz Z. Majkowski, Aleksandra Prokopek, Magdalena Kozyra
9:30 „Opening Remarks“: Magda, Aleks and Tomasz
9:40 Mateusz Felczak In the Disfigured Land of Peaceful Peasants and Patriotic Mecha Hussars: Nature and Social Conflict in the Iron Harvest’s Alternative History
10:00 Karol Popow (Online Only) Harvest, mechs and the Great War — a ludotextual analysis of the European counterfactual storyworld in the Scythe board game 1920+ universe
10:20 Klara Sterczewska Ukrainian Fremen and Russian Harkonnen: Russian Invasion of Ukraine in American Wargames
10:40 Szymon Kukulak Uncertain Allies and Paper Democracies. The Post-1989 Eastern Europe in Command & Conquer Tiberian Universe
11:00 Discussion
Room 212
Gaming and Neurodiversity
Organiser: Mikhail Fiadotau and Marie-Luise Meier
Part 1
09:30 Welcome and introduction
09:40 Lisanne Meinen Play beyond fun: neurodiversity as bridging concept
10:00 Cenk Koknar, Jon Stone TL;DR narrative system: Using different language modes to increase the accessibility of story-rich video games for people with dyslexia
10:20 Marie-Luise Meier (Online Only) Cozy games and neurodiversity
10:40 Discussion
Room 216
Video games, history and museums: Challenges and opportunities for collaborative game development
Organisers: Amelia Williams, Lukaš Kolek, Fernanda Flores
Part I
9:30 Project + Workshop Introduction (Organisers)
9:45 Lukas Kolek (Charles Games) Case study how to develop a video game together with a museum
10:20 „Panel discussion“ (Partially Online) – Fernanda Flores (War Childhood Museum), Michal Mochocki
(Kazimierz Wielki University), Lukas Kolek (Charles Games). Moderated by Amelia
Williams (Trilateral Research)
Room 208
Doctoral Consortium begins at 11:30
It’s time for a coffee and snacks break!
Take the time to get to know each other, exchange knowledge and refuel before we continue with the workshops and Doctoral Consortium.
Room: 214 (Audimax)
Greening Games Education. How to approach environmental issues in video game-related courses?
PART 2: Presentations
11:30 Conor McKeown (University of Stirling, Scotland) (Online Only)
Asserting the Importance of Recent Technological Innovations for Defining Environmentally
Sound Game Design and Play
11:45 Sebastian Möring (Macromedia University, Germany)
Toxic Landscapes in Computer Games – In-Game Photography as a Means of Ecological
Game Analysis
12:00 Gerald Farca (Macromedia University, Germany)
Regenerative Play in the Classroom: a Method to talk about Ecogames
12:15 Annakaisa Kultima (Aalto University, Finland) (Online Only)
TBA
Room: 213
Welcome to Arstotzka! The Ludic ‘Other Europe’ Under Western Eyes
Organisers: Tomasz Z. Majkowski, Aleksandra Prokopek, Magdalena Kozyra
11:40 Maksim Podvalnyi Hotel Transylvania: gamified Eastern Europe as a tourist destination
12:00 Agata Zarzycka From Dracula to Tzimisce: A Biopolitics of Vampire Tourism
12:20 Štěpán Šanda Eidos Montreal’s game Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016) is set in 2029
12:40 Jaroslav Švelch Looking for Killswitch: Exploring the Western imaginary of Soviet bloc games
13:00 Magda, Aleks and Tomasz „Discussion and Closing Observations“
Room: 212
Gaming and Neurodiversity
Organiser: Mikhail Fiadotau and Marie-Luise Meier
Part 2
11:30 Markus Spöhrer (Online Only) Representing and playing autistic characters in video games
11:50 Kübra Oğurtanı, Esra Bulut Flow on the spectrum: A netnographic research on Steam platform
12:10 Mikhail Fiadotau The anxious wolf, the inattentive dinosaur: Reflecting on the neurodivergent experience through procedural rhetoric
12:30 Discussion
Room: 216
Video games, history and museums: Challenges and opportunities for collaborative game development
Organisers: Amelia Williams, Lukaš Kolek, Fernanda Flores
Part 2
11:30 Panel Discussion 2 – Ondřej Trhoň (Charles Games), Amelia Williams (Trilateral
Research), Fernanda Flores (War Childhood Museum), moderated by Lukáš
Kolek (Charles Games)
Room: 208
Doctoral Consortium
The Eludamos doctoral consortium is organized by Holger Pötzsch (UiT) and Martin Lüthe (FUB).
11:30 Alessandro Franzó
Homemade: Gaming houses as cultural and productive hubs in the eSports ecosystem
Commentators: Martin Látal and Martin Lüthe
12:00 Emma Livesey
Roll for Writing: Creating a place-conscious TTRPG for use as a writing program teaching tool
Commentators: Robin Longobardi Zingarelli and Holger Pötzsch
It’s time for a lunch break!
You can shop for food in the mall right across the street, or eat in the many diverse restaurants close to the campus.
Room: 214 (Audimax)
Greening Games Education. How to approach environmental issues in video game-related courses?
PART 3:
14:00 Roundtable discussion & Take-Aways
We will behind the roundtable with a brief impulse talk by
Mikhail Fiadotau (Tallinn University, Estonia), Integrating environmental and cultural sustainability in game design education
Room: 213
Games Journalism – At the Interlink between Game Studies and the Industry?
Organiser: Pascal Wagner (GamesMarkt)
Games Journalism, like Game Studies, connects with the gaming industry through various means such as ads, interviews, and staff transitions between journalism and game development. This connection raises concerns about conflicts of interest, transparency in advertising, and the separation of editorial and marketing teams.
More infoRoom: 212
Level Design
Organiser: Michael Baur, (Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences)
A workshop on the practical lessons of level design. Short theoretical introduction to level design, with a particular focus on player guidance.
Overview of the professional level design workflow in the video game industry.
Conceptual development and designing of a level for a dungeon crawler on paper.
Discussion and feedback on the results.
Room: 216
Video games, culture and myth: theoretical and methodological approaches
Antonio José Planells de la Maza, Víctor Manuel Navarro Remesal
Room: 208
Doctoral Consortium
The Eludamos doctoral consortium is organized by Holger Pötzsch (UiT) and Martin Lüthe (FUB).
14:00 Martin Látal Researching virtual reality technologies as a cultural anthropologist
Commentators: Martin Váňa and Holger Pötzsch
14:30 Robin Longobardi Zingarelli Design practices and transgender agency in video games in independent and mainstream contexts (2005-2022)
Commentators: Emma Livesey and Martin Lüthe
Coffee break and snacks!
It’s time for a second break before we continue with the parallel sessions.
Room: 214 (Audimax)
Greening Games Education. How to approach environmental issues in video game-related courses?
PART 4:
15:30 Internal Transnational Meeting of the “Greening Games” Research Team
Room: 213
Games Journalism – At the Interlink between Game Studies and the Industry?
Organiser: Pascal Wagner (GamesMarkt)
Games Journalism, like Game Studies, connects with the gaming industry through various means such as ads, interviews, and staff transitions between journalism and game development. This connection raises concerns about conflicts of interest, transparency in advertising, and the separation of editorial and marketing teams.
More infoRoom: 212
Level Design
Organiser: Michael Baur, (Ostfalia University of Applied Sciences)
A workshop on the practical lessons of level design. Short theoretical introduction to level design, with a particular focus on player guidance.
Overview of the professional level design workflow in the video game industry.
Room: 216
Video games, culture and myth: theoretical and methodological approaches
Antonio José Planells de la Maza, Víctor Manuel Navarro Remesal
Room: 208
Doctoral Consortium
The Eludamos doctoral consortium is organized by Holger Pötzsch (UiT) and Martin Lüthe (FUB).
15:30 Martin Váňa
Authenticity and video games
Commentators: Alessandro Franzó and Holger Pötzsch
16:00 Lars Lindemann Playing through the end times: a mixed method study of ‘critical apocalypses’ in the video game medium
Commentators: Zoheb Mashiur and Martin Lüthe
16:30 Way forward and final remarks
The last coffee break for this day!
Room: 214 (Audimax)
Keynote by Jana Stadeler (Playground Games)
The Un-Reality of Video Game Cultures
Talk description will follow shortly!
Evening Location for a get-together!
Join us for food and drinks (self paid) at Noels Ballroom (Irish Pub) at Kurt-Eisner-Straße 43, 04275 Leipzig
More Info:
Noels Ballroom
Room 214
Keynote by Víctor Navarro Remesal (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Video Games as Animation: Inquiries into the Animatic Nature of Playable Images
Video games are a hybrid media that can be studied from many fronts. They have ludic, machinic, and narrative sides (Mukherjee, 2015) that can sometimes seem at odds in game analysis. However, there is another side that is often overlooked: video games are also animatic works. Our first contact with them is as playable images, a reality that places firmly within visual culture, and by not studying them as such we are cutting some much-needed ties. This makes games belong within the animatic apparatus explored by Cholodenko (2007) and Levitt (2018), an apparatus with its own formal structure, (an)ontology, and impact on our relationship with media. It also has further impacts on different levels, from design to semiotics. This presentation unpacks them in five fronts:
It’s time for the first coffee and snacks break for the day.
The sessions are parallel, choose one for each time slot.
Room 214
Session 1A – Queering the Utopian Spaces
11:30: Eren Ileri
CYBORG ASTRONAUT: Disembodied White Masculinity and the Imagination of Outer Space in Contemporary Video Games
12:00: Sebastian Möring
Towards an Understanding of Computer Games as Media of Care: Analyzing Animal Crossing: New Horizons in Light of the Recent Covid-19 Pandemic
12:30: Rebecca Käpernick
Maternal Representations in the Horizon and The Last of Us series
13:00: Gerald Farca
Farming Games and the Utopian Narrative
Room 213
Session 1B – Apocalypse Now
11:30: Lars Lindemann
Contemporary manifestations of apocalypse in game and narrative design – Toward a “critical apocalypse”
12:00: Lawrence May
Death Stranding and the ecosystemic zombie
12:30: Krzysztof Czyżak
Between the future and the present – time travel video games and the challenge of post-apocalyptic landscape
13:00 Karol Zaborowski
When Player Bites Back. Ecocritical Thoughts on Playing as a Monster
Room 212
Session 1C – The Local & The Global
11:30: Sajna Alaimsonvilla and Dr. Suhail Abdul Rub P. (Online Only)
Redesigning Indian Mythology via Games: Raji: An Ancient Epic as an Ingenious Avant-Garde
12:00: Laura Jungblut
Changing the Game: Challenging the Colonial Paradigm through Indigenous Production and Storytelling
12:30: Olga Kalashnikova and Leonid Moyzhes (Partially Online)
Russian digital games made for Russians: The case of Atomic Heart
13:00: Yanchen Zhang (Online Only)
The Sin of Play: The criticisms against the act of play in China
Room 216
Session 1D – The Mark of the Auteur
11:30: Beatriz Pérez Zapata
Adapting the meaning of Kenji Miyazawa: pacifism, nature, fantasy, and biography in the video game Ihatovo Monogatari
12:00: Filip Jankowski
A chronicle of a certain cooperation: Muriel Tramis, Pierre Gilhodes and auteur theory
12:30: Bodil Stelter
“Neil can do what he wants, even follow an agenda. He is the creator!” – The persona of Neil Druckmann in The Last of Us value-discourse.
13:00: Alessandro Franzò
Homemade: gaming houses as cultural and productive hubs in the eSports ecosystem
Lunch break time!
You can shop for food in the mall right across the street, or eat in the many diverse restaurants close to the campus.
Room 214
Session 2A – Mechanical Conundrums, Worlds, and Processes
15:00: Hans-Joachim Backe
Worldbuilding through Mechanics: The Case of Escape from Tarkov
15:30: Olli Tapio Leino
Exploring Computer Games as Process Arts
16:00: Espen Aarseth
Meaning from Mechanics: the problem with ‘procedural rhetoric’
Room 213
Session 2B – Phenomenology and Ideology
15:00: Ondřej Trhoň
Gacha-interpellation: Genshin Impact and post-phenomenological critique of open-world ideology of the subject
15:30: Alesha Serada (Online Only)
Defining the Genre of a Monster Breeding Simulator
Room 212
Session 2C – (Re)productivity
15:00: Václav Janoščík (Online Only)
Behavioural Capital: Reproductive gameplay and capitalisation, playful Marx and Battlepass-communism
15:30: Rüdiger Brandis
Liberalism and its Limits in Mafia 2 – “The Working Man is a Sucker, that’s for sure”
16:00: Lars de Wildt
Producing Worldview at Ubisoft Montréal (a political-economic and cultural-sociological study of the Assassin’s Creed franchise’s workers and worldview)
Room 216
Session 2D – Transgressing the UI Boundaries
15:00: Thomas Hessling
How to make a Dragon roar, or Cross-Cultural Sound Scraping: Sounds and Music as Design Elements in Computer Game Culture
15:30: Andrea Mariucci (Online Only)
Expanding the Game Space: Reflections on the Boundaries of the Interface
16:00: Konrad Augustyniak
Abandon the Hotel! Multimodality in Polish Escape Room Design
The last coffee break for this day!
Room 214
Session 3A – Orality, Textuality, Visuality
17:00: Krzysztof Olszamowski
Playing a story or reading a game – Multimodality in the literary experience of ‘Pentiment’
17:30: Małgorzata Majkowska and Tomasz Majkowski.
Play, Goddess! Homeric qualities of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
18:00: Dom Ford
The city, according to city builders: The mythology of city-builder games
Room 213
Session 3B – Historical Narratives
17:00: Jakub Šindelář and Angus Mol
Playing in their shoes? Historical empathy and digital games
17:30: Michał Mochocki, Jakub Majewski and Paweł Schreiber (Partially Online)
The Heritage Discourses of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in Polish Video Games
18:00: Benjamin Dorrington Redder
„From Historical (Game) Form to Historical Gameplay: Establishing the Multimodal Turn of Historical Representation for Game Research and Scholarship“
Room 212
Session 3C – Aesthetics of Representation
17:00: Anna Kożuch and Krzysztof Mroczek
Horizon: Forbidden Hair, or the portrayal of women in video games: intentions and awareness
17:30: Michele Varini (Online Only)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Suit? Fashion co-production in the new digital environment
18:00: Tereza Krobova
What the Hell Are You Wearing? Strategies of Czech Women Working in the Game Industry to Cope with the Gendered Clothing Norms
Room 216
Session 3D – Industry Strikes Back
17:00: Jan Houška
Adapt, Experiment, or Improve Within Local and Structural Limits: Labour of Eastern European and Western Game Workers in Czech-based Studios
17:30: Fabrício Fava and Camila Mangueira
Combining critical design and game playing for imagining media
18:00: Jaroslav Svelch
Decentering software: Transmedia strategies in the experimental 1980s game productions by Mel Croucher and Automata UK
Conference Party @Macromedia Campus, 5th floor!
Please join us for the official CEEGS Party with drinks, food, games, and dance! Everything will be provided, we just need you!
Room 214
09:00 Kahoot Game Quiz! Be early and join us for a Kahoot game quiz that will test your common knowledge on games, game design, and game studies (created in cooperation between our game students and Gerald).
All you need to participate is your Mobile Phone and a Internet connection!
Room 214
Keynote by Charlene Putney (Writer & Experimenter & Co-Founder of writewithlaika.com)
Seeds: 23 ideas for bringing your best work into the world
In this talk, I will offer 23 lessons I’ve learned in my own working life over 20 years as project manager (at Google and Facebook), game writer (at Larian Studios, Die Gute Fabrik, and freelance), and AI startup founder (Write With LAIKA). We’ll look at the practical, the intangible, and the esoteric. Warning: there will be interactive elements, invitations to participate, and a few challenges to bring home too!
It’s time for a coffee and snacks break!
Some more time to snack, have coffee and talk to each other in real life!
Lunch break time!
You can shop for food in the mall right across the street, or eat in the many diverse restaurants close to the campus.
The last coffee break for this day!