This workshop will explore the multi-faceted world of digital multiplayer environments. We will present an interactive workshop that puts participants in a simulated representation of role creation, identity, and competition. The workshop will be punctuated by talks by panelists on the various ways players affect and are, in turn, affected by these games.
", "abstracts": [ { "title": "David Li", "description": "Addons in World of Warcraft have evolved from simple interface modifications into powertools that reshape how players, and the community, engage with content. Much of both in-the-moment and coordination decision-making can be off-loaded onto addons to the point where competitive fairness can be called into question. Drawing on prior studies about user interface modification, as well as Mia Consalvo’s book Cheating, this paper analyzes how what is fair, cheating, and expected, is negotiated within the WoW community, and how it is enforced,both by players and the developers, Blizzard.
Although the general consensus among players is that addons’ abilities to offload effort onto the computer does give an advantage to those who use them, instead of pushing back against them, they choose to embrace them, and socially enforce them within their play spaces. Players expect their teammates to use addons, just like they do, which can flip the script–now players who choose not to use them (or do not know about them) are playing unfairly, as they now hold the team back from performing at their most optimal.
Very recently, Blizzard attempted to address this unfairness after many years of not acknowledging the imbalance directly, by limiting addon functionality in combat and integrating key features into the base game. These efforts aim to level the playing field and standardize access to information for all, but it instead exposed the other side of the issue, which pertains to accessibility and customization. One size fits all leaves players behind, creating a different kind of unfairness. This exposes a careful balance between competitive integrity with accessibility,player expression, and community expectations.
" }, { "title": "Faris Kazim", "description": "Countless hours were spent in various digital worlds from Azeroth to Tamriel to Hydaelyn. People create avatars and launch up the game for the first time, not realizing just how many hours will be spent walking those virtual landscapes. These players build communities with forms of governance and transform into lasting friendships. They express themselves through gear and character creation. They create routines of work and play within these landscapes. They experience significant life events from birthdays to funerals to new year’s celebrations within that space, experiencing them under the umbrella of a corporate government in the form of the game’s respective developer. A new identity forms and they live a separate life in a virtual world over time. The line between playing and living in the MMO starts to blur as that happens. When that happens, they can never leave again. The Magic Circle, the physical and conceptual boundary where normal rules of reality are suspended (Salen and Zimmerman, 94), is what truly blurs in this scenario. The rules of the game become the same as those in real life. Virtual worlds that contain, contend with, and replicate many aspects of real life blur the lines between play and reality.
" }, { "title": "Matthew Lamm", "description": "This paper examines toxicity in competitive multiplayer games not as an anomaly of player behavior, but as an emergent property of designed game systems. While toxicity is commonly framed as individual misconduct, such as the examples of harassment,flaming, or feeding, this research situates it at the intersection of psychological frustration,social structure, and designed mechanics. Focusing on team-based multiplayer environment, this study looks at how games produce and sustain toxic behavior, and how we can use frameworks from other areas of study to instead design for pro-social play.
Drawing from Michel Foucault’ s concept of “docile bodies,” Andrew K. Przybylski’s work on competence frustration, and Pierre Bourdieu’s practice, this research adapts systems-oriented design analysis and cross-disciplinary frameworks to multiplayer game development. Findings suggest that toxicity arises from the interactions between competence-impeding frustration, socially amplified blame within team structures, and affordances of digital environments. Compared to other game development fields, such as first-person-shooters that have decades of iterative and empirical tuning. pro-social design has had to rely on intuition and reactionary methods. In response, this paper proposes speculative design interventions that redistribute responsibility, obscure individual failure behind team accomplishment, and reinforce-prosocial behaviors through systemic incentives rather than reactive moderation.
This research will be presented alongside a live workshop in which participants engage in a simulated massive multiplayer gaming experience. The workshop will contrast intuition-driven and systemically designed social mechanics, allowing participants to experience how different rule structures can shape player behavior in real time. Together,this paper and the workshop propose a shift from managing toxicity as an individual phenomenon to intentionally designing for “friendly bodies” through rigorous systems design.
" }, { "title": "Rena Chen", "description": "The formation of social identity is rarely easy to observe directly. It involves group membership, situational performance, and visibility to others, yet these mechanisms are diffuse, slow, and largely buried in everyday institutions. This paper argues that MMO games provide a simplified testing ground for social identity, where the same mechanisms that shape identity in real society are translated into explicit, immediate, and structured systems. What society does diffusely, an MMO does by mechanics.
The paper identifies three such systems. The class system assigns players a role from the moment they log in, mirroring how institutional position shapes identity in offline life. The guild system provides ongoing group membership and role-practice, compressing into weeks the kind of organizational belonging that would normally take years. The quantification system puts players' contribution on public display, turning otherwise hidden identity-work into something measurable and comparable. To analyze these systems, the paper draws on Henri Tajfel and John Turner's Social Identity Theory to explain why categorization into classes and guilds produces real in-group identification, on Erving Goffman's front-stage / back-stage distinction and Oliver Milik's concept of persona to describe how players perform within these categories, and on Jennifer Whitson's Foucault-inflected reading of gamification to treat quantification as a governance mechanism players internalize. Against the view that MMO identities are escapist fictions, the paper returns to Milik's concept of persona, supported by Jeffrey G. Snodgrass's research on MMO players' offline friendships, to argue that these systems produce real identities under compressed conditions rather than fictional alternatives to them. A comparison of Jian Wang 3, World of Warcraft, and Final Fantasy XIV further shows that these mechanisms are structural features of the MMO genre rather than isolated cases.
The paper concludes that MMOs are not an escape from the social, but a compressed and visible version of it, a setting where identity formation can be observed as it happens.
" }, { "title": "Riley Lyman", "description": "MMOs are uniquely ephemeral experiences. Any game is liable to be lost to time, but none so readily as the MMO, whose technical and networking requirements make preservation efforts a massive challenge. However, this problem cannot be solved by replicating game data alone. In this paper, I show that an MMO cannot be preserved without rich documentation of its social and gameplay dynamics, arguing specifically that player storytelling best fulfills this preservative role. I demonstrate this by close-reading YouTuber Barny's World of Warcraft videos, analyzing the ways in which her stories convey the intricacies of events that could otherwise never be relived. I then expand my analysis outward to show how this same preservative thread traces its way through player stories about other multiplayer experiences. I contrast these examples against single-player Let's Play videos, showing how MMO player stories are uniquely effective tools for capturing ephemeral social interactions. Unlike single-player games, which can be reexperienced at any time, the experience of an MMO is dependent on the social dynamics produced by a specific cultural context. MMO worlds can and have been rebuilt, whether that be via community-led private servers or official relaunches of once-dead titles. However, even if that world is identical inform to the past, there is no way to replicate the original social interactions to be had.I conclude that story is the only viable method to preserve these intrinsically human aspects of gameplay.
" } ] }, { "title": "Genre", "description": "From interactive fiction to open world MMOs, video games can be a myriad of genres. Beneath that diversity lies a question every game must answer: what can the player actually do? This panel explores the relationship between genre, design and player agency. We’ll look at how players interact with the game world in different ways, how the genre sets the rules of that interaction, and what can happen when those rules are deliberately broken. What happens when a narrative game removes your freedom of choice, right at the most crucial moment? Or when a horror game takes away your weapons— just as something in the dark comes out to get you? We focus on designers’ perspective and discuss what are the ways they use to facilitate the agency of the players (or lack thereof), taking deep dives into genres such as psychological horror, crime fiction, and no-input games. Each section opens with an introduction to the genre and its associated player experience patterns, followed by round table discussion and Q&A with intermittent audience participation.
", "abstracts": [ { "title": "Amber Xia", "description": "Psychological horror in video games is frequently misunderstood as a genre defined by what it withholds, as in no monsters, no jump scares, no explicit violence. Yet this framing fails to explain why certain games produce a dread that lingers long after play ends, while others that employ the same surface-level restraint feel hollow. What specific design mechanisms make psychological horror in video games effective, and why do some works succeed where others fail?
This paper argues that psychological horror achieves its greatest effect by engineering a collapse of perceptual and agentive trust. By embedding dread within mundane environments and familiar mechanics, and manipulating the imbalance between what players control and what they are forced to confront, the player becomes complicit in their own disorientation. Drawing on game studies scholarship concerning player agency, cognitive fear responses,environmental design, and psychoanalytic frameworks of the uncanny and abjection, this paper examines case studies including Martha is Dead, OMORI, Anatomy, F.E.A.R., andSlender: The Eight Pages to identify three interlocking mechanisms: the environment as hidden horror architecture, the erosion of perceptual trust, and the deliberate imbalance of agency that produces complicity.
In conclusion, this paper claims that psychological horror is fundamentally a design strategy of misdirection and erosion rather than confrontation, and that when these mechanisms are absent or over-explained, horror loses its hold on the player entirely. Understanding these mechanisms offers a framework for both analyzing and designing horror experiences that operate invisibly, beneath the surface of play.
" }, { "title": "Hansong Li", "description": "Player agency is often considered central to digital games, but remains to be inconsistently defined in detective mystery games. Many such games try to sell the illusion of being the detective, but the exact degree of freedom for the player to act within the game world can vary drastically, and sometimes the detective works are merely a narrative flavor instead of concrete verbs. This paper argues that player agency—specifically the abilities and ways to ask questions, interpret information, and verify conclusions—is the genre-defining attribute of detective mystery games.
Building on Aarseth’s concept of ergodic literature and subsequent work on interactive agency,this paper develops an analytical framework which examines how agency operates across key elements of detective gameplay, including information collection, player-world interaction, player assumption confirmation, mechanism to submit answers and out-of-game cognitive works.
The framework is applied to a range of historically significant titles, from Myst (1993) to Return of the Obra Dinn (2018). The analysis demonstrates that effective detective design depends not on the number of choices available, but on enabling meaningful epistemic interaction.
Furthermore, based on the findings, the paper explores unexplored possibilities within and beyond the genre, by taking inspiration from post-modern detective fiction, and tries to examine emerging titles such as Disco Elysium (2019) and Outer Wilds (2019) with this new perspective.
" }, { "title": "Jon Topielski", "description": "'Zero Input Games' is a new term for a small subclass of games that require little, if any, input from the player. Some examples include Blaseball (Sam Rosenthal), where players follow along but can’t influence any of the game, or Progress Quest (Eric Frederickson), where players simply watch as the simulation unfolds. This presentation discusses how zero-input games can be included in the conversation on the definition of games. These low-input experiences bear striking similarity to works in film, books, and other artistic media, raising questions about whether similar experiences in other media might be analogous to those that we already consider to be games. In our research, we established a classification criteria for better understanding zero-input games that generate novel possibilities for analysis. Trends are revealed through this analysis; films that are game-like tend to be of the type that players solve in their head and simulations that are game-like tend to be of the type where players simply watch as it unfolds. Based on these findings, two objects were created in different media that attempt to subvert the typical types of zero-input experiences that is typically present. In doing so, two novel contributions are made to the burgeoning field of zero-input games and game-like media
" }, { "title": "Kai DeJesus", "description": "The NBC show The Traitors popularized a reality television show format in which certain events that happened were entirely false: for example, several of the guests being 'murdered', rather than being 'eliminated' (or 'voted off the island'). A reality show with false events— or 'surreality' television, which this study proposes this genre be called— is not a new phenomenon. Coined by the show Escape the Night with Joey Graceffa, “surreality” television incorporates challenges, scripted scenes, actors, and props to create a mostly unscripted television experience in which contestants compete to complete a story that couldn’t have been told otherwise using the reality television format, like fantasy isekai and zombie apocalypse. In this study, I examine how reality television shows use game mechanics to make contestants do things that characters in murder mysteries would do, like investigate and die. I also examined how the game elements, like the host and scripted scenes, create a narrative consistent with what the game allows the players to do. This article, through the lens of crime fiction, defines surreality television and argues in shows where the conceit is recreating genre fiction (like crime fiction and fantasy), game elements like the host must work together with the game’s mechanics and challenges so that contestants can fulfill and interact with genre tropes through play.
" } ] }, { "title": "Aesthetics", "description": "In this panel we examine what kinds of stories games tend to tell, how they tell those stories,and why we keep coming back, with a particular focus on violence, power dynamics,mechanical expression, and aesthetics. Join us for a procedurally-generated series of talks covering the what, why, and how of storytelling in games, followed by an audience-directed roundtable discussion where we put you, the players, in charge.
", "abstracts": [ { "title": "Claire Lincoln", "description": "Video games often make players feel powerful. They wield awesome abilities, control competent heroes, and make meaningful choices. This interactivity awards players agency over the experience and constructs a fantasy in which the player is powerful and heroic. Usually, violence accompanies these fantasies, and mainstream titles assure this violence is justified. However, not all games justify their violence, nor do they promote these fantasies. This paper explores three games that subvert these expectations, using interactivity to engage in critical conversations with the video game medium. Titles like Mouthwashing and Horses challenge player agency by deliberately restricting player choice and forcing participation in disturbing scenarios. These titles also subvert the appeal of playing a likable and competent character, forcing the player to identify as someone powerless and undesirable. While these indie titles are more direct, Silent Hill 2 provides a critique of power fantasies at a larger scale. Silent Hill 2 invites the player to revel in an action-packed AAA experience only to recontextualize the interactions in the game’s final moments, stripping away violence’s justification and recasting the hero as weak and culpable. Notably, these are violent games; however, violence is treated not as a justified application of power, but rather as a source of unease and uncomfortable truths. These games use agency not as a source of empowerment, but to construct a reflective experience. By subverting the fantasy players have come to expect, these games challenge their players rather than cater to them and ultimately offer a critical view of their own medium. This exploration evokes questions about the relationship between designer and player, as well as the role of agency in an inherently interactive medium.
" }, { "title": "George Eltzroth", "description": "This presentation aims to introduce a simple and practical new schema for discussing how games function as communication and storytelling objects. Much discussion from writers like Ian Bogost already thoroughly examines procedurality as a way of understanding how games communicate, but the proceduralist approach tends to undervalue or outright ignore the essential role that non-interactive modes of expression (text, images, sound) play in the overall game experience. On the other hand, approaches to game analysis that only look at the non-procedural elements also ignore crucial parts of the experience. Games exist in the alchemy between procedural and embedded elements, and the existing tools of analysis often struggle to examine that process. This new schema is an attempt to provide simple and practical labels to allow for the discussion and analysis of procedural storytelling by labeling and defining the techniques of Embodiment and Assembly.
Embodiment describes what has traditionally been referred to as procedural representation, or more broadly mechanical storytelling. This is the encoding of narrative information into the functioning of game systems. Assembly describes how game systems are used to arrange, move, and warp non-interactive elements such as text, images, and sounds. This schema was developed by collating common patterns in the existing literature, and then critically examining the storytelling techniques of several case studies, each of which is emblematic of a different style of storytelling, and each of which involves a different mix of how embodiment and assembly are employed. It is my belief that this taxonomy provides a useful set of “elementary particles” that can help ground more complex discussions of storytelling in games.
" }, { "title": "LJ Wei", "description": "" }, { "title": "Prince Wang", "description": "Appearance-based prejudice is one of the most commonly existing, but rarely admitted biases among both game designers and players. Although extensive research has demonstrated how character appearance influences player decisions, players who claim to advocate for the representation of unattractive characters will still be choosing the prettier one when given the option. This project investigates how non-conscious appearance bias manipulates player decision-making, and argues that this is not an accidental phenomenon but a systematic design pattern that has been embedded within the game industry for a long time.
This project draws on several existing studies: player-avatar identification, the 'what is beautiful is good' effect in protagonist design, how female character appearance influences player choice,and the compromises made in Gacha games. These studies share a common finding: appearance prejudice operates as an automatic, low-consciousness process. Players consistently claim to be free of such bias, but their behavior says something otherwise.
To actively demonstrate this thesis to the audience, this project decided to be in the form of an interactive video performance. I present myself as the Monarch of the Kingdom of Ugly, hosting the Next Monarch Election. In this kingdom, what the real world defines as 'ugly' is recognized as beautiful. Four candidates compete across several voting rounds, and after a winner is crowned, I quickly change into their costume and reveal that every candidate was the same person all along — thanking the audience for choosing me as their Monarch once again. Through this experience, the audience will expose their appearance judgment automatically. They become the participants and as well as the experiment target. Concluding this project, appearance bias is a deeply automated cognitive response, and that the games industry both reflects and actively reinforces it.
" }, { "title": "Zhili Chen", "description": "Violence has long been a central component of game design, yet it is often treated primarily as a mechanic of challenge or spectacle rather than as a meaningful expressive tool. This project investigates violence as a form of expression in games, asking how violent systems can convey emotion, character, and narrative rather than merely serve as interactive conflict resolution.
This research contributes to ongoing discourse by reframing violence not as content alone,but as a designed language embedded within player interaction. Drawing from analyses of existing games, film theory, and interactive media studies, the project examines how timing,player agency, repetition, and feedback systems shape the emotional and narrative meaning of violent acts. Particular attention is given to how systems of escalation, loss of control, and embodiment can transform violence into a vehicle for expressing psychological states.The practical component of this research is a prototype game that situates combat within the everyday life of a troubled high school student. In this work, fighting is not the primary goal but one aspect of a broader simulation, where player actions accumulate toward moments of loss of control, represented through a “possession” system. This design explores how violence can emerge from systemic pressure rather than player intention alone.
The findings suggest that when integrated with narrative systems and player state, violence can function as a powerful expressive medium, capable of communicating internal conflict and social tension. This project demonstrates how recontextualizing violence can expand its role within game design beyond spectacle toward meaningful expression.
" } ] }, { "title": "Industry", "description": "Games are much more than the software we interact with - they’re the people who make them, the corporations greenlighting them, and the financial structures that can both make them possible and interfere with their core design in the same breath. Beginning with individual presentations, this panel will seek to explore each of those topics through a multitude of perspectives. Destin will talk about the explosion of live-service games in the post-pandemic digital games industry, connecting a through line to the eventual mass layoffs that plagued the industry in its wake. Madeline will draw comparisons between the Hollywood film industry and the modern gaming industry through the lens of its employees: What can we learn from more developed creative industries about how best to protect the people working within it from both internal and external harm? Abhi will dive into “gacha” game design and how it stems from the economy of time, going deep into the pity system and eventually exploring ways of doing ethical gacha design. Finally, Peyton will bring us into the world of analog gaming, giving an extensive study of Kickstarter through its top 100 board games to discover common trends and form a picture of what a successful campaign might look like in the modern Kickstarter environment. After individual presentations, the entire panel will come together to talk amongst themselves in a roundtable discussion that will afterwards be open to audience involvement.
", "abstracts": [ { "title": "Abhishek Chatterjee", "description": "The 'Free-to-Play' (F2P) mobile games industry is built on a difficult conflict: the desire to design a fun game versus the pressure to design a profitable product. This tension is most obvious in Gacha mechanics. Developers often pitch mechanics like the 'Pity System', which guarantees a drop after a certain number of failed pulls, as a safety net for players. However, critics usually dismiss these systems as predatory gambling. This back-and-forth ignores the complex reasons players actually choose to engage with these games and the specific UI tricks used to keep them spending.
This paper bridges the disconnect between industry PR and academic critics by combining my personal experience as a former mobile systems designer with academic research. Using a fractal approach, the paper first looks at Gacha through the broader 'Economy of Time,'exploring how modern players rationalize spending money just to skip the grind. It then examines the core F2P ecosystem, showing how early-game 'fun' pivots into aggressive monetization once a player becomes a veteran. Finally, it breaks down the specific UI of the PitySystem, showing how it hides real-world costs and weaponizes the player's sunk time.
By applying an ethical framework to these systems, the paper concludes that 'Ethical Gacha' is possible. It proposes a set of 'Ethical Design Pillars', focusing on absolute transparency and hard financial caps, arguing that sustainable design must respect the player's agency rather than relying on deceptive mechanics.
" }, { "title": "Destin Piagentini", "description": "Leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic, the digital gaming industry had enjoyed a period of continued growth in both player acquisition and resource investment. That upward trajectory not only continued through the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, but surged as a result of it. While players were stuck at home, it became easier to devote their time to entertainment that was accessible from their living rooms. At the same time, corporate relief efforts made expansion less risky for the companies steering the industry to pump more resources to meet the expanded demand as a result of the increased time commitment from its players. Eager to spend funds, industry leaders began to set their sights on live-service games as an emerging trend. In opposition to the traditional model of digital games as finite experiences, live-service-games seek to deliver multiplayer experiences that are meant to be played repeatedly as they evolve through seasonal up-dates that add new gameplay variations of the core experience. For game publishers, a successful live-service game with ongoing revenue opportunities is an attractive achievement to pursue, but, because these games rely on massive player bases to support them (often in lieu of an upfront fee), achieving success in this genre has become increasingly difficult as the most popular games are focused on monopolizing the time of their players. As a result, major publishers such as PlayStation Studios have tried to ensure a “hit” through sheer quantity,betting that an investment made in many life-service projects will yield at least one game that can generate the profits they’re seeking. In reality, the high difficulty in achieving success for these games mean that most projects are either cancelled before or shortly after they are released to the public. The resulting pivot in strategy leaves the developers of those projects often without jobs or stressed to quickly find a new lucrative project on short-notice.
In my new-games journalism piece, I will directly connect the Covid-19 pandemic to the rapid expansion and ensuing deflation of the digital gaming industry through the renewed focus on investments into live-service gaming, giving context by analyzing the emergence of the live-service trend and examining how the pandemic’s early days served as both a powerful and unsustainable boon to the industry but extracted a heavier toll as the macroeconomic environment soured for both consumers and companies. Concluding my findings, I will offer a humanistic perspective on how these broader trends affect the developers working in this industry who are, by and large, caught in the crossfire of rapidly changing corporate mandates and are often left to suffer the largest consequences of their failure.
In my conference presentation, I will briefly summarize these findings before discussing them amongst other industry challenges in a panel with my peers.
" }, { "title": "Madeline Khare", "description": "Flashing lights, limousines, and iconic outfits: celebrities of the early 2000s seemingly had it all. That is, until the paparazzi told us otherwise. Paparazzi feasted off of disproving the so-called perfect lives of primarily women celebrities, to the point they would do anything to get potentially damaging photos to sell to tabloids. These women were stalked, doxxed, even live-streamed at their own homes without permission - all so jealous hate-mongers could critique them to feel better about themselves. Then, less than a decade later in 2014, Gamergate begins. Gamergate is a misogynistic online harassment campaign attacking several women or nonbinary people who were considered successful in their respective games careers. Anonymous “trolls” on forums like 4chan doxxed the targets of Gamergate, allowing others to send violent threats directly to their residences. Fast forward another decade, in the 2020’s, there has been a clear shift in the way paparazzi are regarded among Hollywood professionals and the public eye - where it was once revered to photograph a young celebrity’s underwear as she got out of a limousine, now that is an offense punishable by law in several states. Meanwhile, in the games industry where fewer legal action has been taken, experts predict a second Gamergate is coming. This essay will seek to examine what legal gains Hollywood took in order to protect women from harassment in the workplace, and determine if such legal actions could prove useful in the games industry.
" }, { "title": "Peyton Schwiebert", "description": "What are the commonalities between the most successful tabletop kickstarters of all time? What does a modern kickstarter look like in comparison to the original concept of the platform? What attracts people to crowdfunding games? To answer these questions, research took the form of a spreadsheet compiling together data about the top board games on the crowdfunding website, kickstart, and subsequent data about the game from the website boardgame geek, a compiler of player opinion and wiki resource for all things tabletop. By compiling information about the top 100 most successful tabletop games on kickstarter, commonalities in genre, theme, timing, and attachment to other intellectual properties, along with other can be found. This trend towards prebuilt fanbases in particular shows a change in kickstarter from a indie game crowdfunding platform into almost a new form of preorder website, allowing larger companies to use FOMO on limited time objects to gain more money from the consumer.This can be seen in comparison who has run these kickstarters, and contrasting the price of a“base” game to the average amount donated by backers in order to get limited time add ons.Finally, the research is concluded through an averaging of all of the common attributes in order to create the next (potential) top 100 kickstarter campaign.
" } ] }, { "title": "Systems", "description": "This panel discusses the concept of a 'reset' existing across multiple facets of videogames explored through communication, space, time loops, and roguelike mechanics.Our panel consists of four individual brief presentations followed by Q & A sessions and a joint game design workshop to illustrate our topics.", "abstracts": [ { "title": "Alexander Machalicky", "description": "While roguelite games began as offshoots of the popular game Rogue, in the modern day,they have become a much more prevalent genre. These types of games often focus on replayability as their main appeal as opposed to other design aspects, making use of limited developmental resources by allowing them to be reused. This presentation will analyze how a focus on replayability makes it an ideal genre for indie game developers, as well as how this trend is able to be used within larger projects as well. Through researching the various development cycles of roguelites within the indie space such as Hades and Mewgenics, as well as direct producer testimony from KILLBEAT (Kammonen, 2025), it can be seen that adding elements that enhance replayability to the gameplay loop overall improve the player experience. These will be looked at in conjunction with other analyses which support the notion of replayability being a boon to not only roguelites, but to the video game space as a whole (Varga,2025). With all of this in mind, the rationale behind why the roguelite scene has prospered for so long is evident, with the relative absence of developmental resources forcing these types of games into making the best possible use of what is at hand. Their focus on replayability is something that well-established studios ought to be taking note of, potentially utilizing them or otherwise giving support to projects of this type." }, { "title": "Ashley Newell", "description": "Video games have dual temporality: the time experienced by characters inside the story, and the time experienced by players. As players’ experience of failure, repetition, and learning is not reflected in their character, ludonarrative disharmony can become a problem. Time loops as the narrative structure and mechanics in video games can bridge this gap.
Using the framework of Linda Lahdenperä, this paper first identifies that time loops, as a game concept, refers to the combination of diegetic and extradiegetic level time loops. Based on this category, this paper uses the ludic subjectivity typology developed by Daniel Vella and analyzes case study games, Ranging Loop, 12 Minutes, and Outer Wilds, pointing out that most time-loop games employ the single-embodied ludic subjectivity.
Integrating Jason Mittel’s four types of character arcs, this paper analyzes how time loops in games strengthen the alignment between the character arc and the player arc in terms of their emotions, knowledge, and skills. Time loop mechanics uniquely integrate character overhaul, education, growth, and transformation in ways that mirror players' own mechanical progression. With accumulated lessons and emotions, a shared finale resolves both narrative and gameplay challenges simultaneously. Therefore, highly aligned character-player arcs created by diegetic and extradiegetic time loops strengthen players’ sense of identity and belonging of the playable figure as “I-in-the-game”, achieving ludonarrative harmony.
This research analyzes time loops as a narrative and mechanic tool and contributes a character-player arc framework to existing discourse on ludonarrative disharmony. It aims to provide scholars and designers with a transferable model for analyzing and building cohesive relationships between game mechanics and storytelling.
" } ] }, { "title": "Makers and Breakers: How the Formats of Game Creation are Intentionally Broken to Create New Possibilities", "description": "Games get “broken” in many ways. Designers push platforms to their limits to defy genre and tell stories in innovative ways and players break games themselves to upend gameplay. In our presentations and roundtable, we will travel from early internet games to modern queer and trans creators, from autobiographical stories to speedrunners that tell their own stories with someone else’s game, and glimpses into Afrofuturistic game development. We’ll have a moderator help us dive into these topics, how they relate, and what designers can take away from how their games are actually played.", "abstracts": [ { "title": "Finlay Logan", "description": "Discussions of games by and about the LGBTQ community often consider them in terms of social impact. Terms like “empathy games,” “games for good” and “serious games” highlight games’ capacity to be a catalyst for changes in players’ attitudes or behavior. These frameworks can be important for giving games byLGBTQ game designers increased visibility and positive critical attention. However, queer designers and scholars have critiqued the concept of empathy games for centering the perspective of normative (straight, cis)players. By emphasizing positive affective experiences, they push out the difficult, complex realities of queer lives and risk further marginalizing narratives that don’t conform to mainstream expectations. The concept of“no fun” in games, proposed by Bo Ruberg, is a way of thinking about gameplay that decenters fun and happiness, allowing for a wider variety of affective experiences. No fun games, much like queer lives, can be sad, painful, disappointing and traumatic. In this paper, I consider Taylor McCue’s semi-autobiographical gameHe Fucked the Girl Out of Me (2022) in the context of both empathy games and no fun. The game deals with the designer’s journey of processing shame and trauma from their experiences with transphobia and sex work,and defies easy categorization. While HFTGOOM is an empathy game in some respects, highlighting the game’s no fun aspects helps us to see the conversation created between the designer and the player, rather than simply focusing on what the player gets from the game. In examining the no fun experience that McCue creates in HFTGOOM, I hope to underscore the importance of treating queer games as sites of self-expression and liberation
" }, { "title": "Selah Wright", "description": "Thriving as a time-honored metagame, a transgressive series of playful activities, and a rich community-driven practice, speedrunning is the act of reaching a defined end of a videogame as fast as humanly possible, strictly within the physical parameters of official game software and hardware. Two categories of speedrun often emerge from this. “Any%” runs are unrestricted; it doesn’t matter how much of the game one completes. “100%” runs require the exact opposite; players must also complete all of the game’s content to finish a run. To most, it’s simply a fun, challenging metagame. However, in the depths of its transgression, I believe speedrunning has much more to say. Buried in the fringes of the practice, speedrunning begins to hold a mirror to the games underneath, illuminating a perspective of their design and development never before seen.
While I was unable to find others who had investigated the connection between speedrunning and game development, I nevertheless came upon many insightful ideas. For example, a few individuals have already constructed compelling definitions to differentiate between glitches and exploits, which I have taken to divide speed running’s reflectivity amongst them. Glitches reveal a game’s software development; exploits reveal a game’s design and conception. Utilizing this, research about the tenets of the metagame, and my own investigations into the differences between the world record times of speedgames’ Any % and 100% categories,I believe I have uncovered a plethora of fascinating truths about the qualities of videogames that encourage speedrunning, the “speed ludemes” that have emerged from common game programming practices, and the ways in which required versus optional game content is designed. Through it all, speedrunning has shown itself to be one of the greatest hidden game analysis tools, one scholars should employ to find incredible, exclusive insights into the games they seek to examine.
" }, { "title": "Stephen Rubino", "description": "The late 90’s and early 2000’s framed an era poised for technological change, and several influential elements of modern digital culture were formed during this time. While many of these, including several social media sites, still exist and continue to influence digital games and media, Adobe Flash was hugely influential while eventually falling into obsolescence.
In this paper, I apply the approach outlined in Minor Platforms in Videogame History (Nicoll,2025) to better understand Flash’s place in the development of the interactive web. Flash is situated at what Nicoll refers to as a “moment of rupture” within the gaming world, inhabiting and even facilitating a transition between distinct eras of games, developers, and technological possibilities. We are then able to use Nicoll’s lens to evaluate the ways in which Flash “articulate[d] alternative structures of feeling” and gave rise to unrealized cultural patterns. Namely, we are able to draw connections between Flash and several trends that persist in gaming. These include the rise of “rockstar” indie devs, many of whom came from traditionally outsider career paths and got their start by making games in Flash. It is also possible to chart the beginnings of a trend towards free, browser-based games, starting with influential sites likeNewgrounds and culminating in a modern ubiquity of games across non-gaming media.
" }, { "title": "Whit Walton", "description": "African Diasporic cultures are deeply underrepresented in video games, but this is a part of a larger problem. Colonialism, a violent act of conquering and creating economy out of the lives and bodies of African people, has lasting negative effects in access to education, resources, and global representation. However, African Diasporic people have been able to create with these limitations in place.
From the at-home video game console to the President of Xbox, the contributions to the video game industry are far and wide. However, the games being created are still representative of a white, male, hegemonic view. This is harmful to players, developers, and the global view surrounding African Diasporic people who face discrimination in systemic ways in tandem with avenues of play. By decolonizing the minds of video game developers and encouraging new developers to create stories that resonate with their African Diasporic culture, new code that is void of harmful stereotypes and misconstructions of African people in games can be written.
My research will begin with the history around the Trans-Atlantic slave trade that displaced Africans in the Americas and the innovative creators of technology post-emancipation. Next, it will focus on the current programs created to encourage Black boys to become game testers and current trailblazers in the industry. Finally, I will imagine an Afro futuristic-inspired game design world. As the future begins to embrace wider technology, video games as emerging media is an industry that can be the preservation of African Diasporic cultures and histories via the African Diasporic game developers who are coming into the field.
" } ] }, { "title": "Couch, 9:16, Shoes, Acrylic Charm", "description": "What is outside the screen? A couch, 9:16, shoes, and an acrylic charm. What does that have to do with games? In this series of presentations, we will be touching upon what tangents upon the globe of games. Marco Carenza will speak on the uniquely important role that community plays in fighting games; Jingwen Shi will reveal what fuels the popularity of casual games; Ahmed Shuwehdi will analyze museums as walking simulators; finally, Nic Kim will criticize the pitfalls inherent to personal identification through fandom. Following the presentations, we will hold a Q&A with the audience!", "abstracts": [ { "title": "Ahmed Shuwehdi", "description": "This paper examines the conceptual and experiential overlap between museums and walking simulators, two seemingly distinct forms of curated environments. While museums have traditionally been framed as spaces of passive observation and education, and walking simulators as a contested genre within video games, both rely on spatial navigation, environmental storytelling, and visitor interpretation as core mechanisms of engagement. The central question of this study is how the design principles of walking simulators can inform and enhance museum experiences while looking at The National Museum of African-American History and Culture as a case study of how a successful implementation could elevate the experience.
This paper contributes to ongoing discussions in museum studies and game design by framing museums as analog counterparts to walking simulators, emphasizing their shared ethos of guided exploration and meaning-making. Drawing on journalistic analysis, critical game studies, and design research, including Mintchev’s museology research on applying video game design to museum exhibits, this study synthesizes concepts such as pacing, environmental storytelling, and player agency.
The paper concludes that integrating walking simulator design principles into museum contexts can transform exhibitions into better participatory experiences without compromising their educational mission. Ultimately, it argues that museums and walking simulators share a foundational logic and that recognizing this relationship opens new possibilities for rethinking how cultural spaces are designed and experienced.
" }, { "title": "Jingwen Shi", "description": "My paper mainly focuses on how the growth of macroeconomics reshapes everyday routines and how these changes contribute to the rise of casual and free-to-play games. Rather than treating these games as simplified forms of entertainment, this research frames them as systems that embed play into fragmented time, constant accessibility, and habitual engagement.
Macroeconomics growth reshapes everyday routines in concrete ways. Time becomes broken down into short intervals and daily behavior turns into repeated actions such as checking apps and notifications. As a result, daily life has been organized around frequent, low-intensity engagement rather than sustained attention which pushes the growth of casual games.
Based on casual game studies and media structure such as casual game design, free-to-play game business model and social game research, my research analyzes the core loop of these games which is interruptibility, reward loops, and continuous feedback align with reinforce everyday digital habits. These design structures enable players to engage with games in short, repeated intervals, integrating gameplay into daily routines.
From a psychological perspective, this research further explores how these systems produce emotional responses, including comfort, anticipation, and attachment, which encourage players to return to the game over time.
Lastly by comparing the shared structure of casual games with social media platforms, how both software economies operate the attention driven and habit development of our audience. Through daily logins, streak systems, and algorithmic reward cycles, these systems reshaped our user behavior in a similar way. I am also planning on providing specific examples to analyze to show how these systems are revealed in game, illustrating the intersection of design, emotion, and monetization.
This paper argues that casual games do not simply adapt to fragmented daily routines, but actively participate in reshaping how players organize time, attention, and emotional engagement in contemporary digital life.
" }, { "title": "Marco Carenza", "description": "This paper explores how fighting games foster community in comparison to other competitive games. I will discuss fighting games as a genre, its history, while giving examples of sub-genres. After establishing the field of study, the analysis will focus on the Fighting Game Community (FGC), comparing it to other competitive communities in the gaming space. This analysis finds that while other genres tend to foster their communities online, fighting games have had little official online support. Due to the recency of serviceable online play, fighting games and their communities tend to center on “offline” play spaces, which separates it from other genres. Other games tend to foster more “online” communities, as online play is more convenient. Based on this comparison, I discuss how the FGC values their unique culture and emphasis on social competition.
" }, { "title": "Nic Kim", "description": "In the contemporary character-centric environment of fandom, there is an observable difference between the treatment of gay male characters – either canon or interpreted –and female characters or characters of color. This zine describes the phenomenon in which fandoms that identify as progressive safe spaces will nonetheless exhibit the same tendency to deny, excuse, or defend bigotry within the source material they are fans of or within the fan communities they are a part of. The same bigoted rhetoric present in FPSlobbies recreates itself in the progressive fandom space, the difference being that gay men are no longer the subject of that hate. I analyze the fanfiction site Archive Of OurOwn for data on the relative popularity of characters and found that not only did M/M vastly outperform F/F, but that male characters also had more fanfiction written about them in general. The same goes for white characters versus characters of color. I also examine various fandoms such as those for Disco Elysium, Dropout TV, The Pitt, andBaldurʼs Gate III for their reactions to political criticisms of their source materials.
I believe this reveals something about how Western audiences perceive media consumption. Media consumption becomes an identifier, and, moreover, a political identifier. Buying apparel, stickers, and acrylic charms at conventions is reframed as supporting local queer, woman-owned businesses instead of a symptom of purchasing cheap labor from the Global South. When one hinges their political identity on the type of games they play, there is an incentive to then defend those games as politically correct,with little room for criticism.
" }, { "title": "Panel one talk eight title goes here", "description": "Talk description does here" } ] }, { "title": "Identity", "description": "Our panel will be discussing how certain concepts are represented in games and why they’re represented that way. Each panelist will be covering a different aspect of the self and examining how players explore said aspects in and outside of games.
To start, we will have the audience play a version of HARVL, a social deduction game with roleplaying elements. This will contextualize our identity-focused presentations.
Esteban will use the affordances of role-playing games to understand whyFacebook’s version of the Metaverse was largely unsuccessful. Though manyRPGs – from tabletop to MMOs – already provide a safe and shared space for personal expression, what is the role of technology in creating 'limitless”social worlds?
Mars will examine the Bioshock series to analyze how the heroic father protagonist and the systematic erasure/demonization of motherhood does not necessarily celebrate fatherhood — rather, “exceptional” male parenting is simply ordinary maternal expectations rebranded as “heroism”.
Lucas will draw on the principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as a lens to explore how mental illness can be taught and represented in games without the stigma and horror tied to it. He will develop a framework and apply it to examine how Depression Quest portrays the struggles of depression not through psychological horror imagery, but through its procedural rhetoric.
Despoina/DLC will discuss representation of gender in nonhuman characters and analyze how it leads to gender and identity play in Pokémon fans both in-game and IRL. She will examine cosplay, in particular Pokémon cosplay drag (PokeDrag), as a way in which queer Pokemon fans co-opt and co-create the identities of these creatures alongside the designers.
We will conclude with a brief Q&A session with all panelists. The audience will be asked to allow their HARVL roles to guide how they behave during the Q&A!
", "abstracts": [ { "title": "Despoina/DLC", "description": "Pokémon, first released during 1996 in versions Red, Green, and later Blue, isa well-beloved video game and transmedia franchise that has amassed all kinds of fans over its 30-year-and-counting lifetime. This presentation aims to discuss the evolution of gender and identity play among Pokémon fans. To that end, I examine five major design choices that have been made to dictate how gender is represented in the Pokémon world. These are:
● 1996-Now: The introduction and function of Pokémon gender as a mechanic
● 2000/2001: The ability to choose the gender of your player character
● 2013: The ability to customize your character avatar
● 2016-2019: The introduction of the first non-binary Pokémon trainer inPokémon GO
● 2025: The advent of gender-neutral clothing in Pokémon Legends: ZA,Pokémon’s latest main series title
My investigation of these features leads me to observe one way Pokémon fans transition their in-game gender and identity play to the physical world. I refer to the growing Pokémon cosplay drag (or simply, PokéDrag) scene,found in New York City and other cities with vibrant drag communities.Research done to support this analysis includes interviews with queerPokémon fans, as well as academic writing on cosplay/drag, Pokémon and gender representation in games, and the role of Pokémon fan works. This is all in service of my argument that queer Pokémon fans deepen their relationship with the source material and by extension, themselves, by co-opting and co-creating the identities of these non-human characters.
My conference contribution will feature a presentation that functions as a scoped down version of the larger video essay and will conclude with a PokéDrag performance from yours truly to further contextualize my thesis.
" }, { "title": "Esteban Romero", "description": "The metaverse is a vision of a digital universe popularized in 2021 after Facebook rebranded itself and announced it as their next social platform. They claimed that people could do anything together in this digital universe –from business to education (Meta, 2021). A few years later, the company is downscaling their Reality Labs division and their proprietary VR social app, Horizon Worlds, has been called 'dead' by major media outlets (Tan & Isaac, 2026). In this work, I will analyze the metaverse beyond its technical challenges to understand its failure as a vision and a culture: a 'technofuturistic dream' of a post-racial, hyper-connected, and limitless VR utopia. By comparing this ideal to the worlds of role-playing games, I support the thesis that the metaverse failed to be widely adopted because it was pitched as a way for people to perform real-world activities and lacked the social structures afforded by rules. RPGs, on the contrary, tend to provide a safe and isolated space for play, socialization, emergent storytelling, and expression of identity. Through our creativity and capacity for social negotiation, we can use games to transform any social experience into a shared fantasy without the need to rely on technology. References:
Meta. (2021, October 28). The Metaverse and How We’ll Build It Together -- Connect 2021. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uvufun6xer8Tan, E., & Isaac, M. (2026, March 19). The Long Farewell to Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/technology/mark-zuckerbergs-metaverse-vr-horizon-worlds.html
Through the lens of CBT, representing depression through procedural rhetorics can destigmatize mental health and teach players how it feels to have depression from a cognitive and behavioral viewpoint.
Mainstream games that tackle topics of mental illness frequently depict them negatively, associating them with fear and violence. Conversely, while indie games are praised for their more authentic depictions, they are also vulnerable to the same stigmatization due to strong ties with the psychological horror genre. Horror techniques such as jump scares, atmospheric tension, and uncanny aesthetics risk destabilizing players rather than encouraging them to empathize and ultimately undermine the player’s capacity to engage with the game.
This raises questions: What can games do to foster self-reflection and empathy? How can games accurately convey the cognitive and behavioral experience of mental illness? How do we design games to communicate this without resorting to horror tropes? To address these questions, this paper applies the core principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to analyze how games can utilize mechanics to convey procedural rhetorics about mental health. It then draws comparisons between the structure of treating mentally ill patients in each CBT session and player behavior. This framework is subsequently applied to a case study of Depression Quest (Quinn, 2013) to demonstrate that, through the lens of CBT, it offers a viable model for conveying depression through procedural rhetorics and can destigmatize the negative associations of mental health games.
" }, { "title": "Mars So", "description": "