Katja Aller (Cologne Game Lab / University of Cologne)

René Lang (a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School | University of Cologne)

Su-Jin Song (Cologne Game Lab / TH Köln)

Katja Aller (Cologne Game Lab / University of Cologne)

René Lang (a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School / University of Cologne)

Su-Jin Song (Cologne Game Lab / TH Köln)

Gaming is one of the most vibrant and diverse cultural spaces of our time—yet, like any social environment, it is not immune to extremism and hate. Online multiplayer spaces, streaming platforms, and game-related social networks have increasingly become arenas where extremist ideologies spread, recruitment takes place, and hate speech flourishes. These spaces are not just being infiltrated by extremists; they are being actively shaped as metapolitical tools, designed to normalize and disseminate harmful ideologies under the guise of gaming culture.  

The connections between gaming and right-wing terrorism are no longer hypothetical. From Christchurch to Halle, attackers have referenced gaming subcultures in their manifestos, livestreamed their actions like a twisted form of speedrunning, and embedded extremist memes and language into the broader gaming discourse. However, framing gaming communities merely as breeding grounds for radicalization misses a crucial point: these extremists are, above all, gamers themselves. They come to these spaces not just for ideological purposes but for the same reasons as everyone else—to play, to connect, and to belong.  

This presents both a challenge and an opportunity. If extremists seek community within gaming, then it is precisely through the power of inclusive, liberal gaming communities that we can push back. But this cannot be achieved through top-down interventions alone. Meaningful change must emerge from within—through a collaborative effort between gamers, developers, civil society, and policymakers. This keynote will explore how gaming spaces can be reclaimed, how grassroots action against hate is already taking shape, and how we can build digital worlds where belonging is not dictated by extremism but by shared passion and mutual respect.

Matthias Heider (Institute for Democracy and Civil Society (IDZ)

“Cozy games” is a vernacular term among player culture and industry that has triumphed over prior scholarly attempts at labeling non-competitive or violent, wholesome gameplay, such as “empathy games,” or “ambient games.” Cozy games encourage relaxation rather than challenge, creative energy instead directed toward crafting environments and socializing with other online players or with Non-Player Characters (NPCs). This project provides a critique of the notion of coziness, attempting to understand how forms of coziness produced in pandemic-era play preserve hegemonic structural ideologies. The term boomed in mainstream discourse with the popularity of games such as Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley in 2020. Play during a pandemic might take form in bundling up in a blanket, soothing anxiety, grief, or Covid itself. These games invite players to pick flowers and nurture relationships in a walkable community, delivering a warm hug while the outside world seemingly caved in. Rural spaces are positioned as a remedy to the depressing grind of the urban jobs from which protagonists – and subsequently players themselves – flee. Cozy games construct a nationally unspecific Volk in a bucolic space void of modern crises. Such a rural figure is embedded in modern nationalist culture, all the more fervently with recent resurgences in western populist campaigns that purport to remedy crises brought by failing capitalism in aesthetics, while structurally tearing apart what few constraints to catastrophic ecological destruction or labor protections remain. The cozy game Volk is however as transnational as the global market, and socially progressive. Perhaps not the figure of nationalistic appropriation, the tolerant farmer however delivers a populism unoffensive to Western progressive liberalism. Beneath the pastel colors, cozy games’ objectives demand hours of grinding, or tedious, repetitive task fulfillment identical to those seemingly left behind in the city. After hours or even hundreds of hours of grinding, the farm is automated as if a factory, thus suggesting that crisis may be resolved along spatial rather than structural terms. In a moment of global crisis, coziness was offered in place of struggle, a veneer of wholesome anti- capitalism dangled over the grinding gears of sleepless 21st century capitalism.

Bibliography:

Juul, Jesper. A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and Their Players. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.

Bakun, Martyna/Agata Waszkiewicz. “Towards the Aesthetics of Cozy Video Games.” Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 12 no. 3 (2020): 225–240.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Gandolfini, Enrico and Sofia. “Playing Across the Social Zone: Animal Crossing, Gaming Communities and Connectedness in a Time of Crisis.” Academicus. International
Scientific Journal 12 no. 23 (2021): 41–51.

Lewis, Joanna E. “New Social Horizons: Anxiety, Isolation, and Animal Crossing During the
COVID-19 Pandemic.” Frontiers in Visual Realities 2 (2021).

Blanco-Fernández, Vitor. “Video Games were my First Safe Space: Queer Gaming in the Animal
Crossing Community.” Games and Culture (2023).

Mackay, O.E.L & C.A. Roberts. “Peace in the Valley: A Media and Discourse Analysis of Eric
Barone’s Stardew Valley Through Utopian Theory.” Games and Culture (2023). McRobbie,
Angela. Be Creative. Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2016.

Ludography:

Stardew Valley (Concerned Ape 2016)

Animal Crossing: New Horizons (Nintendo 2020)

Alexandra Petrus, M.A. (University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts)

Rüdiger Brandis, M.A. (Playing History GmbH; University of Göttingen)

Games, with their interactive and immersive properties, have the potential to engage audiences more deeply with their subject matter than other media formats. This study investigates whether smaller versions of these games—mini games, which are relatively easier and less expensive to produce—can serve as effective tools for storytelling about labor movements in the gig economy. The goal is to create layers of impact, including encouraging the public to join and support unions, especially during a time when new capital, backed by platform and gig economies, is reshaping work structures. This shift necessitates public interest and participation, empowering workers to exercise their agency through a tripartite mechanism in formulating governing policies for the digital age of industrialization.Accompanying this study is a practical component: a mini game titled Resist, which is based on a dramatized story inspired by ongoing unionization struggles within a real-world transnational e-commerce company. This game serves as the primary case study for this inquiry. The analysis is guided by a mixed methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative techniques. The qualitative aspect draws from existing research on mini games, their use cases and methodologies for measuring media impact. The quantitative component involves testing the game prototype with a sample of 10 participants, including students, gig workers and journalists.

Initial findings support the hypothesis that mini games are an effective medium for storytelling. They provide insights that foster empathy with the workers portrayed in the game and offer players an experiential understanding of surviving under the conditions depicted. Furthermore, this study highlights that mini games not only present a unique approach to advocacy and storytelling in the digital age but also demonstrate potential for engaging investigative journalism in accessible, enjoyable and impactful ways.

Zubair Ashraf (Freelancer)

This study investigates the sociality of South Korean female online game fans to understand
the sociological background that influences the creation of long-term game communities and
how these communities influence both South Korean gaming culture and the fans themselves.
Despite South Korea’s gaming population having a nearly equal gender ratio, Riot Games’
multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, League of Legends (LoL), remained maledominated, with only one professional league for male gamers. However, most fans are female, forming a community on the social media platform Twitter (now X) and developing intimate bonds by attending and supporting matches in person.

South Korea’s LoL tournament began in 2012 and has evolved into a vast organization
managing professional gamers, teams, and fans. However, in the early 2010s, the fandom was
relatively small, gaming culture was male-dominated, and the relationship between fans and
gamers was opaque as professional gaming was not recognized as a profession. As a result, a
small group of female fans played an important role in shaping fan cultures. They helped new
female fans by acting like “sisters”, sharing their empirical knowledge about how to behave
when there were no fan-meeting rules, how to communicate with other fans on social media,
and how to avoid issues with male gamers or fans.

The sexual discrimination that female fans faced during their fan activities, combined with the
growing awareness of misogyny in society highlighted by the “feminist reboot” movement in
South Korea in 2015, offered a societal context for women to speak out and unite in solidarity.
Based on ten years of interaction, participant observation and interviews with female LoL fans,
this study argues that their fan activities not only provided a safe environment for female fans
to gather, but also transformed South Korea’s male-dominated game culture.

Yoonjung Kim (a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School / University of Cologne)

Esports is an emerging field that elevates gaming to a new level. To ensure that everyone can participate, it is crucial to actively promote equal opportunities and inclusion right from the start. However, this has not yet been achieved: women remain underrepresented and face disadvantages in esports. Experiences of structural sexism and exclusion are omnipresent, for example during selection processes on the path to an esports career, in team formation, at esports events, and within the digital games themselves.

In my paper, ‘Gender & Equality in Esports,’ I present a status-quo analysis of the German esports scene with a focus on female players, developed as part of my PhD thesis. Based on currently 16 in- depth interviews with female League of Legends, Valorant, and Counter-Strike players, field research at numerous esports events, and my own practical work on gender equality in esports, my contribution aims to identify the obstacles women face in esports and the strategies that they have developed to cope with them. Since a career in esports is closely linked with successful self- marketing, the paper also covers other practices associated with digital games such as streaming and influencing. Lastly, emerging initiatives advocating for greater gender equality in German esports are examined, evaluating their sustainability and identifying potential mechanisms of failure to provide a recommended course of action.
My contribution addresses several themes of the Young Academics Workshop, particularly diversity and inclusion, polarization, sexism, and racism within gaming and digital communities, and social interaction/community building with a focus on gender equity. I will be nearing the submission of my dissertation at the time of the workshop, so the feedback would be immensely beneficial, and as a ‘young academic,’ I would undoubtedly gain from it.

Bibliography:
Balakina, Daria, Alesha Serada & Gareth Schott (2022): From the Cradle to Battle: What Shapes the Careers of Female CS:GO Esports Players, in: Academic Mindtrek ’22: Proceedings of the 25th International Academic Mindtrek Conference, 41-52.

Condis, Megan (2018): Gaming Masculinity. Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 44-67.

DeWinter, Jennifer & Carly A. Kocurek (2017): “Aw Fuck, I Got a Bitch on My Team!”. Women and the Exclusionary Cultures of the Computer Game Complex, in: Jennifer Malkowski & TreaAndrea M. Russworm (Ed.), Gaming Representation, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 57-73.

Groen, Maike (2014): Ladies <3 Gaming: E-Sport und die (Ent-)Dramatisierung von Geschlecht, in: Markus Breuer & Daniel Görlich (Ed.), Paidia. Zeitschrift für Computerspielforschung.

Kordyaka, Bastian & Marlies Brunnhofer (2021): Self-Fulfilling Prophecies? Using Expectancy Theory to Explain Gender Disparities in eSports, in: Proceedings of the Forty-Second International Conference on Information Systems, Austin 2021.

Misra, Anamika & Akshay Danwani (2012): The World of eSports – Through a Girl Gamer’s Eye, in: Julia Christophers & Tobias M. Scholz (Ed.), eSports Yearbook 2011/12, 59-62.

Ruberg, Bonnie, Amanda L. L. Cullen & Kathryn Brewster (2019): Nothing but a „titty streamer“: legitimacy, labor, and the debate over women’s breasts in video game live streaming, in: Critical Studies in Media Communication, 466-481.

Ruotsalainen, Mria & Usva Friman (2018): “There Are No Women and They
All Play Mercy”: Understanding and Explaining (the Lack of) Women’s Presence in Esports and Competitive Gaming, in: Proceedings of Nordic DiGRA 2018.

Ruvalcaba, Omar, Jeffrey Shulze, Angela Kim, Sara R. Berzenski & Mark P. Otten (2018): Women’s Experiences in eSports: Gendered Differences in Peer and Spectator Feedback During Competitive Video Game Play, in: Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 235-311.

Siutila, Miia & Ellinoora Havaste (2018): “A pure meritocracy blind to identity”: Exploring the Online Responses to All-Female Teams in Reddit, in: Proceedings of DiGRA 2018.

Finja Walsdorff, M.A. (University of Siegen and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany)

In the “Assassin’s Creed” series, interactivity is applied to explore major events in world history, from Viking-invasions to the French Revolution. How does player choice – and with it, an opportunity to claim representational agency through the loopholes non-linearity invariably provides – impact the ways such “official pasts” can be mediated in games? And, even more intriguingly, what further opportunities does this offer for retelling lesser-known, swept-under- the-rug histories?

My practice as artist and game designer has been deeply informed by explorations into such odd pockets of representational sovereignty: re-walking, and, in consequence, re-imagining marginalized histories playfully. In this session, I will present recently released “STONEWALL – Streets of Rage”, a serious arcade game chronicling the cataclysmic events surrounding the 1969 Stonewall Uprising. Produced in collaboration with fellow CGL students Frannie van der Walt, Vaisko, and John Bright Golder, I will discuss strategies our team applied and the challenges we faced navigating these complex countercultural histories. “Stonewall” was also produced as nod to a wider contemporary scene of indie-game designers and digital artists often utilizing a rogue punk approach to storytelling to address a still glaring gap in gaming (mis-) representation.

In this session, I invite to speculate on the transgressive potential non-linearity holds for finding new representations of often “conveniently left out” histories. Especially, more spontaneously and less restrictively DIY-produced indie and art games have proven to be driving vessels in expanding games’ narrative scope and depth. These propositions, not unlike Doc Brown’s self-modified DeLorean, become vehicles of change, granting their players the ability to experience representational histories as spheres of agency that can be negotiated and reclaimed; their magical flux capacitor – “This is what makes time travel possible!” 1 – being: interactivity.

Hannes Ribarits (Cologne Game Lab / TH Köln)

Harassment and identity-based discrimination are highly prevalent in digital communities, both in social media and in online gaming spaces (ADL Center for Technology & Society, 2024a; 2024b). However, coded or covert language, dog whistles and hate symbols can make it difficult to identify hate posts and take action against them, especially for children and adolescents.

“The Moderator” is designed as a narrative-driven educational game where players take control of a content moderator on the first day of their job. Logging in on a virtual desktop, the player is tasked with evaluating reported posts on the fictional social media platform Y. However, they can always message their mentor or friends to start non-linear conversations about the posts they are reading. While these conversations are designed to communicate information about hate symbols and discrimination, they are also full of narrative hooks to keep the player engaged in the story and its characters.

Educational merits of the game are based on the constructivist approach that proposes learning takes place as learners are actively involved in a process of meaning and knowledge construction as opposed to a passive reception of information (Reich, 2012). A given set of posts is used as guided instruction (Fisher & Frey, 2010) to prompt questions and guide thinking on online extremism. From there, the game moves to inquiry-based learning (Dostál, 2015) as players can autonomously decide which topics to probe and which questions to ask.
The game is work in progress. Game ideas are presented and implications for educational settings are discussed.

Bibliography:
ADL Center for Technology & Society. (2024a). Hate is No Game: Hate and Harassment in Online Games 2023. https://www.adl.org/resources/report/hate-no-game-hate-and-harassment-online-games-2023

ADL Center for Technology & Society. (2024b). Online Hate and Harassment: The American Experience 2024.https://www.adl.org/resources/report/online-hate-and-harassment-american-experience-2024

Dostál, J. (2015). Inquiry-based instruction: Concept, essence, importance and contribution. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci.

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2010). Guided instruction: How to develop confident and successful learners. ASCD. Reich, K. (2012). Konstruktivistische Didaktik. Beltz.

Benjamin Strobel, Phd (Behind the Screens)

Developed by Demagog Studio for the post-apocalyptic games Golf Club Nostalgia (2021) and The Cub (2024), the fictional radio program ‘Radio Nostalgia from Mars’ is central to the games’ satirical narratives, which engage with timely issues like loneliness, post-communist nostalgia, climate and social change, new media politics, dissent, and corporate hypercapitalism. This diegetic radio program not only sets the game world’s tone through original music and a charismatic host, who airs nostalgic stories of listeners that explore and reflect on the games’ themes, but these stories also function as audio-only vignettes from pre- and post-apocalyptic human futures. Meanwhile, Radio Nostalgia from Mars is presented as a controlled space of dissent for the survivors (now living on Mars in a privately-owned society ruled by big corporations) and has design limitations that, in fact, authorize the survivors’ experience of both the past and the present, thus adopting unique nostalgic, identitarian, and collectivizing natures. This paper considers Radio Nostalgia from Mars’ design as a nostalgic device that, rather than simulating future (or past) cultural dynamics and social behaviors for the player to interact with, thematizes speculative socioeconomic conditions, rules, and constraints of human life on Mars. Thus, this device is in the process of constructing a post-apocalyptic virtual prosthetic community based on the liberties the radio program offers, which are solely based on memory and nostalgia of what is essentially the players’ present time. This community promotes a supportive multicultural environment that seeks social change while unironically reflecting on the current political and environmental climate. To explore this nostalgic device, this paper carries out a thematic and close-reading analysis of the games Golf Club Nostalgia and The Cub, and their iterations of the radio program Radio Nostalgia from Mars.

Keywords:
Post-apocalyptic Video Games; Post-Communist Nostalgia; Corporate Hypercapitalism and Society; Memory and Identity; Video Games and Community Building

Ludography:
Demagog Studio. 2018/2021. Golf Club Nostalgia. PC edition. Belgrade: Untold Tales.
———. 2023/2024. Highwater. iPad edition. Belgrade: Rogue Games, Inc.
———. 2024. The Cub. PC edition. Belgrade: Untold Tales.

Bibliography:
Berry, Shane, and Igor Simić. 2022. Radio Nostalgia from Mars. Golf Club Wasteland: Original Game Soundtrack. Belgrade: Demagog Studio. https://open.spotify.com/album/7qIpdG2tlkWPc3XXJL6Lze

Bjelić, Dušan I. 2005. “Introduction: Blowing Up the ‘Bridge.’” In Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation, edited by Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić, 1–22. Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. 2009. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Choice Reviews Online. Electronic Mediations ; 29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fordyce, Robbie. 2020. “Play, History and Politics: Conceiving Futures Beyond Empire.” Games and Culture 16 (3): 294–304. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412020962430

Fraser, Emma. 2019. “Post-Apocalyptic Play: Representations of the End of the City in Video Games.” In Broken Mirrors: Representations of Apocalypses and Dystopias in Popular Culture, edited by Joe Trotta, Zlatan Filipovic, and Houman Sadri, 121–37. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429280634-8

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

———. 2004. Multitude : War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press.

Leiderman, Daniil. 2022. “The Landscape of Durance: Utopianism and Eastern Europe in Video Games.” Russian Literature 129: 47–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ruslit.2022.02.001

Mejía-Alandia, Diego A. (2024). A [W]hole in One. Balkanization, Empire, and the Apocalypse as Playground in Golf Club Nostalgia. Proceedings of DiGRA 2024 Conference: Playgrounds. DiGRA. https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/2265/2262

Nesterenko, Oleg. 2021. “Golf Club: Wasteland Creative Director Igor Simic: ‘We Create Digital Content for a Generation That Will Live to Witness the End Times’ [Interview].” Game World Observer. 2021. https://gameworldobserver.com/2021/10/27/golf-club-wasteland-creative-director-igor-simic-we-create-digital-content-for-a-generation-that-will-live-to-witness-the-end-times

Rekść, Magdalena. 2015. “Nostalgia for Communism in the Collective Imaginations.” Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 183: 105–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.04.852
Simić, Igor. 2019. “Constellation Storytelling [Conference Presentation].” In Game Happens Festival 2019 – Elements of Change. Genova: Game Happens. https://youtu.be/uAWQR-36KZU
Simić, Igor, and Ivan Stanković. 2018. “World, Film, Game: The Transmedia Storytelling of Golf Club: Wasteland [Conference Presentation].” In Unite Los Angeles 2018. Los Angeles: Unity. https://youtu.be/UAC5ofsVhNs

Todorova, Maria. 2009. Imagining the Balkans. Updated Ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Todorova, Maria, and Zsuzsa Gille. 2010. Post-Communist Nostalgia. New York: Berghahn Books.

Weiss, Srdjan Jovanovic, and Armin Linke. 2018. “Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act.” Post. Notes on Art in a Global Context, July 2018. https://post.moma.org/socialist-architecture-the-reappearing-act/

Diego A Mejía-Alandia, PhD (Universidad de Sevilla, Spain)

“Representation matters!” has become a popular buzzword in identity politics, used to signify the importance of working towards the goal of creating spaces and role models for marginalized communities in politics, sports, journalism and media among others. In this effort to generate opportunities for all kinds of realities, experiences and struggles to be visual and audible in our culture, games can take a leading role. They are uniquely capable of featuring characters in a way that allows players to not only identify with them but to be them to a certain extent. The aim of this paper is to showcase how games can achieve representation through player agency and storytelling, exemplified by Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2021) and its portrayal of addiction and addicts. Disco Elysium features a protagonist continuously dealing with the consequences of alcoholism and the trauma he is suffering because of his addiction. Drinking and taking drugs is an integral game mechanic that allows players to explore the consequences of addiction for their character. The mechanic also creates moments of reflection and discusses issues of substance-usage with a specially created “voice” in the protagonist’s head. Furthermore, the game depicts several addicted side characters that allow insights into the various ways addiction has affected their lives. The paper will explain how Disco Elysium makes addiction apprehensible and gives players a better understanding of the issue. It will furthermore visualize the real-life impact Disco Elysium has on players dealing with addiction and recovery by showcasing examples and reports from the addiction-community. In doing so, it will demonstrate why Disco Elysium is a valuable resource that can help players on their journey to recovery and that also raises awareness and understanding for a community which often faces prejudices and exclusion from society.

Tom Teufer (University of Cologne)