Check out the latest publications of CGL-professors & staff in 2022. Find all other articles, chapters and conference proceedings in our ->publications section.


August 2022

Playful Materialities.
The Stuff That Games Are Made Of

Freyermuth, Gundolf S. | Beil, Benjamin | Schmidt, Hanns Christian | Rusch, Raven (eds.)

Game culture and material culture have always been closely linked. Analog forms of rule-based play (ludus) would hardly be conceivable without dice, cards, and game boards. In the act of free play (paidia), children as well as adults transform simple objects into multifaceted toys in an almost magical way. Even digital play is suffused with material culture: Games are not only mediated by technical interfaces, which we access via hardware and tangible peripherals. They are also subject to material hybridization, paratextual framing, and processes of de-, and re-materialization. [->learn more

October 2022

Mental Health | Atmospheres | Video Games.
New Directions in Game Research II

Alvarez Igarzábal, Federico | Debus, Michael S. | Maughan, Curtis L. | Vozaru, Miruna | Zimmermann, Felix | Aguilar Rodríguez, Jimena | Song, Su-Jin (eds.)

Gaming has never been disconnected from reality. When we engage with ever more lavish virtual worlds, something happens to us. The game imposes itself on us and influences how we feel about it, the world, and ourselves. How do games accomplish this and to what end? The contributors explore the video game as an atmospheric medium of hitherto unimagined potential. Is the medium too powerful, too influential? A danger to our mental health or an ally through even the darkest of times? This volume compiles papers from the Young Academics Workshop at the Clash of Realities conferences of 2019 and 2020 to provide answers to these questions. [->learn more]


November 2022

Playing at a Distance. Borderlands of Video Game Aesthetic
Sonia Fizek

Do we play video games or do video games play us? Is nonhuman play a mere paradox or the future of gaming? And what do video games have to do with quantum theory? In Playing at a Distance, Sonia Fizek engages with these and many more daunting questions, forging new ways to think and talk about games and play that decenter the human player and explore a variety of play formats and practices that require surprisingly little human action. Idling in clicker games, wandering in walking simulators, automating gameplay with bots, or simply watching games rather than playing them—Fizek shows how these seemingly marginal cases are central to understanding how we play in the digital age. [->learn more]