Program

Workshops, keynote lectures and conference talks are open to general public. Social events and doctoral consortium are available to registered participants only.

September 26 (Thursday)

HourWORKSHOP:
Disobedience of fantasy and fantasy of disobedience: non-English magical worlds in videogames
Room 206
WORKSHOP:
Gaming Sights, Sighting Games: Ludic Visualities In and Out of Games
Room 205
11:30Mateusz Kominiarczuk  In hoc signo vinces? Complicated history of Christian symbolism in selected fantasy gamesAnna Szilágyi-Nagy, Eszter Tóth Abstract or Real? Transforming Children’s Mental Maps into Game Space
12:00Alesja Serada World- and Language-Building in Chinese-Themed Fantasy (the case of Jade Empire)Agata Zarzycka Ridiculing Visualizations of Gameplay as aSelf-Fashioning Trope in Game Culture
12:30Michał Łukasz Mochocki The Contested Polish/Slavicness of Witcher 3: A Postcolonial PerspectiveMateusz Felczak, Michał Gulik Interface, Failure Management and the Aesthetics of Paper Doll in Fantasy cRPGs
13:00DiscussionDiscussion
HourTrack 1
Room 213
Track 2
Room 115
13:30Registration Starts
15:00Official opening and KEYNOTE: Ignacy Trzewiczek: Story driven board games and the lack of text
Room 213
16:30Coffee Break

SESSION 1
Room 213
SESSION 2
Room 115
17:00Jaroslav Švelch and Jan Švelch Playing cards with abominations: Posthuman monstrosity in the Hecatomb card game Tobias Staaby “We’ll lose if Clementine dies!” – Video games as tools for dialogical teaching and learning
17:30Jonne Arjoranta Interpretation as a Game Mechanic in Board GamesStanisław Krawczyk Tabletop RPGs, video games, and SF&F literature in Poland in the 1990s: A joint study
18:00Piotr Sterczewski Brave Volunteers, Heroic Scouts, and Playing the Pogrom Card: Semper Fidelis. Battle of Lviv 1918–1919 and Polish Mnemonic HegemonyMichał Mochocki Role-Played Heritage: The Roots and Forms of Physical Role-Enactment as Heritage Practices
18:30Péter Kristóf Makai Cladistic and Climate Change on Cardboard: Evolution in Ecological Eurogames Jacek Mianowski Leadership, Circuition and Shift in Tabletop Wargaming Community
20:00 Welcome Party
Kufle i widelce pub, ul. Czysta 3
Google maps

September 27 (Friday)

HourTrack 1
Room 213
Track 2
Room 115
9:00Registration starts
9:30Morning Coffee
10:00KEYNOTE: Jaakko Stenros
Room 213
11:00Coffee Break

SESSION 3
Room 213
SESSION 4
Room 115
11:30Hans-Joachim Backe Platform Studies and Hybrid Games – a Test CaseAleksandra Mochocka Children’s games and play in My Memory of Us
12:00Agata Waszkiewicz “I Am Not Lying, I Am Embellishing:” the Ludic and Narrative Unreliability in Video Gamess Maksim Podvalnyi Construction of gender in Shadowrun: Dragonfall
12:30Michal Švarný and Vít Šisler Towards an Operationalized Definition of Procedural RhetoricMartyna Bakun There’s No Place Like Home – Subversiveness of Cozy Games
13:00Ida Kathrine H. Jorgensen The qualifications of games as mediaMagdalena Bednorz Fantastic femininity of space: environmental storytelling in Gone Home
13:30Lunch Break

SESSION 5
Room 213
SESSION 6
Room 115
15:00Jakub Šindelář A Thorough Look at Noah Caldwell-Gervais: Fan-made audiovisual essays as an inspirational alternative to classic academic articlesRenata Ntelia Falling in love with an NPC: Embodiment and Intentionality
15:30Paweł Frelik Preserving Ludic Heritage One Torrent at a Time: Video Games, Immaterial Labor, and Dark ArchivesMarta Błaszkowska Master Detective, Mister Nobody. The identity of the protagonist in HOPA games
16:00Tomasz Gnat Robin$on Cru$oe. Gentrified survivalism and survival as a commodity in the discourses of interactive entertainment.Magdalena Kozyra  I’ve failed again. On overcoming obstacles in video games
16:30Coffee Break

SESSION 7
Room 213
SESSION 8
Room 115
17:00Maciej Nawrocki The Royal Pursuit or a Ludic Triviality? The Cultural Significance of Chess in Renaissance Through the Lens of Jan Kochanowski’s SzachyAgata Włodarczyk and Marta Tyminska Female modes of outside the game engagement with a franchise – slash fan works for Fate/Grand Order
17:30Vít Šisler Revisiting Historical Traumas in Video Games: Case Study of Svoboda 1945 Dominik Kudła Preferences of Polish Gamers with regard to the Language Version of Video Games (Online Survey Results)
18:00Mikhail Fiadotau Exploring the histories of CD-ROM piracy in 1990s’ Russia, Ukraine, and BelarusFilip Jankowski French New Wave: Contemporary Events in the Works of Jean-Louis Le Breton, Tristan Cazenave, and François Coulon (1984-1986)
19:00 Conference Reception
Mięta Restobar
ul. Krupnicza 19a
Google maps

September 28 (Saturday)

HourTrack 1
Room 213
Track 2
Room 115
9:30Morning Coffee
10:00KEYNOTE: Torill Mortensen: Gamestudies in the digital jungle: observing play in new habitats
Room 213
11:00Coffee Break
11:30Doctoral Consortium
Room 205

SESSION 9
Room 213
SESSION 10
Room 115
11:30Raine Koskimaa Performing Fandom in Game of Throne’s Let’s Play VideosLeonid Moyzhes Simulating Numinous: representation of believers in “Cultist Simulator”
12:00Bartosz Wieremiej Death, Taxes and Sports. FIFA Ultimate Team game mode and Dead FootballersDamian Stewart A Play of Wills: Narrative Entanglement and Psychological Violence in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
12:30Jan Švelch From Tabletop to Esports: Magic: The Gathering in the Era of Live-StreamingAgata Waszkiewicz and Mateusz Kominiarczuk Q&A: Reinterpreting Quests and Achievements Through the Frame Analysis
13:00Kristian Bjørkelo Gaming culture as a microcosm. A study of political discourse in gaming forums.Haryo Pambuko Jiwandono and Edeliya Relanika Purwandi Gaming for All: Digital Games as Empowerment Mediums for Individuals with Impairments in Indonesia
13:30Lunch Break

SESSION 11
Room 213

15:00Arendse Løvind Andersen Real(er) Doors: On the Fictionality and Virtuality of Escape Room Doors
15:30Daniel Vella To Be Otherwise: The Ec-static Existential Potential of Virtual Game Worlds
16:00Alesja Serada Materiality of Play in Crypto Games 
16:30Coffee Break
17:00CEEGS Round Table and Final Remarks
Room 115
19:00Afterparty
HEX Boardgame Pub
ul. Józefa Dwernickiego 5
Google maps

Keynotes

Torill Elvira Mortensen

Torill Elvira Mortensen is an associate professor at the IT-University of Copenhagen since July 2010. Before that she was an associate professor in media and communication at Volda University College, Norway, where she worked from 1991 – 2010. Her Ph D is on online roleplay, and much of her research and publications are on games, the rest more generally on social media. Her teaching has mainly been on public relations, digital rhetoric and transmedial communication, and more recently on user cultures and networked user practices.

Torill served on the board of DiGRA, Digital Games Researchers Association from 2006 – 2010, was a member of the board for Norsk Tipping from 2011 – 2015, and she was a founding member of the journal Gamestudies. She is active in several of the internet research communities, and was program chair for Association of Internet Research’s conference IR 11.0 in Stockholm 2010, and Digital Games Research’s association’s conferences DiGRA 2018 and DiGRA 2019. She wrote Perceiving Play: the Art and Study of Computer Games, 2009, was main editor of The Dark Side of Gameplay: Controversial Issues in Playful Environments, 2015, and co-edited a special issue on Media-ludic approaches for MedieKultur in 2018. She currently studies transgressive aesthetics and affective, cross-platform games and play.

Jaakko Stenros

Jaakko Stenros (PhD) is a University Lecturer in Game Studies working at the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies (at the Game Research Lab, Tampere University). He has published eight books and over 50 articles and reports, and has taught game studies for a decade. Stenros studies play and games, and currently he is working on understanding game rules, the making of larps, and uncovering the aesthetics of social play, but his research interests include norm-defying play, game jams, queer play, role-playing games, pervasive games, and playfulness. Stenros has also collaborated with artists and designers to create ludic experiences and has curated many exhibitions at the Finnish Museum of Games.

Ignacy Trzewiczek

Ignacy Trzewiczek is a game designer and CEO of Portal Games. He has published 2 RPG games and over 20 board games and expansions with Robinson Crusoe and Detective being the most popular. His designs received over 50 industry awards and nominations including Golden Geek for Best co-op game for Robinson Crusoe or French Game of the Year for Detective.

In 2011 Ignacy started a blog dedicated to game design, and since then it became one of the industry most popular collection of essays about the topic. Best articles were collected into two books (Board Games That Tell Stories) released in 2013 and 2015. The third book should be published this year.

Workshops

Disobedience of fantasy and fantasy of disobedience: non-English magical worlds in videogames.

Organizer: Leonid Moyzhes

In his famous essay “Piróg, or, There is No Gold in Grey Mountains” Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski stated that fantasy, as a genre, was rooted in Anglo-Saxon literature and folklore so deeply, that it was impossible to create a fantasy setting – and consequently, a work of fiction of any type – based on any other sources. According to Sapkowski, whether one calls her monsters and heroes by Slavic, Spanish, Chinese or Arabic names, as long as one writes fantasy, one will always end up with another recompilation of Arthurian legends and chivalric romance.

Ironically, many years after the essay was published, “The Witcher” – videogame franchise based on Sapkowski’s books (which had been initially conceived as a parody of classical “sword and sorcery” novels) – gave a new life to the discussion on the possibility of non-English, specifically, Slavic, fantasy. It was followed promptly by Slavic fantasy games like “Thea” series, “Yaga” or “Pagan Online”.  Shortly after, many other projects that can be described as “non-Anglo-Saxon fantasy” appeared, like “Unrest”, “Kenshi” or “Six Ages”. The similar can be observed in the tabletop RPG industry, where relatively small costs of production allowed for the emergence of many fantasy games inspired by various cultures, like “Red Lands” or “Weapons of the Gods”.

While there is nothing new in the fact that a certain market within pop-cultural industry attempts, often unsuccessfully, to revitalize itself by borrowing from not yet overexploited sources and incorporate ideas from “exotic” cultures and mythologies in its products, this current trend is a good starting point to speak about the possibility of the non-English fantasy. Could those games become a form of what Walter Mignolo called “decolonial Option”? Or, on the contrary, they serve as a way to further colonize and universalize the pop-cultural landscape of the world?

We welcome all submissions related to the question of the possibility of the non-English fantasy in videogames, board games, classic wargames, LARP and tabletop RPGs.

Suggested topics:

  • History and case studies of tabletop, roleplaying and videogames in the genre of non-English fantasy
  • Colonial identity in fantasy videogames
  • Clarification of terms: non-English or non-American.
  • Folklore and mythologies as inspiration for game mechanics
  • non-English fantasy and Orientalism
  • Cultural appropriation
  • Representation of non-Abrahamic religions in videogames
  • Videogames as tools of de-colonization
  • Language use in fantasy videogames
  • Representation of ethnicity in videogames

Guidelines for authors

Your submission should contain an abstract (700 words maximum) accompanied with a list of up to 10 keywords and a list of references (bibliography and ludography), that won’t count against word limit. The deadline for abstracts is July 31st. Presenters accepted for the main CEEGS 2019 program are also eligible to apply. Acceptance notifications will be sent on August 10th.

Submission address: sfantasyworkshop@gmail.com

Gaming Sights, Sighting Games: Ludic Visualities In and Out of Games

Organizer: Paweł Frelik (University of Warsaw)

Arguably, visuality is one of the least critically examined dimensions of contemporary video games. There are extensive bodies of critical texts on narrative, code, and social contexts. The game audio has received a fair deal of attention. Some of the reticence concerning game visuals can be explained by many researchers’ desire to distance themselves from the aspects of the medium that were historically perceived as connected to other media: film, television, and visual arts. A larger trend in the humanities that treats image as suspect and decorative can also be held accountable for this silence.

We are interested in in-game visual assets and their contexts, including

  • aesthetic styles and stylizations in games
  • color and lighting in games
  • visual retro and nostalgia
  • national and regional visual styles
  • perspective and visual construction of space
  • cutscenes as bridges to film and television
  • methodological intersections with art history, visual studies, and media studies 

At the same time, in keeping with the topic of the 2019 Central and Eastern European Game Studies conference, “Beyond Digital,” we particularly encourage and invite presentations on the game visualities beyond digital. The list of possible subjects for inquiry includes but is not limited to:

  • designwork and concept art
  • game-related commercial and advertising visuals 
  • game-inspired fan art
  • gameworld maps outside games
  • art and artworks inside video games
  • boardgame, cardgame, and other analog game visualities 
  • visualities of pen-and-paper RPGs
  • visual and artistic texts and practices influenced by video games 
  • in-game photography

Abstracts should be no longer than 500 words (excluding bibliography) and be sent directly to the organizer (p.frelik@uw.edu.pl). The workshop itself will focus on both presentation and discussion, so we encourage submitting work in progress.

The deadline for abstracts is July 31st. Presenters accepted for the main CEEGS 2019 program are also eligible to apply. Acceptance notifications will be sent on August 10th.

Games and Money: Before and After the Digital

Organizer: Alesja Serada

We live in the time of tokenomics (Power & Au, 2018) when real world economies become less ‘real’ and more ‘ludic’. This change has been reflected in the boom of cryptocurrencies, which economies can be interpreted as ‘Bitcoin games’ (Hutten & Thiemann, 2017). But there have always been a variety of socially marked ‘monies’ (Zelizer, 1994), and in-game currencies can be just as valuable and meaningful as any other means of exchange. Besides, such monies represent fascinating material cultures of gaming – from Monopoly bills to casino chips.

At our workshop, we invite game researchers to talk about monies in games, primarily (but not exclusively) covering the following topics:

1) Cryptocurrency-based games: the future of the game industry?

2) Material culture of in-game monies: chips, tokens, imitations;

3) Playing with real money: from coin tossing to ‘secret messages’ on bills;

4) Making money in games: new and emerging practices;

5) Real world economies as money games.

Submissions should be sent to gamesandscholars@gmail.com. We expect circa 200 word proposals for 20 minute presentations, accompanied by reference lists, sent as attached single text files. Please introduce yourself in the body of your email. The main acceptance factor will be relevance of the submission to the core idea of the workshop – the analogy that we will explore: materiality of money in games (before the digital) and the ‘new materiality’ of cryptocurrencies in crypto games (after the digital).

The deadline for abstracts is July 31st. Presenters accepted for the main CEEGS 2019 program are also eligible to apply. Acceptance notifications will be sent on August 10th.

Submission reopened. The new deadline for abstracts is August 31st. Presenters accepted for the main CEEGS 2019 program are also eligible to apply. Acceptance notifications will be sent on September 1th.

REFERENCES

1. Huetten, M., and Thieman, M. Money at the Margins – from political experiment to cashless societies. In: Bitcoin and Beyond: The Challenges and Opportunities of Blockchains for Global Governance. Routledge, 2017. Pp. 25-47.

2. Power, T., and Au, S. Tokenomics. Packt Publishing, 2018.

3. Zelizer, V. The Social Meaning of Money. Princeton University Press, 1994.

Doctoral Consortium

This year’s CEEGS will offer a doctoral consortium (28  September 2019 from 11:30). Participation is limited to a number of selected candidates.

Selection of candidates is carried out on basis of:

  • extended abstracts (max. 1000 words including references);
  • abstract and timeline of whole PhD project (max. 1 page); 
  • short CV (max. 1 page);
  • cover letter specifying expectations to the event (max. 0,5 pages);

Form the submissions, the committee will select a limited number of candidates who will be invited to submit full papers. Relevant criteria for selection are not only the overall scientific quality of the work. Additional relevant factors can be the current stage of the doctoral project (e.g. early-stage applicants need less developed proposals), the chosen thematic, theoretical and methodological frames (how do they fit with the emerging workshop as a whole?), and how each paper may speak to other submitted contributions. We will attempt to achieve a balanced composition of the workshop with respect to gender and other identity-based criteria.

The process will not be anonymized.

Each paper included into the workshop will receive approx. 60 minutes for feedback and discussion.

  • 15 minutes presentation;
  • 5 minutes structured commentary by assigned peer;
  • 5 minutes structured commentary by one organizer;
  • 35 minutes free discussion/feedback;

All submitted papers will be distributed to all registered participants before the doctoral consortium takes place. We expect all participants to have read all papers and to actively take part in discussions and debates. The workshop will be open to interested conference participants.

Deadline for submission of abstracts and additional required documents: 1st July 2019.

Deadline for the submission of full papers (max. 5000 words excl. references): 2nd September 2019.

Send submissions to: contact@ceegs.eu

The doctoral consortium is organized by Hans-Joachim Backe (ITU), Holger Pötzsch (UiT) and Hanna Wirman (ITU).

Venue

The conference will be held on Jagiellonian University Second Campus, just about 10 minutes walk from the Main Square. The building is located on Ingardena 3, a quiet street right next to the Jagiellonian University main library and the park.

The Jagiellonian University; established in 1364, it is the oldest university in Poland and one of the oldest in Central Europe. With almost fifty thousand students, ten faculties and four campuses, it remains a vibrant and prolific academic center. The Jagiellonian Game Research Centre is a part of Faculty of Polish Studies. In its current status, the Faculty has been established in 2004, but the university and its alumni have always been shaping Polish academic reflection on literary theory and history of literature It was also a place of education of many great Polish authors, including Wisława Szymborska, who was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Research Centre is also the major hub for Polish and European game studies communities and experienced conference organizer – it hosted the second Central and Eastern European Game Studies conference in 2015, among others.

A brief note for participants of past conferences organized by the Centre and held on Gołębia street: the location is different this year, please check the map above!