 I would like to welcome to the stage our first speaker, Marivore, who is a psychological researcher at the Department of Social Psychology, where he studies psychological functioning in the context of digital technologies and online and virtual environments. Much of his most recent research has focused on the roles that digital technologies and particularly video games play in individuals' well-being. In his work, he applies statistical methods to large-scale data sets and conducts controlled experiments. He also places great emphasis on the transparency and reproducibility of all of his work. So please give him a round of applause and a warm welcome. All right, let's get this show on the road. Kaboom. Hey, it's my pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me today. It's very nice to see all of you here who are interested in all of our work and games and hopefully some science as well. And that's what I'm here to talk about today. So as mentioned, I'm a psychological scientist and recently I've been focusing on video games and what they can do for us. Particularly, I'm interested in people's well-being in the context of video games. Basically, I want to know whether video games can be good for people, are they bad for people, and how we might support these viewpoints. In my presentation, I'm going to focus a little bit on the methodologies that psychological researchers have used and are using in this field of study to give you an idea of how we're trying to understand how the things that you enjoy so much might be affecting your lives and social circles. So to kick this off, there's a lot of hopes, both among society more broadly, but among social researchers and psychological researchers as well, that video games can play a unique role in supporting people's well-being by affording opportunities for socializing like in this picture where these young individuals are enjoying a classic LAN party kind of situation where they actually physically gather together to play games and drink Coke. Now you might more likely to be in a situation where you're on Discord rather than in the same room when you're socializing and playing with your games, but the idea is the same. Games can be a social glue that bring people together so that they can communicate with each other, just basically have fun with each other, engage in interesting tasks, feel a sense of accomplishment, maybe competition, disappointment sometimes, but these are all functions or basic psychological needs that games can target like socializing and feeling accomplishment. On the other side of the psychological research spectrum on video games are psychologists and neuroscientists working on topics that have more to do with how we think, how our minds work, how effective we are in processing information. So here's an image of a participant in what is a fairly typical experiment where people are asked to play usually these kind of like fast-paced action games or strategy games and people are really trying to study whether these kinds of games in particular, but all kinds of games more generally affect specific aspects of our brains or our brain minds, particularly in the fields of things like attention, how well we're able to attend to different kinds of stimuli or things in our environment, our memory, so how well we're able to remember things and other faculties of our cognitive machinery. And there is some promising work in this area that has shown that, for example, very sort of low-level human performance factors such as your actual visual perception, how accurately you're able to detect things in streams of visual stimuli can be enhanced by repeatedly engaging with these fast-paced action games. But there is a ton of work that needs to be done there to check that those results reproduce, for example. Attention is another thing. There is a lot of worry in our society today that engaging with screens is doing something to our attention and now we can't even read a newspaper anymore. Not that anyone actually reads newspapers, but you just scroll them on your phone. And there's been increasing worry that kids in particular are more likely to develop attention deficit problems. So for example, ADHD attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which is one of the disorders that involves people's reduced ability to pay sustained attention to things. And there are now things, games like Endeavor RX here, that doctors can prescribe to kids whose parents or the kids themselves report that they have attention problems. So this is in America, where this is an approved treatment program. You go to a doctor and maybe you go yourself or you go with your, usually your child and you tell the doctor that my child is having a problem attending to things and is hyperactive, et cetera. And the doctor then prescribes this game to this child as a treatment regime and the child is asked to play it maybe a couple hours a week. And then over time, there are promising results with this particular game in curing or treating severe mental difficulties like ADHD. But again, these results need to be carefully replicated and studied in more detail before we can say that games cure ADHD. It's a little bit early for that. On the other side, then among gamers, perhaps a little bit less, but at society at large, there have been historically worries that video games, particularly extremely realistic and violent games like Doom, caused people to exhibit aggressive and violent behavior out there in the so-called real world. So in the 90s, for example, when some of these high-profile, terrible school shootings happened in the US, reporters were quick to find that some of these perpetrators of these horrible acts had been playing Doom in their spare time. It then didn't take very long for them to suggest, oh, well, maybe if these people were playing Doom and they were also actually murdering people, let's connect the dots. And there was again one of these moral panics where people were very worried that violence in games and games that enable you to exhibit and explore violent behaviors and to see violence happening makes violence generalize, such that you walk out of your bedroom or wherever you're playing and you kick some butt. And that's basically the idea of some of these theories, how video games affect violent behavior. And this is still an ongoing issue, and there are two sides of researchers. One side of researchers say there is a conclusive evidence and consensus among researchers that violent video games cause violence. And then there's the other side who says, no, there's no consensus, and they probably don't cause violence, so who knows. More research needs to be done, but this is, to many gamers, a bit of an odd statement to say that playing Doom makes you stab people. More recently, people and international health organizations have been focusing on video game addiction. This is now in the process of being codified in these international diagnosis guidelines, like the ICD and the DSM in the States, as online gaming addiction, it has a few different names. And basically it is a constellation of symptoms that some people suggest define a specific mental problem or a maladaptive pattern of behavior whereby people are so engaged with games that they can't let go. So they are playing so much that they don't socialize anymore. They play so much that they don't go to work or to school. They don't do their homework, et cetera, et cetera, and they can't disengage with this behavior. And people are very aware of this, and there's again two camps of researchers, one suggesting there is conclusive evidence to show that this is a real thing that we should be very worried about, and up to 50% of young individuals are suffering from one form or another of gaming addiction. And then there's the other side who says, hold on, we don't really have the evidence and we should maybe look into this in more detail before we restrict the basic human rights of children and young individuals to have a good time. With this addiction, the proposed addiction, there are now clinics in the world where you can sign up to yourself or recommend that your child goes either to an inpatient or outpatient program to get treatment for gaming addiction specifically. How do we know about these things? Next I'm going to tell you just a little bit about the kinds of research methods that we as psychological scientists have been using in studying these phenomena. So let's take video game violence and real-world violence and this hypothetical link. In typical experiments, what you do is you ask a group of people to come into your laboratory and then you ask them, could you play this violent video game for half an hour? Then you take another group of people and you ask them to play this non-violent game for half an hour. Now you've manipulated exposure to violent video games. You need to find a measure of aggression or violence and you can't give people a knife and ask them to go run around. This is a very tricky thing to measure. Psychologists figured out that what you can do is use chili sauce. So in this task, which is called the hot sauce paradigm or the chili sauce paradigm, is you ask these people to go play one of these video games and they come out of the room where they were playing and you tell them, okay, we have another participant in the other room and we're going to offer them some lunch afterwards. They really don't like spicy food. We would like you to put some chili sauce on their lunch. This is a hypothetical thing. They're not actually giving chili sauce to the other participant. But they make the player believe that they are giving chili sauce to the other participant and they sprinkle chili sauce on the hypothetical lunch and what you find repeatedly over and over and over and over again is that people in the violent video game condition here and here put about double the amount of chili sauce on the lunch than players in the non-aggressive game conditions. People have done these sorts of what are called meta-analyses, which are studies of studies. In this particular study, they looked at 79 experiments. Not all of them were chili sauce experiments, by the way, but similar kinds of methodologies. And they find that if there was nothing going on, it would be extremely, extremely unlikely that you would see these kinds of differences. So it must be the case that violent video games make people express violent behavior, such as putting more chili sauce on people's lunch who don't like spicy food. Okay, let's now step back a little bit. Here's a picture of the cover of Pete Etchell's book. He's a British researcher who studies video games. He has a book out, I believe this was out in 2017, so it's rather new, called Lost in a Good Game. And here's a quote from his book that describes his journey in video games and also psychological research about video games. And he says, after talking to players and video game developers, it made me realize just how immature some of the science we're doing is. We're asking the wrong questions in the wrong way using the wrong methods. So there's a lot to improve. And next, if I have time, I'm going to run you through some of my own work, which I hope is a little bit better. So this is a little bit of self-aggrandizing advertisement here. But I'm going to try to highlight to you some new avenues that people have been exploring in video game research. This work has been done in collaboration with Professor Andi Shubilski at the University of Oxford, Dr. Niklas Johannes at the University of Oxford, Dr. Christopher Magnusson at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and James Botlin, who is a Unity developer at FutureLab, a British game developer. And in collaboration with these other international companies, some of which you might recognize. So we've realized that there might be something to study in video game play as it happens, not inviting people to your laboratory and asking them to play a game, but measuring people when they're at home, eating chips and playing games with one hand. So we're trying to measure video game play as it happens naturally and then correlate that with various life outcomes in such a way that we might be able to infer something ultimately about causal relations between those variables. Let's skip that. Here's the very first study that we did. In this study, we worked with Electronic Arts and Nintendo to recruit players of Plants vs. Zombies, Battle for Neighborville, that's an EA game, and Animal Crossing New Horizons. This was a couple of years ago at the height of the early COVID pandemic when especially Animal Crossing was really going through the roof in popularity. We recruited thousands of players of these games and spoke with representatives of these companies and convinced them that it would be a good idea for them to enable these players to give their play data to us. We know that companies, online platforms, log everything that we do online. You click on things, you play games, this data is recorded in data warehouses somewhere in the Arizona desert. It's usually used in this context to try to make the games better but also to monetize their products better. What we wanted to do is to use that data for the common good, to better understand how video games might be impacting people's psychological well-being. In this first study, we call it a pilot study, we had thousands of people who played these games also answer questions about their well-being. Here on this graph on the X-axis is just the hours of time, the time that they spent playing these video games in a two-week period. And then on the Y-axis are their responses to a questionnaire about psychological well-being that relates to things like mood, how are you feeling today, or in these past two weeks. And what we found in these two games was an extremely tiny, smallest possible correlation that you can detect, a positive correlation such that people who played more of these two games reported slightly greater affective well-being, just a tiny bit greater affective well-being. So this doesn't tell you anything about causality, it just tells you that people who play more report slightly greater well-being. We then took this idea a little bit further and worked with more companies and games. So this particular study involved players of Animal Crossing, Apex Legends, Eve Online. Does anyone know what Eve Online is? Oh, amazing. Forza Horizon, GT Sport, Outriders, and The Crew 2. So these are fairly popular titles. We again recruited tens of thousands of players of these games, so in total. And then we followed these people over a six-week time period. We again asked these companies to enable these players to give their data to us so that we can study it for what we hope are scientific purposes. Then we asked these players at three time points in that six-week period to tell us about how they've been feeling. What's your mood? How do you feel about your life? And then we did some structural equation modeling, which is a fancy word for doing correlations, and looking at over time how video game play within a person predicts their subsequent well-being. And what we find is that it doesn't predict well-being. Compared to how much you usually play, it doesn't matter if you play more or less in terms of your well-being. People just feel how they feel, and video games don't seem to play a role in that, at least as far as the duration of gameplay is concerned. But we then dug deeper, and we looked at people's intrinsic motivations to play. So this is things like reporting that you play because you want to, because it gives you maybe a sense of autonomy, a sense of accomplishment, and so forth. So these are good reasons to be playing, motivations to be playing. And we find that reports of intrinsic motivation predict greater well-being. So this suggests that the quality of play, so if you're playing for reasons related to intrinsic motivation that predicts your well-being positively. The contrary also holds. We ask for people for their extrinsic reasons or motivations to play. And these are things like you're playing because you feel like your social group is playing, and you have to join them in the game to be able to socialize, or you feel some kind of external pressures to play. And the more you feel like that you're playing, the lower your well-being ends up being. We're gonna skip this. We basically found no relation between violence in game and people's aggressive thoughts. In the interest of time, I'm gonna skip some things. Do I have time to show a video? Yes, because this video is awesome. Trust me. All right, this is a video of our latest project. That's gonna be the first paper on this project. It's gonna be published next week. In this project, we collaborated with FutureLab. James Butler was hired to work at FutureLab to make modifications into this commercially available product, such that we can use it as a scientific instrument to study people's well-being and other psychological indicators during gameplay. Here, a person starts PowerWash simulator and the game asks, how are you feeling right now? And it has the university logo and it says research edition. So people know that they're in a research version of this game. They start, they continue their career mode. So this game is all about power washing. It's super sweet. So they start washing the car in this level. There's all kinds of different nozzles and stuff you can use, very relaxing. So our participants went to Steam and saw that there is a research edition available and they downloaded it and started playing. And in the game you get these kinds of messages, another question coming your way and then it asks you a question about your psychological states, like focus, enjoyment, well-being and so forth. And when you participate, you get new skins and new nozzles and stuff. So we reward you with in-game items. You can also use the menu to report your mood outside of those automatic pop-ups that happen in-game. And this is the first time ever that anyone has studied these kinds of psychological instrument inside a game. And it's much more plausible that if video games impact how you feel your psychological states, we should be able to detect those in-game, not say two weeks later when we ask you how were you two weeks ago when you played a game. So this, I'm super excited about this methodology because it allows us to look at people's psychological experiences in-game. Here's just a graph of one of our approximately 10,000 players who answered a couple dozen survey questions in one day. This is one day on the X-axis. In total, we have so far about 700,000 responses in-game from these players. This particular person answered three different kinds of questions during a day related to their well-being, focus and enjoyment during play. And what you can just see for this one person during one day, perhaps some kind of fluctuations in their enjoyment where they started feeling super good, maybe dipped a little bit and then towards the end of the night felt even better. Maybe focus went up and down, maybe I'm not showing any statistics here, this is purely just me kind of presenting these data here. And well-being, maybe early in the morning they were feeling slightly less good than later on in the day when you saw kind of a plateau happening. And this player on this day was pretty into power wash because you can see that they're just reporting stuff all the time. They had lunch here at around noon and then like a super quick dinner here, right? And back to power wash. So we really followed their psychological states the whole day for this particular day, for this particular person. And this, we hope, is going to bring shed new light into not only like how much you play, what happens during play and your behaviors during play, how those might predict well-being because in addition to these responses, we now sort of took the role of these mega companies that collect sort of all of your behavior because everything this individual did in the game and everything that happened in the game flew right into our database. So in addition to their psychological reports, we can find out everything that they did in this game. And this, I have not yet analyzed this data like I said, this is just about to end this study. So stay tuned. This is going to be super cool. If you have time, play some power wash simulator. And I'm going to toot this stuff when it's done. So you can follow me on mastodon. So hopefully I gave you sort of a bird's eye view of what's been happening in the psychological sciences related to video games, but also a glimpse of what I've been doing because that's what I like talking about the most. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Mati, for these very interesting insights. Our next speaker will be Aris. He is the coordinator of the game art and animation program at the SAE Institute in Amsterdam. And he's also the head of the games department. He has a PhD in culture analysis at the University of Amsterdam. And he's focusing on the interplay between fan communities and the gaming industry. He is also a guest researcher at the University of Amsterdam. He has been following the industry for over 25 years and has worked as a video game journalist. He will now help us form a clearer picture of the impacts that video games can have on representation. So everyone, give a small welcome round of applause. Thank you. Thank you for this lovely introduction. Also, thank you to Link for having me here. Once again, I really enjoyed these events and I'm very happy to be here. Also, thank you for being in attendance. Today, I come to you with a double identity. As was just explained to you, I work at the SAE Institute of Amsterdam. So we do some creative media work there. And I'm also a guest researcher at the University of Amsterdam focusing on the intersection of online communities, of gaming and the industry. Therefore, for this presentation, I'm going to include a little bit of gaming industry knowledge and some cultural analysis and mix them together for a bigger result. Let's start then. Did I press the correct button? Yeah. So this gentleman right here is William Coxton, or was William Coxton. In 1476, he published a book titled The Game and Play of the Chess. I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it correctly because my old English is not very good, but it was quite an old book. And for a long time, it was thought to be the first book to be printed in the English language. In this book, Coxton presents members of the British society of the time as chess pieces and assigns attributes to each piece based on what they do on the game and finds analogies in the British society of the time. Following on that Caxtonian analogy, I have also found that there are some, let's say, similarities in a bigger chess game that is being played in an area much bigger than the UK, namely the entire world. And some people have bigger powers. Some people are just pawns, but not always realize it. I promise I'll make it a bit clearer now. So before we get there and start talking about pawns and power in the board, let's talk a little bit about culture. What is culture? I mean, you can have multiple definitions of what culture is, but one definition I really like, and I think it's quite applicable here, is one by Dick Hebdigeb. That says that culture consists of various elements of everyday practice, including activities, behaviors, and meanings. Okay, so if we accept this definition, then it makes sense to look what affects those practices, activities, behaviors, and meanings. Before we get there, also important to keep in mind that in every type of culture, there is hegemony or hierarchy, struggle, and this brings fraction in cultures, subcultures, meaning cultures within cultures, communities within other communities, and of course resistance. And by resistance, sometimes we mean opposition to meanings. For example, as Janis Radway found in 1984, novel readers would make their own meanings and sometimes come up with their own ideas, their own scenarios that would oppose the official plot of a book, a.k.a. fan fiction, as we would label it a few years later. Similarly, Henry Jenkins a few years later used the term poaching by Michel Dessortot to make it textual poaching, and will refer to fans, people who follow the popular cultural realm, when they create their own meanings, when they create fan art, when they create their own songs, their own content, as textual poachers. So, some people participate in those fan cultures through resistance, and by resistance, again, I don't mean going out on the streets and rioting, even though that happens as well, I mean participating by creating their own alternative meanings. Now, this brings to participatory culture. In 2006, the Time magazine named you as a person of the year. Yes, you. Because users would create their own content and distribute it online through platforms, meaning that if any one of you, and I see a lot of young people in the audience, were active on the internet around 2006, that means that congratulations, you are a Time magazine's person of the year for 2006, you can add that to your CV. I have added it actually on my Twitter bio. That's true. And to quote Henry Jenkins again, the reason for that happening is now because people or the society in general act both as consumers and contributors of meaning and further shape content. Sounds nice, right? Sounds quite empowering. We'll get to that in a moment. This is just some platforms, a list of platforms we use to participate nowadays, of course used primarily in gaming as well. Now actually game manufacturers, game designers encourage people to share content online, encourage people to shape the gaming community they're part of. For example, here we see the share button on the PlayStation 4. I would have included the PlayStation 5 controller, but I think the share button is not very visible on that, so I chose to go with the PS4. If you type the title of a game, you will find a myriad of reaction trailers, of actually videos, reaction videos to trailers. You will find discussions. You will find all sorts of reviewing which comes from users themselves, players themselves, not journalists or not the people of the industry, but the people that these products are being addressed to. Then we have Twitch, which still is the major platform of content distribution that stems from players themselves. And then there are pages on social media used by companies that they employ to get in touch with their fans and sometimes help shape the content together. I'll also get to that in a moment. We have Twitter, and we also have the story, one of my favorite stories. I'm going to throw a few examples here, so we will reach a general consensus later, but I wouldn't like to share a few stories first about Mass Effect 3. Has anyone played Mass Effect here? And Mass Effect 3. Okay, were you happy by how it ended? Yeah, I see someone giving me thumbs down there. Yes, many people shared that sentiment. Therefore, they created extended cut of Mass Effect 3, which was a free-to-download patch to the game, and it changed the ending because exactly many people went online on the social media that I saw earlier and complained about how the game ended. So they got a free improvement. I don't know if it was improvement or not to the game's ending. Similarly, when Star Wars Battlefront 2 came out a few years ago, many people complained about the use of loot boxes in the game and how the game didn't really live up to the standards they had for a particular game. So temporarily, EA had to pause the sale of loot boxes and try to find a different way to satisfy players. So here we have another example of players making their voice heard and changing their voice. They're changing the game of the game. Also, a very important category to keep in mind is modification. And here we have PlayerUnknown's Battleground, or PUBG, which started as a modification. And then Brandon Green, also known as PlayerUnknown, got in touch with, first I think it was Shony, who found his modification work online and later he also came in touch with some people in a Korean studio and got funding to make his vision a reality and create PUBG, which was, which is, last time I checked, the fifth best-selling game of all time, which started out of a game modification just a very aspiring modder. And of course, modification is quite tied to the video game industry because we have Counter-Strike, which again started as a fan-made endeavour and later became an official game, Counter-Strike, Global Offensive, which is also one of the most played games of this current era and has its roots to grassroots culture, mod culture and fan culture. All this can be encapsulated by what Axel Brun said, but in 2008 that now consumers act as producers. Users are now appropriate content, they assimilate it, they recreate it, and they send it out. So they are both users and producer at the same time, which makes them producers. Sounds fancy, right? Yeah, sounds great. All this sounds great and as I said earlier, very empowering and very hopeful. But is it like this, who should it be maybe making us a bit suspicious of how the industry works? Namely, are there any traces of exploitation there? Well, we live in a capitalist society, so my answer in brief is yes, but let's have a better look. Now, this is a screenshot from the Twitter page of Mortal Kombat Mobile, mobile application, mobile game, based on the popular series Mortal Kombat, in which the creators are asking, and I like the wording here, help us plan the rest of the year. So they're pretty much asking the fans themselves to go online and vote for their favorite character to be implemented in the game. For some people, that sounds great. Yes, I get the opportunity to let the creators know what they should do for me. I can also call it free marketing, free marketing research. Because it is. Going back to an example, Fallout 3. Anyone interested in the Fallout series here? Oh, I see a lot of people. Have you played Fallout 3? And were you excited when Fallout 3 was announced? Yes, you were. And many people agreed with you as well. The thing is that when Bethesda acquired the rights for Fallout 3, they opened up a forum and they said, please let us know what you want to see implemented in the game. So lots of fans went online and they started designing characters, they started designing items, stages, all sorts of stuff, because they wanted to get the game that they wanted. That didn't sit very well with some fans though and some actually complained about the company asking them to do unpaid labor. However, what I found very interesting here is that most of the fans quickly disregarded those accusations and saw it as an opportunity to get the game that they always wanted and get a very good game because there was a very big pause between Fallout 2 and Fallout 3 and the fans were getting desperate about the game they're going to get. So most of the fans, the biggest part of the fan base were actually quite positive about Bethesda asking them for their opinion. So as I note here, fans don't always see themselves as carrying out labor. What they see is offering back to the community, being hired and getting sometimes exposure if they make something really cool and the company serves it online. They see it as an exposure as an opportunity for them to climb the hierarchy of the fan culture. They're part of... But what is important for fans is to always get credit. For example, at some point, speaking of PUBG, when Microsoft used a poster that the fan made to promote PUBG and they didn't give any credit to the fan, the people who were responsible for that, the marketing team of Microsoft received a lot of harsh criticism on social media and they took the poster down immediately. And this goes quite back, actually. I have a walkthrough here from the early mid-90s that I found online for the very first Tekken game and there is this user here who complains about finding ripoff variations of his walkthrough, of their walkthrough sorry, the gender of this particular individual is not revealed. Complaining about a ripoff variation of the walkthrough and also at some different point of the walkthrough actually says that, hey, if you have more information about the game, please get in touch with me so we make a better walkthrough together. So the user here does not care about getting any financial compensation, only wants to improve the community and at the same time bust the people who steal the work of the, steal, well, borrow or get inspired by the work of the players. Speaking of which, going back to Bethesda, some of you might remember when they announced the Creation Club which was an initiative to offer fans the opportunity to create their own mods and then share them online on Steam and this mod would be up for sale and this is a big no, no, no in modding community because user generated content in general but mods especially are based on a gift economy meaning that people creating them as an exchange for anything but money online. So mods are being based in this idea of creating stuff for the community to save and offering it for free or offering it as an open source idea for other fans to improve and this didn't go very well for Bethesda. Then we have some other negative implications that happen in gaming industries. For example, this is the Floss Dance Kid. He became quite popular doing this dance which was also implemented in Fortnite without the Floss Dance Kid's consent and last time I checked he was engulfed in a legal battle with Epic. So I don't know how this went but this is another example of a company acting a bit more freely and appropriating things that people post online. Staying on the legal issues, this is Project M. Is anyone familiar with Project M? Oh, lovely. Yes, so for those of you who don't know Project M it's a modification based on Super Smash Brothers Brawl because when it came out some fans found it lacking so a few years later they created their own modification adding the features they thought missing and well as I said as I saw earlier some modifications were positively received by the companies and the companies hired the people for example or gave them some funding to create their own game which is cool. As I said, as long as you get credits as long as you get something back it's great but the response here was for Nintendo to ban it from tournaments, ban everyone who would mention Project M on the official Nintendo forums and create Project M as a taboo expression in the competitive scene of Super Smash Brothers. So also keep in mind when you engage into distribution, creation and distribution of user-generated content online there's also the legal aspect to keep in mind. There's actually this very nice meme going online that any video game company, oh, this is a really cool mod, come work for us. Nintendo, oh, this is a really cool mod. See you at court. So what can fans earn from this whole process? They can get a sense of belonging. They are part of an imagined community as Benedict Anderson said, a community that is not limited by physical bounds and anyone can belong as long as they share the same language within quotation marks, the fandom language. They also get the opportunity and this is pretty important for some people to express their creativity and connect with other people. As I said, some get recognition and they also get the opportunity to make the transition to professionalism. One last thing though, and something to also keep in mind, I made a reference to the legal part earlier, but now this is something even bigger. This is something that concerns many fans and not just one particular person or a group of fans. When Epic Games was removed, no, sorry Epic Games, Fortnite from Epic Games was removed from the Google Play Store. What Epic did was to ask the fans to create hashtags and create merchandise like t-shirts or posters or any other items they wanted with the hashtag, I think Save Fortnite and actually create an entire campaign that would raise awareness to their legal battle against Google. In a way, they asked the fans to fight their own fight. Of course, they had their own legal department and they would go into their whole legal procedure against Google themselves, but they also asked fans to give them support instead of fans doing this in their own free will. They asked, hey, please, could you support us? Could you give us some moral support? And what seems as they made it seem like a David versus Goliath battle, like David being Epic Games going against Goliath of Google, which in a way makes sense, but there were more layers to that than just a company being mistreated by Colossus. It was way more than that. So what do we learn from taking all this into consideration and thinking of how the interplay between communities and fans happen, sorry, communities and the industry? So video game fans use platforms to communicate and serve their content. They are the times person of the year for 2006 and they have some power, yes. So do the companies though. They also communicate, they also serve the content and they also find that content. Fans often resist to companies by creating their own meanings, by creating their own fan art modifications. Sometimes resist to companies by straight resistance and by, as I mentioned earlier, some fans were not eager to offer their ideas to Bethesda or to any other company. Some efforts of resistance are successful, but success will be commodified. The industry will find a way to make a profit out of it because this is the world we live in and offer back a false sense of empowerment to fans. Yes, fans have an empowerment, but unfortunately this empowerment is often dictated by the industry itself. Any surrender of power by the company, therefore, and by the industry, is done under condition, condition that will make sure that the fans are never more powerful than the industry and then the company at question. But if we want to talk about resistance, resistance comes from within, comes from within the industry and not from the outside. Anyone know Celeste? Oh yes, lovely. So Celeste is a platform game, quite difficult at some points, I dare say. I haven't finished it yet, I admit it and it's been out for years. But what it came to be, this is a reading that mainly the community offered, is that the main character of Celeste is actually a trans person and this whole game is their journey to understanding themselves and going through the gender transition. So Celeste started as an indie game, indie gaming is quite a potent for that because it's still within the industry, right? But indie games are not directed and supervised by bigger conglomerates and bigger companies, so they still allow for some creative liberty to the designers. So Celeste is a game that can also be read as a powerful message about queerness. Then we have All Are Asias by Milo Santani who also describes the experience of being an Asian person in the Western world. And then we have one of my favorite examples here, the developers of Disqualism thanking Marx and Engels during their Spitz at the Game Awards. So yes, these examples happen. I'm pretty sure if you think about it, you can find more examples, mainly coming from the indie game so I think that in a world that resistance is very much dictated by the higher ups, sometimes resistance comes from within. I thank you for your attention. Thank you very much for that presentation and of course time flies when we're having fun so we've already reached our third and last speaker, Hendrik Engelbrecht. He's a lecturer and PhD candidate at Tilburg University. He started his career as a gamification designer and has been teaching game design for serious as well as entertainment games for the past five years. In his research, he's looking into the persuasive power of games as enabled by procedural rhetoric. His latest publication discusses the potential of player agency in preventing risky drinking behavior in young adults. So please once again, give him a warm round of applause and a warm welcome. Does this work? Yes, cool. This makes it sound a little bit like I'm going to talk about my research, which I'm partly gonna, but very zoomed out. First of all, thank you Missing Link for having me. Thank you all for being here. A little plug if you guys are interested since we have a games course at Tilburg University, look out for your minors and choose play and game. We're making serious games and it's a lot of fun. What I want to talk about today because we have the themes of culture, I want to talk, zoom in a little bit and talk about culture on an individual level. How do we transfer from a game to the person him or herself? And we're going to do that through procedural rhetoric and I'm going to explain the term and highlight a little bit of what that term means and how through procedural rhetoric we actually can transfer attitudes, we can transfer behavior from game to person. For the good, the bad, and sometimes also unfortunately or rather a lot of times for the morally questionable. So what we're going to do, first we're going to talk a little bit about what is procedural rhetoric, so you know what I'm talking about. Then we're going to have some very small case studies. It's really only one slide per case study, but that highlights what I mean when I talk about the power of procedural rhetoric because I do really believe that this is a very interesting way to look at games and analyze games for serious impact. Then procedural rhetoric in serious games because we're using entertainment schemes first to highlight it, and then lastly misuse of procedural rhetoric which I think will serve well a little bit also as a discussion starter because I'm always curious about opinions on that because I have an opinion and obviously this is going to be colored by that, but you probably also have strong opinions on this. So what is procedural rhetoric? So traditional rhetoric, if you have ever read a book or if you've ever watched a movie, there's always a message. So rhetoric is the out of persuasion. We're trying to get a message across if it's 1984, it's about the oppressive government, unfortunately we have arrived there already, but if it's about the big short, it's about the evil bankers during the financial crisis. There is an underlying message that is going to be sent from the author to you whether you want it or not. And the whether you want it or not part sometimes, well first we have a nice definition because we're academics. The out of effective and persuasive speaking or writing, especially the exploitation of figures of speech and other compositional techniques. Unfortunately sometimes this also happens rather unintentionally. Any work of art has an expressive purpose. So this is a crap movie, it's really bad, like a lot of Adam Sandler movies, but at the same time also it uses a lot of stereotypes and exploits these for misogynistic reasons in order to make you laugh. Even though this arguably is probably not the authorial intent of this work, of this expressive work of art, very big quotes, it does arrive at the audience and that can be a problem as we're going to see later. So let's do procedural rhetoric on the other hand. In games we do have normal rhetoric. We have things like written speech, we have audio-visual rhetoric that communicates a message to some degree. The thing that we have additionally, on top of that is interaction because as a medium games are interactive and this is where procedural rhetoric comes in and what sets games apart from normal rhetoric. So as Bogos defines it, and Bogos kind of like the grandfather of procedural rhetoric and who coined the term, is the art of persuasion through rule-based representations and interactions rather than the spoken word writing images or moving pictures. So rule-based persuasion, the idea really that the interactions that you have with the game through the mechanics and the dynamics that result from that tell you something about the state of the world or tell you something about an ideology or political persuasion. I see some puzzle phases, we're going to get to that and hopefully resolve those phases into different ones. So for that I'm going to use my personal darling and I always love to use that game because I absolutely adore it, the beginner's guide and then we're also going to take Far Cry 2 because I think it's a really good example of a game that seems to be violent and seems to be your standard shooter but really has a message that it wants to tell. Oh yeah and then going back to the idea of the unintentional message I think there is something to be said about a lot of other games that unintentionally portray a certain worldview and we're going to come back to that similarly as Jack and Jill, Modern Warfare 2022, there are some question messages that might have been put unintentionally into the game which we're going to look at later. So what is procedural rhetoric if we're going to use this model here from Cikart he's mainly using it to explain mechanics but it's very simple you have the player and the player has a set of actions these sets of actions are restrained by the designer themselves you decide what somebody can do then you have an effect within the game world based on that action and then a feedback loop going back to the player if we allow our player for example to be able to shoot civilians because we have that as a possible action and the effect within the game world is no more percussion we're telling the player something about the state of the world the problem is as games get more and more analogous to real life right the more we're trying to go high fidelity we can make these direct connections between games and the real world which is also why the argument often comes in that oh people who play violent either their games actually become more violent as was already discussed in the beginning it's not that simple the process itself there becomes something for expressive purpose there's an argument that bogus makes that even something like Tetris makes a procedural argument and we don't have the time to go into that but I love the idea that we can just have a procedure and through the procedure we actually can have an argument so if later we want to discuss it I would love to but if you take everything else away you would still have a message so I want to take the beginner's guide as a game by Davey Reedin who also did the Stanley parable Return of the Operatin this is one of his lesser known games I think because every time I bring it up people know the Stanley parable but they don't know the other ones and they don't know the beginner's guide in the beginner's guide you're following the narrator who's trying to figure out what happened to his friend Kota now Kota was a game developer and made games and on his computer you go through individual small game experiences that Kota made and that kind of tells you the story of how Kota felt and what Kota went through so a lot of these experiences are very dark they're really depressing it really gives you the feeling that Kota was in a very dark place when he made them but then where we jump in is at a certain point we come to a house we come to a house we have a really bright interior and we go inside and we have some very soothing music playing and we start looking around and the only thing we can really do in this house is we find the bed and we can have an interaction of making the bed and then we find the dishes and we can do the dishes we can arrange the pillows that are in the bedroom we can organize the shelves and then we can start over the bed is unmade we make the bed then we clear the table again we do the dishes we arrange the pillows we organize the shelves we go back we make the bed we clear the table we do the dishes we go over and over and while this is happening we have the narrator slowly coming in and talking about he was grossly happy all the time and nobody directly tells you what is happening but he's making an argument about structure he's making an argument about somebody who's suffering from depression coming to realize that structure is the thing that he needs and we're making that argument without using expressive language to tell me that I figure it out because I go through the process that the designer designed for me in this case and I think for me this is one of the most it's a very simple one but I think it highlights really well how powerful procedural rhetoric as a tool can be Far Cry 2 and now a lot of you probably know the newer Far Cry games unfortunately they've kind of left the station when it comes to procedural rhetoric so in Far Cry 2 released in 2008 yeah we have a war civil war in an African unspecified African war to a country between two factions and I think what Far Cry 2 does very interestingly it really shows you the ambivalence of morality whereas in a lot of other shooters you would have a faction and you do missions for that faction in order to come out at the other end and resolve the conflict Far Cry 2 makes you do missions for both factions and nothing gets resolved Far Cry 2 intentionally constrains the actions that you have as a player and tries to frustrate you by having a malaria mechanic you need to take malaria medication your weapons degrade your weapons jam up thereby stopping you in combat there's nothing fun about this but it overall paints a picture we have humans as an expandable resource in war whereas in other games in New York Far Cry games as well you go to an outpost and you clear the outpost in order to gain territory clearing outposts in Far Cry 2 doesn't do anything once you come back to the outpost later the people are going to be there again the faceless humans that you have to kill again because it's the ambivalence of human life in a world that really doesn't matter because we can't resolve this conflict so the constraints established here in gameplay and the overall systems really paint a grueling view of war and conflict we're showing that hyperviolence itself is an ineffective solution it doesn't solve anything think about all the shooters that you're playing and all the games that have violence in them and think what picture they're painting about violence violence usually is the solution a couple of notables just because we don't have enough time papers please also really good when we're talking about procedure rhetoric the Stanley parable and also the remake now that came out Spec Ops line I think one of the most effective anti-war games that I've ever played even though the cover does not really tell that picture that looks more like cool shooly shooly dude just if you wanted to check that out so what about series games now series games this is a definition by Johansson series game is a simulation which has the look and feel of a game but it's actually a simulation of real-world events and processes and that's where we come back to the analogy to procedure rhetoric the idea is that we're trying to accurately portray how something feels in real life it's about depression it's not only about physical events and processes it's also about mental events and processes yeah so if you see it here if we can accurately constrain the rulesat if we can accurately constrain the actions and the effects within the game world including the feedback we can model these specific rhetoric arguments that we're trying to make about real life for example spend which was a game from 2011 developed by an ad agency McKinney it's trying to show you what it's like to have low income to struggle financially and the idea here is that you start off with a budget and that budget does for example not allow you to you find a job but it does not allow you to move to the city center because it's too expensive so you move outside the city center what that then means for you is the problem is well you need to get a car now well the car now needs to get insurance because otherwise it breaks down then from that point onward well you also need to get the kids to school so they need bus money so it shows you the cascading effects that we often oversee when we're actually talking about poverty because we ourselves cannot relate because on the face of it you can say well why don't you get an apartment outside of the city well it's not that easy it's the cost and effect chain of events of the processes that are going on in somebody's life that are being modeled in a procedural argument in this game to make you understand where somebody starts and where they end so the accuracy of the process and effect is important because otherwise if we make a game about poverty and we basically just say well if you get an apartment outside the city and then it's being solved then we really misappropriate and we're making the wrong statement the false statement the second part is that it's for a specific purpose and that purpose can be abused we can use processes and events we can misalign these processes and events to our own fault to our own gain so how can this go wrong and arguably morally questionable we communicate a worldview through the games we make I hope you understand a little bit better what I mean with this now but we can intentionally or unintentionally create a harmful message as well if the accuracy of the process be it mental or physical is either biased because we want it to be or it is lacking because we didn't do it very well so this is a I just want you to shortly watch this this is from Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 2022 so this takes place in the mission where you are in an urban environment where people are normally working they're normally living there and you come in there and you're chasing the bad guy and once you meet civilians and you have to go through the house the civilians are like what are you doing help help help and the way that they chose to implement the de-escalation is to hold your gun into their face and de-escalate is what the game is asking you to do now what message does that send about police brutality be it about what somebody with a weapon who's in the part of the executive is allowed to do to you whether intentional or not it does send a message so we come to the last part of this and this is about America's army does everybody know America's army who knows America's army if a couple so America's army was a video game released in the early 2000s and it's a state-sponsored video game by the American army it was funded and I think this is an important point to make it it was funded by the recruitment budget of the military it had a teenage rating so they dialed back the violence so they could give it a teenage rating and it was free to play it got shut down this year sometimes I like to think I had something to do with it because I've always preached about it for years but unfortunately not it has been discontinued in May 2022 but America's army is part simulation it's trying to simulate the life of an average soldier in that you have rules of engagement so the way that you're allowed to attack an enemy you're not allowed to kill a deftly wounded enemy you have to take them as a prisoner of war it has realistic weapon handling that is very different from other shooters it has a military command structure you have to obey the commands that you're given in that way we have a pretty realistic snapshot of what it's like to be a soldier but the part that we don't have is a pretty big part being a soldier is very complex what we don't have is lying in the sand for hours and hours trying to wait waiting to get that kill shot what we don't have is the mental anguish that comes with being a soldier the brutality that you're faced with the trauma that you're faced with mental and physical events and processes on top of that we have gamified systems where that communicate a moral imperative the idea that your statistics your player statistic as an American soldier you are denoted as loyalty, duty, honor, integrity, courage and they're tied to your in-game performance but they're completely out of context the enemy is a faceless enemy the only thing we really know is that you're an American soldier so whatever you do inspires loyalty, duty, honor, integrity and courage we're removing all context and making an argument about what the duties of the soldier are as Boga says the American's army also shows that epistemic games bear a risk sometimes we may want to question the values or professional practices rather than assume those values blindly the idea being that if we have a process that is so complex that it's really hard to simplify it while keeping the integrity alive while keeping what makes the job that we're trying to model the job that it is and prepare people appropriately maybe we should not touch that and that's kind of what I want to leave you with for one I think the existence of violence in video games does not imply exploitation of violence for entertainment sometimes that violence like with spec ops line is used for an effect of persuasion about the opposite about the dangers of about the the maybe a second about how how violence is bad bluntly on the other hand we have serious games and in serious games we have both things happening at the same time on the one hand unfortunately in game studies what we see a lot is that we don't really have well thought out procedure arguments but we have an anti-alcoholism game where you throw a ball at some bottles and then that is supposed to make your drink less what we need to do is we need to bottle the we need to bottle we need to model the procedure of what it's like to become an alcoholic and how we get there for people to understand to have empathy and to learn to not fall prey for the same thing on the other hand we also need to protect players from unintentional harm that is both in the entertainment space and the non-intentional space and lastly what I don't see at all most of the time is a call for disclosure there's a lot of money involved in for example the call of duty games that comes from the American military for good reason because it's fun to be a soldier in these games and it's fun to enact violence but there's very little reflection on what that experience is and we've seen over many scandals that we had with no Russian for example with modern warfare 2 if somebody remembers or with the last years the last black ops game where this moral ambiguity is being shown to people who cannot really reflect on it that well yet and I feel like there needs to be a call for disclosure sometimes the same happens with Topkan Maverick if you've seen it awesome movie largely financed by the American military for good reason because it's a recruitment tool and then the question that I just want to throw out there should something simply not be made into games I feel very strongly about this I do believe there are things that should not be gamified again because we can just simply not accurately represent that process and it's it's I wouldn't say immoral but it has a lot of issues to then do it thank you very much for your attention all right thank you everyone for coming back we're now going to start the Q&A session so if you have a question for one of the speakers could you please first state for who the question is and then set your question we have Jochim in the back with a mic so just raise your hand and I'll direct him to come to you for your question so yeah who wants to be the brave one to ask the first question what a surprise all right Sparta go for it this is for you Hendrik do you mind if I call you Hendrik or should I call you okay yeah we know do you think that there are certain games that don't have a rhetoric and they're just there for simply existing like there are some games that don't have a plot like minecraft or something I don't know well so there's an interest so maybe I can explain this what I was talking about with Tetris and Bogus saying well even Tetris by itself would make a procedural argument there's criticism of the idea of procedural arguments in that it always requires subjective reflection so the argument of Bogus as well if we have to I hope I'm not misquoting here I think Murray was involved in some point as well sorry guys um if you have something like Tetris it could be an argument about American consumerism because you're stacking things most efficiently and trying to you know put everything into its boxes but then the retort to that as well that's a subjective interpretation and you need that interpretation in order for there to be an argument so now different people would make different arguments so now if we take that if we take that and really apply it to almost literally anything we will always get an argument because there's gonna be a reflection on it so do I believe this I specifically took the Jill what is it called? Jack Jack and Jill example because it's terrible maybe because the idea that we can completely remove authorial intent from something I think is a fantasy so then we need to be careful about that but is there something that does not have any procedural argument whatsoever I don't think so now I think everything has to some degree in the case of Minecraft I think it's a lot more about co-operation it's about creation it becomes a little bit more implicit than in my examples but I think it's still there I don't think you can completely remove it yeah thank you thank you all right then y'all can take back the mic who would like to have the second question oh lots of hands raised at once I think we'll just go in this order and then move down that way hi this is a question for Aris it's about so producers as you call them so in the current world do we live in in video games I've noticed that when games are released in comparison to like in the early 2000s they don't come with that map editor anymore like they used to and with some examples like for instance with Blizzard Entertainment and the creation of Dota and like League of Legends um how like do we then navigate a world where like uh like you said free labor how do we then navigate in the future where we've noticed that a lot of innovation actually comes from players creating things but doesn't it then feel a little stifling when um you know big companies realize that there's a legality aspect to it so they don't put effort into it so do you have an idea for what the future might be like when it comes to the interrelationship between corporate and the producer in creating something that's new or fresh when it comes to gaming oh very interesting question and I like trying to imagine the future first of all yes some games might not have map editor as you mentioned but what I've noticed is that more and more games have character editors now so it makes it even more interesting that people can model characters and they have custom customization for characters many sports games have the create a superstar like basketball games or football games or even professional wrestling games give you the opportunity to create your own character and there's actually servers and people in the developer team whose task is to maintain those servers and try to enhance and encourage players to share set characters actually very recently when Soul Calibur 6 was released Bandai Namco did this contest and asked the fans to please share your character creation with us and the best ones will get will be shared on our Twitter and our social media so pretty much they asked people to create characters send them to Bandai Namco for as I like to say free advertisement free marketing and they all just got a shout out on Twitter which for some fans yeah it can be empowering but for I think it has bigger benefits for the company than the fans so to answer your question I see a future not very different than what we have now I see a future and when its companies will try to tap even more to the opportunities and offered by not just the games themselves and the platform that the game is released to but also trying to tap into the potential of social media trying to tap in the potential of online media to get even more exposure for the games just as I said earlier PS4 consoles have the share button which allows you to share screenshots on your social media so I think now we're getting into and not we're getting we are and we're getting to an either we're getting there even more to area let's say to an environment where all sorts of media will convert to a bigger experience that in the end will probably benefit the company more than the players all right thank you then I think we had a question yeah cheers thank you very much for all three of the talks they were really fun I have a question for Hendrik actually on your very last point on the kind of so what you had on this slide and what you said were two different things so in the slide it said there are some things that shouldn't be made into a game and what you said was there's a worry about gamification and I worry that there's a conceptual difference between those two so as a cheap example think of like Brenda Roberts game train right where she puts into a game oh you're the people who are running the trains to get people to the camps in the Holocaust she's not gamified the Holocaust but she's put it into a game do you see kind of what I'm after with the conceptual difference there and I worry that the way you pitched it sure there's lots of things that we shouldn't gamify but that's not the same as saying that there are things we shouldn't put into games do you think that's sensible or yeah that's a very fair assessment I think without taking apart now gamification series games like conceptual definitions I think going back to the specific purpose so if we think about this example and there's also the counter example of somebody that there was unfortunately somebody who made the Holocaust simulator right which was a thing so now the content why is it the topic itself should not be taboo because we as an expressive medium should be able to deal with it either way but at the same time the purpose of the game itself is a very different one and how it's handled so should some things you're right in that I don't think any topic should be off topic any topic should be off topic but what I think is the the the purpose for which sometimes the purpose itself for me would put it in the category where I think well do we make games for military training maybe we should not gamify those and there's a some things are just not fun some things should not be engaging because we're going too far away from the simulation of what this is supposed to be and how you're supposed to feel like and on that note I do think it's very interesting sorry I'm going to cut it short that we I think it's very interesting the what is it called again I'm familiar with the game game you were talking about train train yeah train makes you feel bad makes you feel shit sorry it's it's but not when you're playing yeah no but it creates that point of reflection which I think for a lot of procedure rhetoric games is very effective sometimes we also need to go away and in research we do that a lot as well things need to be engaging and that's why we do game no they don't need to be you can't feel really bad because sometimes we need to make you feel bad because you're engaging in a process where you're supposed to learn something sorry thank you thank you for the question all right then right below we had another question I actually have a question from Maddie because I see in your presentation thank you for all those nice presentations and the question from Maddie is that I see you are present quite different genres of of games and I wonder for a lot of games it actually gave people different feelings for example I don't think people play car wash has the same intention or feeling if people choose to play don't doom so I wonder is there any a certain difference between different genre of how immersion people are or what's the effect on people thank you thank you for your question so first of all power wash simulator definitely like lives above genre it's so amazing it's the world's first first person power washer game I believe but yeah there is definitely a question to be asked about the qualities of the games and how they might differ then in their effects on our well-being or our violent behavior life satisfaction and such things we have not really looked at that in detail partly because all we have are the games and genre itself is sort of ill defined a game can be grouped into many different genres it can define genre so we haven't done that kind of a content analysis I didn't show you our results in detail but we did not find that there were particular differences in the relationship between how long people spend playing those games and then subsequent well-being between the seven different or eight different games that we've looked at even though they span quite a wide range of what we might consider genre like Eve online for example is I believe of the genre spreadsheets in space and then you have you're a sort of more straightforward shooters racing games their associations how long people play those games and how they feel after that they were all very very very similar a very small relationships if any but they were very similar and I'm not at the moment I can't recall a persuasive empirical argument that would suggest otherwise that there is for example a specific genre that makes people feel amazing and then there's another genre following which one which people would feel terrible I don't know maybe this holocaust train genre might belong into one of those categories I've never heard of it before it sounds interesting but yeah I mean that's something that not in that sense but like I'm curious about this game now there should be more work into the content of the games but not also in the terms of genre I as a behavioral scientist I'm interested in the kinds of things that people do in the games and how that might affect their subsequent psychological states and different games afford you to do different things so maybe driving this terrible train this behavior this particular kind of behavioral affordance does something unique than driving a train in another kind of game would in short I don't know good question all right I think over there in that corner we had another question multiple questions thank you I have two questions if I may the first one for Maddie you mentioned the game that is prescribed in the US for children with attention deficits what exactly is the content of the game if you know like what exactly is the curing aspect of it I have actually not played it I don't know the content in detail but the idea is that it's supposed to reinforce your sort of naturally occurring abilities of controlling your attention I don't know what that entails in that game I have not been persuaded enough to actually like play it I don't even know if you can buy it or whether you have to get a prescription it's like medical cannabis but medical game yeah a good question I don't know you could look it up thanks I'm sorry and the second one from Henrik I think you touched up on this already a little bit but I guess kind of intuitively like you'd assume that games that kind of make you like not really feel good like also specifically with the one where you have debt or where you kind of live in like some kind of poverty that people wouldn't really want to play those games because it just makes you feel really terrible and so I guess kind of like that's I guess instinctively maybe what you think so my question is kind of like what exactly about those games that actually draws people in like curiosity or there is actually a scientific term for that it's called eudaimonia eudaimonia I don't know how to pronounce it I only see it written out and I've been pronouncing it 15 different ways anyway eudaimonia which has been studied quite a bit in film studies actually so it's the idea that we seek out congruent emotion like if we feel sad we watch a sad movie a lot of times or if we if we feel like we don't want to think too much we watch an action movie like we're not only driven but we're not only motivated to engage with entertainment when that entertainment is fun and exciting but we also want to face our feelings and face our fears and engage with that and I think the same applies here where games as a eudaimonic experience is not as widespread unfortunately because I think it sounds better if you have a product for the masses that is like doesn't have any sharp edges so that everybody can play it and everybody can enjoy it but stuff like the games that I was spending before I think are perfect candidates for a eudaimonic experience that connects to you personally and we seek out those experiences we do with in the same way that we do with films thank you all right I think right next to it yeah yes I also have a question for Maddie if I pronounce it correctly I'm not sure my question is what was your selection criteria for the game titles that you chose to analyze with your team and yeah what was the motivation behind it and because I've noticed most of them were like triple A titles that were quite competitive quite dynamic quite fast-paced so there was no not really much time to kind of reflect on your emotional states of time I assume for most of most players yeah selection of games and also the participants is a really critical issue here right the ways in which this research ultimately happened were sort of different than how you usually do research I as a psychological scientist would define I want to study people from North Brabant and then you sample from there here it was more we need to study play as it happens naturally this data exists and it's in a data warehouse somewhere owned by EA we're gonna go to EA and say we want to study this play data we would like to have a game that's popular that real humans play that's not some dusty Tetris clone from 1994 and we would have some ideas we'd say we want to do this and they would say no we're a multi-billion international multi-billion dollar international company we decide what game you get to study in a nutshell that was the selection criteria sometimes we would go back and forth forth and say like well look this game doesn't appear to be one that might be let's say psychologically interesting or provide a persuasive argument in terms of maybe the player base is so low and we'd go back and forth a little bit and then end up with another game that they suggested ultimately but really they were calling the shots to some extent in that case unfortunately and yeah but we were lucky to get things like animal crossing which was a flagship product that it's time and hopefully going forward we'll have more choices freedom in choosing those things yeah interesting and thank you for the sad truth and honesty all right is there anyone else it's right here in the front in the front and then in the back again making him do a small laugh around the room a question for Hendrik yeah you were talking about like the how the Refix of the game impacts someone right the procedure Refix but how much does that actually depend on like how willing someone is to see that Refix because if I play games I play like story-based games or whatever but my roommate says oh that's boring and he plays shooters and all the shooter teaches me is that I can't see blood so like how much is that Refix depending on how open someone is to actually see that Refix and not just like play through a game and be done with it thanks for the question first of all I don't know so the problem the problem with procedure rhetoric as a field of science is that there's not much work there which is why I really like it so I started doing so I started doing it the problem is we a lot of the reference points that we have we really need to take from other forms of media to the point where the question of counter arguing comes in for example in persuasive communication the idea that there is personal dispositions that are different between people in terms of what you can persuade them with and how they're thinking about something so what we're actually doing right now is we're trying to isolate what a procedural argument is and then we're also trying to look into counter arguing as one potential moderator in that equation to see whether or not that differs per person but I think you're right as with anything if you are not willing to process the arguments you're not willing to engage with that and you think it's boring I can see like with the beginners kind of thing a lot of people would think it's it's a boring game what is this about then I don't think you're gonna get there yeah it's still very much depends on whether you want to engage with it unfortunately in games as well as in movies we see a lot right the big blockbusters are usually the ones with the least amount of meaning behind them because it sells so I think there's a there's a big mass of people unfortunately who don't who don't want to be persuaded about anything yeah so I think there's just as a little caveat I do think there is always a little bit of that going on even with the Adam Sandler movie I still think you're gonna get part of that message even if that message is as small as it's it's okay to make fun of somebody because they're short which is really what that movie that's a terrible movie so I do think that still comes across but yeah no it does depend on the individual I agree I think all right we had in the back another question yes hi again I'm just gonna be really slavish and maybe ask two questions if I may this one is to is to Henrik so I was thinking about Call of Duty and the example you gave me when I think of Call of Duty and procedural rhetoric I think of press F to pay respects and how that stops you in the game and you can't do anything but I also then think about the inconsistencies in the procedural rhetoric of the game so obviously you play a sort of a lunatic of a soldier because you can do whatever you want right and with the example that you showed you intimidate civilians but at the same time if you kill a civilian the game ends and for instance I think in one of the most recent Call of Duty there's so many I can't remember which one if you I think you're rating a house if you shoot the baby the game ends if you shoot it again it takes you back to the main menu and such yeah yeah so I my question basically is what do you think about for instance games like Call of Duty where there is an obvious kind of trivialization of life kind of playing both sides if you will in with the use of procedural rhetoric I think there is a standard that we have come accustomed to that we are okay with and I think they're treading that line where yes if you shoot the baby we need to end the game because we have not luckily we have not gone far enough to where we're like yeah that's cool right we want to we're applying a normative standard I'm not anthropologist so I'm not sure there's probably fancy terms for that in science but so I think they're doing what they have to do and then the glorification of what you're doing for entertainment's sake takes a precedent to everything else so I think that's then where we we start going into if you see the difference between America's army and the call of duty right we have zero rules of engagement there's bad guys shoot him if he's on the ground then you have a fancy execution that's the thing right that this is like and I play call of duty I play it you know I'm guilty but the thing that really irked me and where for one of the few things where I'm like oh I'm not sure if I'm okay with that is the finishing executions that you can earn as cosmetics and those are super brutal and like I'm not I'm okay with violence and video games usually but that kind of irked me as I'm not sure if I want to have an even more gruesome execution as an expression of myself in that game and I think it's a slippery slope there so hopefully we don't reach the point at some point where we go from baby killing not okay to no that's also okay and let's have an execution for that baby right you don't that's on camera now so it's I I think it's what what we find acceptable and to your point at some point we should not find it acceptable right so no Russian is anybody is anybody anybody familiar with the no Russian mission and call of duty modern warfare 22 so you were an insider as part of sorry if I take too much time saw me off but you were taking you were an undercover agent inside the Russian some kind of Russian unit doesn't really matter but Russian terrorist organization and then in one mission they make you go into an airport and mow down civilians because you're undercover right and in that case you can mow down civilians and I've seen both side of that argument being portrayed as to saying well there this is actually to the opposite effect where we're trying to make the player feel bad about it and the other argument was which why back then this cost a lot of critiques while you're trivializing the murder of people you're making people play a terrorist and I think there is a very thin line there and then we come back to the interpretation well does it really depend on who plays that game somebody could be like oh yeah that's cool where somebody else feels bad about it and actually reflects on it to where we have the intended purpose because sometimes we need to change perspectives to show the other side of conflict and things like that I don't know why I'm going with this but point being it's complicated but thank you for the question I hope I at least got somewhere with it yes you did on my next question really quickly is to Matthew from a psychological perspective I wanted to ask why what is our fascination with mimicry games that are all based around blue collar jobs so my myself personally it's anecdotal I love American truck simulator now the issue is would I love to drive a truck across the Midwest probably not it's a stressful job and same goes with power washing so I was wondering what the emotional response is and if that's something that's been studied or not as to why the we love sort of the mundane aspects of a video game that is really just echoing life but we're in real life so why we've been playing life on the game look that's an awesome question I really wish I could say I don't know ask a psychologist but I'm literally a psychologist I have no idea I mean given that I have no idea I will now proceed and answer your question as kids we want to be things that we know about like fire people and doctors and stuff maybe they just aren't simulators for jobs that don't exist or are too new like AI prompt engineer or is that already a game let me conclude Euro truck simulator and apparently there is an American truck simulator hell yeah I don't know thank you I would like to at my opinion what makes us play those games because as you mentioned these games some of these games actually require people to keep doing the same things again and again at this mundane repetition so I would say that it may be because in real life we get quite stressed with our daily tasks and for you know living in the environment we live in we have to be stressed with a lot of stuff and sometimes we look for that gateway actually this is what gaming does to many people so I think by just doing something mundane something that doesn't require a lot of thought process and a lot of activity just by pressing one button or just by doing the same thing and again again it helps us unwind because I was recently reading research paper about as the author calls it inter-passivity not interactive but inter-passivity and in this paper the author says that people really enjoy watching let's play games not because they learn new tactics but because it helps them in a way get get away and resist in a way the structure of constant stress and constant manual tasks so just by doing something mundane something that doesn't require a lot of effort in a way helps them resist the the stressful environment they are part of so that's my estimation I think that's really interesting let me just let me just go with this a little bit as a total as a total like non-expert but why is it then the case that let's talk about power wash simulator any washing simulator people don't go and like I'm gonna relax I'm gonna do the dishes for four hours but yet they're willing to go and power wash for four hours and it relaxes them reportedly and people go then on YouTube that they watch videos of people virtually power washing cars and that is chill and it relaxes them like I'm behind your argument but I also find it mysterious because what it is what is it then in the virtual environment that is so like captivating but people have to be like on drugs to do dishes for four hours and I wonder what the difference is probably it's easier to do it probably it's easier to do it virtually because I think yeah you saw about you saw that person earlier who played the power wash simulator from like 10 in the morning till 10 in the evening yeah very important but I don't think the same person would be willing to do that in an actual you know car wash so I think it is yeah doing it virtually makes it easier and yeah sometimes and I'm going to insert some personal experience here sometimes when I I used to play a lot of cross bandicoot 3 a game that's very dear to me and there's this stage in which you have to participate in a racing contest and beat the other racers but sometimes I would voluntarily throw that match I would lose the match and just go very slow while enjoying the scenery of the of the racing stage because it wasn't an actual race it was a virtual race so it was much easier to do and it would just help me unwind just help me relax just to observe the the digital environment I was part of so I think that's that's that's maybe a reason all right great question thank you very much for that I do have to say we are running quite close sometimes only one or two more questions please I believe we had Felix and Joel still wanting to ask something I have less of a question more of an observation about what was talked about just now and so far that these sort of job games where you perform a minial task seem to be very popular especially recently with like the power simulator with I can't remember the name but some game where you disassemble spaceships for scraps and numerous others and I think I had a point I think it was just be fascinating to study why we like to have even Eve online which is literally just spreadsheets in space while you like to for some reason like to have a job as a hobby it's on the screen okay yeah so now I'm also going to take a step I think for me what it is it's very tangible progress like with a lot of games the problem is I don't really see where the end is and I don't really see how I'm getting there with something like power or something like that I've played a lot as well it's I have a task that is not particularly I know I'm not going to fail at it I know I'm going to get there and I can see how I'm getting there with every little bit that I'm doing it it's kind of like this low effort task that still requires a little bit of effort for me but I know I'm not going to fail at this dungeon in Diablo now I'm going to get to the end so I have very little stress I think that's what relaxes me about that kind of game to be honest but that's also more anecdote than anything also what I've noticed is that big part of the fan base of those games to speak a little bit in a different language do this for tech rules you know for for the memes and for the lulls and yeah as they say they just want to share memes online and have fun they don't take those games seriously bigger trends that you mentioned is happening now so yes some people might be playing to relax some people have more serious objectives but I believe there is a bigger a big part of the fan base out there who does this because it's a trend and they want to have a laugh with their friends which is cool by the way all right then I believe looking at the time almost the last question over here yes for Mati about the psychology of games how does the when I think about like violence in games and how that affects real world how is there any look into how frustration in games would affect personal mood of a person because I feel person I feel like games that are frustrating are more likely to make me feel bad in the long term than games that you just like commit violence yeah frustration definitely there's there's work on that there's um what I believe to be some of the more sort of robust findings is manipulations of things like frustration with the controller or not having experience not having yet like learned how the justics work and stuff like that and if you find that experience experience frustrating that usually tends to lead to worse outcomes ranging from I believe there's some in like negative affect I'm not sure if anyone has measured violence following that I don't know all of the world's hot sauce tasks but uh yes frustration definitely leads to negative psychological outcomes what we don't know however is how long these outcomes last is it just the case that you're frustrated you throw the controller away and you're angry for five minutes or 12 years later what happens you don't know you should find out but uh yeah frustration is one of these important factors for sure and that's you know a lot of time from designers side goes on trying to put tutorials in and stuff so it's not frustrating we can talk later I'll just yes thank you yeah it sadly looks like we're reaching quite close does anyone have a really short question that they can still ask okay really short go for it okay so this is for Ari I wanted to ask because you talked about how particular fangame fans of games tend to do a lot of things that are like essentially free labor but they don't perceive it as such and it made me think of how it's similar in like within development teams there's a huge thing of crunch time of people doing like essentially exploitation of passion and order to get free work or like our video games specifically in a unique position on this where they uniquely exploit this or is it like just because of our perspective focusing more on games I'm not then I'll try to answer fast now and feel the pressure I'm not an expert in all entertainment industries but from what I've heard and from what I've read and I think shortly yes it's everywhere in the entertainment industry not just in video game but you can also see that in movies the recording industry even books for example and make no mistake I have no issues with video game designers themselves I believe there are people who really enjoy the love they get from fans and when they say to fans that they love them I believe they believe it but when you hear that from the marketing team or the sales team or people who are not really gamers themselves and they don't know the gaming culture the same way that the game developer game designer game artists would know it I believe that sometimes they say that they love you might be true but I think they love your wallet more all right well thank you very much that was a very important or informative Q and A just in general as a host I would like to say thank you to everyone first of all thank you to the audience for being so interactive it definitely made everything and especially this Q and A session here really fun also to the back and forth between you guys and the audience then of course a huge thank you to you guys with your really awesome presentations and your speakers and with that I would like to also call all the organizers of this to the stage really quick so that we can give everyone a more official thank you for that as well