We would like to consider the presence of nationalistic game-related rhetoric in traditional media and on digital platforms, as well as the influence of the national cultures over game design practices and game content (e.g. The aim of this workshop is to critically scrutinize the relationship between digital games and national cultures. In this publication, we hope to come up with a number of suggestions about practices of game education that originated during lockdown, but that have also proven to be useful in post-pandemic times.

The major objective of this workshop is sharing of ideas and experiences, which will ideally lead to a collective publication in which we will present our insights to the broader game community. Participants who have submitted examples of their own experiences in advance may be invited to give a short presentation at the start of the workshop The workshop is open to everyone working in this field or interested in the topic. Participants are requested to provide short biographical information, explaining their interests and their level of knowledge about this topic, and if possible also 2-3 examples of challenges, solutions and/or insights they consider relevant to share in this session. The second half of the workshop will focus on further dialogue between participants, with smaller groups dedicated to discussing the challenges they have faced during their game courses, as well as solutions, practices and novel insights they may have gathered on those aspects. The workshop will consist of two parts: in the first half the workshop coordinators and a number of selected participants will provide 5-10 minute presentations. This 2-hour hybrid workshop aims to address the challenges that game educators have faced during the recent lockdowns due to worldwide COVID19 regulations, and invites them to share the creative solutions, newly invented practices and novel insights that they may have derived from having to teach their game design courses online. How can critical game scholarship on post-human agency intervene in pressing debates about persuasive technologies’ manipulation of human volition and its long shadow over the mechanisms and institutions of collective decision-making that constitute democracy? Videogames also embed critiques of this conundrum that are often ambivalent but occasionally trenchant. How can critical game scholars address and advocate for more inclusive, democratic, and sustainable forms of play, understood as performative outcomes of an array of interdependencies between humans, environments and non-human entities? As an artistic and economic expression of the mediated technicity of our current age, videogames crystalize the conundrum of individual agency that has beset our screens and bedevilled our politics. Guided by the pragmatism of the feminist eco-humanities, this workshop will deploy theories and consider methods (Hamilton and Taylor 2017) to politicize ways of conceptualizing, designing, and organizing games for agency beyond human centrism. Thus, the workshop will bring together different researchers interested in exploring the avatar and related concepts, to examine, compare, and debate the uses and applications of the different approaches and how the community of scholars studying games may best handle the present challenges to avatar theory. At the same time, the term has been criticized for being a cultural appropriation of a Hindu object of worship (de Wilt et al., 2019), and the expansive nature of the avatar, as indicated by the great diversity in theories, suggest that it might be time to organize existing theories to be able to compare and discuss whether and how the term can be productively used in future studies of digital games. Research from psychological and social-scientific angles (Waggoner 2009 Ducheneaut et al 20) has also considered the significance of avatarial engagement on personal and social identities. The topic has been approached from a variety of perspectives, ranging from theoretical investigations rooted in phenomenology (Klevjer, 2007 Vella, 2015 Kania, 2017) and game design (Jørgensen, 2013 Willumsen, 2018) to theatre and puppetry (Blanchet, 2008 Westecott, 2009 Georges, 2012) and player engagement (Linderoth, 2005 Bayliss, 2007 Lankoski, 2011), to name a few. “Avatar theory,” or the study of avatars and related phenomena (player figures, playable characters, player-controlled components, etc.) is continuously expanded as scholars dive deeper into the configurations of interaction with and within digital games and the worlds they project.

Frostpunk multiple workshops