Videogames are a mass medium whose global sales and user numbers have exceeded those of the film and music industries for over a decade. However, they serve much more than just entertainment purposes. As interactive, educational experience worlds, they are used by governments and paramilitary groups as propaganda tools and military training simulators, e.g. in the Ukrainian War. Simultaneously, videogames can serve to convey and critically engage with culturally specific and folkloric content and thus pursue pacifist, democratic and sustainability-promoting goals. Although this dual role forms the basis of much public controversy, there is no comprehensive scientific/scholarly understanding of how videogames as folk worlds can impact intercultural understanding in anti- and prosocial ways. Nor do we have the methodological tools to perform such research in qualitative, quantitative and mixed approaches. To address this lacuna, this international symposium serves to develop a systematic transdisciplinary research program in videogames as folk worlds and as tools for transcultural understanding. The contributions range from media, literary and cultural studies to computer science, anthropology, educational psychology and political science.
Generously funded by the Vielberth Foundation and sponsored by the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies and the Department of Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies at the University of Regensburg, this two-day symposium will analyze the dual role of computer games as transregional, nationalistic propaganda machines on the one hand and as democracy and diversity-fostering, critical and prosocial media experiences on the other. It will explore how the social and political actions of players are shaped by nationalist or fascist content, how such content appears in games, and how, conversely, pro-democracy, sustainability-promoting elements can be incorporated, experienced and learned in and through the design of alternative “indie” games.
An extensive conference report by Hanna Weimann (University of Stuttgart) is available here.
Programme
| 9:00h | Welcome and reception | Coffee/tea | |
| 9:15h | Opening address by the Dean of the Faculty of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures | Prof. Dr. Maria Selig | |
| 9:20h | Introduction, rationale and goals; “Folk Mechanic as Transregional Anthropocene Criticism in Indigenous Video Games” | Astrid Ensslin | |
| 9:45h | “A world to escape to: Gameworlds as otherworlds in datafied society” | Dom Ford | |
| 10:30h | Break | Coffee/tea | |
| 10:45-13:00h | Panel 1: Folk and Folklore in Games | Chair: Tomasz Majkowski | |
| 10:45h | “Who Are the Folk in 2024”? | Kristian Bjørkelo | |
| 11:30h | “Popular Heritage in Chinese Gameworlds: From a Tripartite Schema to Straightening?” | Bjarke Liboriussen | |
| 12:15h | „The Amorphology of Folk Games: Indian Videogames and Folk Narrative Traditions“ | Souvik Mukherjee | |
| 13:00h | Lunch | Fingerfood buffet | |
| 14:00h-16:15 | Panel 2: Tradition, Nationalism, Essentialism | Chair: Kristian Bjørkelo | |
| 14:00h | „Games and Invented Traditions“ | Tomasz Majkowski | |
| 14:45h | „Decolonizing Sweave: African Tradition and Alternative Cultural Pedagogies“ | Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang | |
| 15:30h | „The European video game exists. Do we need it?“ | Victor Navarro Remesal | Zoom |
| 16:15h | Break | Coffee/tea | |
| 16:30h | Graduate intervention / Surprise | Chair: Sebastian Richter | |
| 17:30h | Free time | ||
| 19:00h | Dinner, followed by guided walk through Regensburg |
Day 2 (12 April)
| 9:00-11:15h | Panel 3: Sustainable Politics and Pedagogies | Chair: Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang | |
| 9:00h | „Materiality of Digitality. The Politics and Ethics of Making Videogames“ | Sonia Fizek | |
| 9:45h | „On the Representation of Repair and Maintenance Cultures in Computer Games“ | Sebastian Möring | Zoom |
| 10:30h | Video recording (extended version, courtesy of University of Tampere) | Xenia Zeiler | |
| 11:15h | Break | Tea/coffee | |
| 11:30-13:00h | Thinking Ahead: Utopias, Visions, Actions | Chair: Astrid Ensslin | |
| 11:30h | „Re-Configuring Petrified Politics: Folk Games as Tools for Progressive Utopian Populism“ | Holger Pötzsch | |
| 12:15h | Joint discussion: where to next? (funding programs, publications, Nordic Digra 2025 panel and brainstorming for topics and RQs) | Hosts: Astrid and Holger | |
| 13:00h | Lunch | Fingerfood catering | |
| 13:30h | Small group work: designing new projects | Hosts: Astrid, Kristian and Tomasz | |
| 15:00h | Reporting back and closing discussion / forward planning | ||
| 16:00h | Symposium ends |
Decolonizing Sweave: African Tradition and Alternative Cultural Pedagogies
Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang, University of Ghana
Video games are typically played for teleological purposes: the goal is to “win” and complete the tasks associated with the game. However, there is research into alternative reasons for playing video games, with some focus on the quotidian and intentionally failing games. Leaning toward the latter goal, this presentation explores the nexus between alternative purposes and pedagogy through the game Sweave. Created by the African platform Leti Arts, this ball game includes moments of teaching anytime the user fails: the user learns about Adinkra and Ancient Egyptian symbols that recall traditional forms of knowledge production and learning that have characterized African society. This presentation explores the implications of using failure as a strategy to learn about one’s culture, positioning this move as a decolonial turn. Sampling the views of undergraduate students at the University of Ghana for this exercise suggests that even though the game is designed with winning as the primary objective, alternative playstyles that embrace failure unlock unique educational possibilities.
Kwabena Opoku-Agyemang is a senior lecturer at the English Department of the University of Ghana and the academic director for School for International Training Ghana. His scholarship has appeared in several edited volumes and journals, and revolves around African digital literature. He is the West African Anglophone editor of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde, the oldest literary journal in South Africa, and serves on the boards of journals that include Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, and Critical Global Issues.
The European video game exists. Do we need it?
Victor Navarro-Remesal, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
This presentation discusses the idea of the “European video game” as a category separated from North American and Japanese video games, tackling it from the benefits but also dangers it presents to nationalism, identities, and democratic culture. In 2021, we edited a book titled Perspectives on the European Videogame that proposed an inquiry into the shared elements of games made in Europe, including both analyses of transnational aspects of European production and close readings of national specificities. The authors in the collection focused on European works and creators but also addressed contextual aspects within a wider sociocultural and philosophical ground. After that, we saw the need to go to the roots of our object and we are now currently working on a second volume, dedicated to historical elements. Our ongoing experience has shown us that there are benefits to using the concept, such as illuminating contextual factors that might be overlooked in a global perspective and dialogues and exchanges between regions, but also that the label risks being misapplied to construct a unified object with a fix cultural identity that separates its in-group. The European video game exists, and we need it to better understand history and cross-pollination, refusing essentialisms.
Víctor Navarro-Remesal is game scholar from Tecnocampus, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). He is the current president and a founding member of DiGRA Spain and the co-president of the History of Games conferences. His last book as an editor is ‘Perspectives on the European Videogame’ (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). His research interests include player freedom, Zen-inspired games and slow gaming, regional game studies, and game preservation. Currently, he’s one of the two Principal Investigators of the project Ludomythologies: Myths and ideology in contemporary video games.
Materiality of Digitality. The Politics and Ethics of Making Videogames
Sonia Fizek (TH Köln, Cologne Game Lab)
It was high summer 2022. In many regions of Europe and worldwide, temperatures reached record heights. France suffered under unprecedented wildfires, with over 62,000 hectares of flora burned by the end of August 2022. Meanwhile, players of the Riders Republic, a major multiplayer sports video game developed and published by Ubisoft Annecy, engaged in digital reforestation. They planted virtual trees in dedicated locations of the game’s map, bringing to life an entirely new forested area that stayed in the game for others to experience long after the event had come to an end. The Riders Republic Rebirth event culminated in the first ever in-game climate march. The project was conceptualized in 2021 during a Green Game Jam[1], organized by the Playing for the Planet Alliance, the Environmental Program of the United Nations. Boris Maniora, Riders Republic gameplay director, believes that green activations such as Rebirth show the empowering impact games can have on their players, instigating hope and potentially providing them with skills they could transfer to their off-line realities.
However, video games are not only drivers of ecological messages and climate positivity. They are as much objects of culture as they are of nature. As virtual, immaterial and clean as they are portrayed within the framework of postindustrial capitalism (Maxwell and Miller 2012, 5), they are literally made out of natural resources and material labour. Video games rely on technologies and production dynamics that make those media possible in the first place. Amongst many other media scholars, Sean Cubitt in Finite Media. Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (2017) talks about media as “finite resources in the closed system of planet Earth” (2017, 7), time-bound and tied to their physical dimensions. This talk is an invitation to rethink video games and gaming within the context of climate crisis and environmental sustainability, specifically their reliance on earthly matter – e.g. minerals that build up electronic technology, indispensable for their production, consumption and distribution.
Sources
Maxwell, R., and T. Miller. 2012. Greening the Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cubitt, S. 2016. Finite Media. Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Sonia Fizek is a games and media scholar. She holds a professorship in Media and Game Studies at the Cologne Game Lab at TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences. Fizek is also a visiting professor at the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw (Poland) and a co-editor-in-chief of the international Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds. In her latest book Playing at a Distance (MIT Press 2022), she explores the borderlands of video game aesthetic with focus on automation, AI and posthuman forms of play. Fizek’s current research concentrates on the environmental sustainability of video games. She is a principal investigator of “Greening Games” (www.greeningames.eu), an international project on the sustainability of video games (2021-2024, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service EU/DAAD) and a work package lead in the project „STRATEGIES. Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries“ (2024-2027, funded by EU HORIZON).
On the Representation of Repair and Maintenance Cultures in Computer Games
Sebastian Möring, Macromedia University, Berlin
In this paper I wish to explore the topics of repair and maintenance in the light of green game studies (Beke et al., 2024; Chang, 2019) as well as green media studies (Parham, 2016). Popular culture – both radical and mainstream – has an important role to play in supporting environmental awareness and translating ecological values in ways that are meaningful to our everyday lives. This comprehensive survey of green media and popular culture introduces the reader to the key debates and theories surrounding green interpretations of popular film, television and journalism, as well as comedy, music, animation, and computer games. With stimulating and original case studies on U2, Bjork, the animated films of Disney, the computer game Journey, and more, the text reveals the complicated and often contradictory relationship between the media and environmentalism. Green Media and Popular Culture is a critical starting point for students of Media, Film and Cultural Studies, and anyone else researching and studying in the rapidly growing field of green media and cultural studies (Parham, 2016; Parks & Starosielski, 2015). The contributors to Signal Traffic investigate how the material artifacts of media infrastructure–transoceanic cables, mobile telephone towers, Internet data centers, and the like–intersect with everyday life. Essayists confront the multiple and hybrid forms networks take, the different ways networks are imagined and engaged with by publics around the world, their local effects, and what human beings experience when a network fails. Some contributors explore the physical objects and industrial relations that make up an infrastructure. Others venture into the marginalized communities orphaned from the knowledge economies, technological literacies, and epistemological questions linked to infrastructural formation and use. The wide-ranging insights delineate the oft-ignored contrasts between industrialized and developing regions, rich and poor areas, and urban and rural settings, bringing technological differences into focus. Contributors include Charles R. Acland, Paul Dourish, Sarah Harris, Jennifer Holt and Patrick Vonderau, Shannon Mattern, Toby Miller, Lisa Parks, Christian Sandvig, Nicole Starosielski, Jonathan Sterne, and Helga Tawil-Souri (Parks & Starosielski, 2015), and waste studies. It has become a common trope in games that players can make their characters collect objects that can be used to repair or maintain other objects that in turn are often integral to the freedom the players of games can enjoy (Leino, 2014). The first quests of games such as Walden, A Game (Fullerton & USC Game Innovation Lab, 2017) or No Man’s Sky (Hello Games, 2016) require the players to gather a diverse range of objects the gameworlds of said games in order to repair either a hut in the forest (Walden, A Game) or a spaceship (No Man’s Sky). In other games, parts of tool or machines deteriorate after some use. These have to be repaired or replaced such as the pickaxe in Minecraft (Mojang, 2011) or a range of car parts in Jalopy (Minsk Works & Excalibur Games, 2018) in order to keep the functionality they provide. Jalopy is set in the time between the fall of the German Wall and the reunification of the two Germanys. The main character drives with an old Laika (a simulated version of the East German car Trabant) from Berlin to Istanbul. Reaching the goal is highly dependent on the successful maintenance of the fragile vehicle which is always on the brink of breaking down. The game is set in an everyday culture known for its dependence on repair knowledge (Hanstein et al., 2022). In light of the current climate crises, we need to understand how our cultures of waste and consumption can be modified to cultures of maintenance and repair. I believe that the analysis of how such cultures are represented in computer games will be of help in this endeavor.
Bibliography
Beke, L. op de, Raessens, J., Werning, S., & Farca, G. (Eds.). (2024). Ecogames. Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis. Amsterdam University Press.
Chang, A. Y. (2019). Playing nature: Ecology in video games. University of Minnesota Press.
Fullerton, T. & USC Game Innovation Lab. (2017). Walden, a game.
Hanstein, U., Klaut, M., & Mangold, J. (2022). Reparaturwissen: DDR Einleitung in den Schwerpunkt. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft, 14(27–2), 8–23. https://doi.org/10.14361/zfmw-2022-140203
Hello Games. (2016). No Man’s Sky ([PlayStation 4; Xbox One; Microsoft Windows]). Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Leino, O. T. (2014). <∞ min to Oasis of Happiness: Promises of Freedom and Play in Pocket Planes. Proceedings of The Philosophy of Computer Games Conference. The Philosophy of Computer Games, Istanbul. http://gamephilosophy2014.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Olli-Tapio-Leinoi-2014.-%E2%88%9E-min-to-Oasis-of-Happiness-Draft.-PCG2014.pdf
Lewis, T. (2008). Revealing the Makeover Show: INTRODUCTION. Continuum, 22(4), 441–446. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304310802190053
Minsk Works & Excalibur Games. (2018). Jalopy ([Windows PC, Xbox One]).
Mojang. (2011). Minecraft ([Windows PC et.al.]). Mojang.
Parham, J. (2016). Green media and popular culture: An introduction. Palgrave Macmillan.
Parks, L., & Starosielski, N. (Eds.). (2015). Signal traffic: Critical studies of media infrastructures. University of Illinois Press.
Dr. Sebastian Möring is a professor of Game Design at Macromedia University in Berlin. In 2021 he received the Teaching Award of the State of Brandenburg. His research focuses on the philosophy and aesthetics of computer games, in-game photography, green game studies, and games in educational contexts. Most recently he co-edited the anthology Screen Images. In-Game Photography, Screenshot, Screencast (Kadmos, 2023) and co-authored the chapter “Climate–Game–Worlds: A Media-Aesthetic Look at the Depiction and Function of Climate in Computer Games“ (in Ecogames. Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis, Amsterdam University Press, 2024). For further publications and more information see http://sebastianmoering.com.