 Right, welcome everyone to this year's Missing Link! Yes, indeed, welcome! Alright, the topic of this year's Missing Link is of course about fun, so that's why we have the very appropriate game on, but why? What makes video games fun? This symposium is organised by TSEA Link and Studium Generale. And in today's symposium we're going to try to answer the question, what makes video games fun? Everyone plays games probably educational on your phone, on the computer, in your free time or just for whatever reason you want to play it, and that's kind of like what we're going to delve into here today, where we have also invited our three lovely speakers who each are going to highlight aspects of this amazing world. Hi everyone, thank you for inviting me. First of all, I love to talk about video games, it's also my job, so that is nice. And today I want to talk about games and comedy. The talk that I'm going to give you here is actually part of a book called Games and Comedy, which you can definitely check out if you want to. I wrote a chapter for that book and that's kind of what I'm going to present today. So what I'm going to be trying to do is give you a blitz introduction to philosophy of humour, because of course philosophy is my field, and I'm going to use philosophical theories about comedy and humour to say a bit more about why games are fun. So actually what I'm going to be talking about is why are games funny? Why is playing games funny? Why does it make us laugh? Why does watching other people play make us laugh? Those are the questions that I'm interested in here. So to start giving you an introduction into philosophy of humour or philosophy of comedy, I go way back to Plato's work, the Theatratus. Because in this, Plato tells a story, which is kind of the beginning of philosophy of humour as such. Plato tells a story about Thales, which you might know from math classes. Thales was, of course, a very distinguished scholar. And at one point it's already, well, the sun is down. Thales is taking a stroll. And Thales was very interested in the cosmos. And in the stars. So while on his stroll, Thales is looking upwards to the stars that he sees in the sky, and he's so wrapped in thought about these stars that he doesn't see a well in front of him and he stupidly falls into it. And a girl was standing nearby and she sees this distinguished scholar stupidly stumble into a well and she laughs because she says, well, he was so busy with what was above him that he didn't see what was right in front of him. Very philosophical attitude by Thales, I would say. But in any case, this story already tells us something very important about philosophy of humour because here we already have the two most important aspects the situation must have to be funny or to be comical. What we have here is an unexpected contradiction, a very distinguished, supposedly intelligent person does something really stupid. And we have a distanced spectator. We have somebody who is not really involved in the situation, reflecting on it from the outside, able to take on an objective attitude towards it and thus she can laugh. Those are two crucial ingredients for comedy, not only according to Plato, but according to everyone after him who talked about philosophy of humour. And my kind of argument for today will be that these two aspects can be found in video game play very, very often and that it kind of tells us something about why playing video games is fun. So first, I want to go a bit more into these two aspects because they are really important, right? So you have a contradiction or an incongruity, something that doesn't quite fit with what you expected. And we have a distance and dispassionate reflection. Dispassionate here just means without any emotions, without emotional involvement, right? Let's look at each in turn. So incongruities or contradictions. Kant, whom you may know, says about this, laughter originates from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing. Schopenhauer says it as follows, the comic arises in the perception of a contradiction and laughter itself is just the expression of this incongruity. Helmut Plesner says, comedy happens when inattentiveness, absent-mindedness and inflexibility readily manifest themselves in clumsiness and rigidity of behavior. As you might tell, philosophers are very, very serious when talking about comedy. It's not very funny to hear them explain what is supposedly funny. But what they mean here is basically this, when something is funny, it just means that you expected one thing to happen, but then you encountered something entirely different. Think again of Thales, right? You didn't expect this intelligent person to fall down. So you expect flexible behavior, intelligent or skilled behavior when watching other people act. But what you find is often rigid, mindless or clumsy behavior. And that's often what is so funny. So how do we find these kinds of contradictions or incongruities in video games? Because that's, of course, what I want to talk about. Well, in fact, it's very easy to pinpoint irrational, rigid and clumsy behavior in players, because there is a kind of inherent contradiction to video game play. Think about playing a game, right? In this case, a digital game on a screen. Of course, we all know when we are playing a game that is just a game. Like it's not very serious. We just do it out of entertainment. It's for fun, supposedly. But we tend to take it very serious. For example, when I was playing Uncharted, Drake's Fortune, I didn't know that it was a scary game. I normally try to avoid horror games. But Uncharted, Drake's Fortune has this kind of change midway through the game where suddenly these guys pop up, which I absolutely hate it. Why? Because I got super scared. Like, I was really shaking while playing this game. I was so scared they were going to kill me. They looked like that. I was super terrified. That doesn't really make any sense, though. Because why was I terrified? Of course, I knew that this was just a bunch of pixels on my screen. They weren't real. They couldn't hurt me. And also, while I said, like, oh, I'm so scared. I'm running away from the zombies. What I was actually doing was just pushing buttons on my controller. It's all not that serious. So here we already see a kind of irrational behavior, right? Like, we take it very seriously. We are super terrified, or at least I was. But in fact, it's just a game. It's not that serious. You also see this kind of stuff when, for example, players are playing Dark Souls or any kind of from-software game, in fact, which of course are infamously difficult. When you are playing from-software games like Dark Souls, you very often see this screen. I do not believe that anybody would not see this screen very often. Do not want to believe that. So you die very, very often. And also there, when playing these kinds of games, you often notice that you take it way too seriously. Players can get super frustrated when a game is difficult. Again, this is super irrational behavior. It's not that big a deal that you die in a video game. Nothing really bad happened. You are definitely irrationally overreacting. But this is, you know, this is how we play games. This is the contradiction that tends to be inherent to video game play. And not only video game players are irrational or clumsy in their behavior, also characters within video games tend to be very rigid and clumsy in their behavior. Of course, because they are, I mean, programmed to have certain behaviors, and sometimes their AI is not very smart. Here you can see the skate game. This doesn't make any sense, this kind of behavior. This shouldn't be possible also. This is weird. Like this person keeps doing this thing that is impossible, and then at the end succeeds in, and then it doesn't make any sense what we see here. Very rigid, very clumsy, very irrational. And this is the kind of behavior we very often see, of course, in both avatars and NPCs or non-playable characters in video games. So again, very incongruous behaviors. Now let's look at that second comic element. There needs to be a distance and dispassionate reflection on those contradictions that we just discussed. Bergson says about this, step aside and look upon life as a disinterested spectator. Many a drama will turn into a comedy. In fact, if you succeed to take distance from situations that at first seemed very tragic, often they become very comic. Like, oh, it's actually not that big a deal. It's actually quite funny. Kierkegaard says, the comic is everywhere, where there is contradiction and where the contradiction is painless. So again, when we are not too involved in it, when we can reflect on it in an objective or emotionless way. And Freud says, we can only laugh at something when we distance ourselves from it. So same idea. We need to take on a rational or objective perspective towards something before we can think of it as comical. Think in this regard again about Thales. Of course, the girl who was watching the situation, who didn't stumble into the well, is the one who is laughing. She's like a third objective person. Probably Thales himself was not laughing. Plato doesn't describe this, but he might have even heard himself when stumbling down. So he is too involved in a situation to find it funny or to see why it is comical. In fact, Blesner says that we are very often too preoccupied with ourselves and our own actions. So very often the comedy of our actions is only visible to the disinterested observer, not us but someone else, the laughing third party. Often it's someone else who can see that we are stupid and thus funny, but not us. But something very interesting goes on there because a lot of philosophers say that, well, in fact, you can become a disinterested spectator towards yourself sometimes. In fact, human beings have this inherent power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time. Baudelaire says that the philosopher is very good at this because we are the kind of people who are trained at taking an objective and rational distance from ourselves. Sometimes we feel something and then we have to rationally or philosophically think about it. Like, what does this mean? Why do I have these emotions? Why do they fit the situation that I'm in? Or don't they? We are very trained in taking an objective distance towards ourselves to be able to do philosophy about emotions or ourselves, etc. Baudelaire also says that the comedian is very trained in this. Comedians are people who go through very tragic situations and then they say like, hey, this would make a perfect situation to talk about in my next show because they can take, again, this kind of objective distance towards their own lives to talk about it in a funny way. This is what Baudelaire says. But what I say is that there is a third category of people who are very good at taking a distance towards themselves. And those are video gamers. And that's what I want to focus on now. So again, imagine you're playing a game, right? You're running away from zombies. In this situation, two versions of you are present. You have the avatar, who you refer to as me in the game. It's often called in philosophy the I in the game world. You are referring to this person in the first person. I am running away, but actually you are referring to the person on the screen. And then there's, of course, also the actual me, the person sitting in the couch and pressing buttons. So already what we see here is, I already can take a distance towards myself because there are two versions of me. There's the actual me, who can reflect on the actions of the me in the game world. So if the me in the game world does something stupid, like walking into a chasm while running away from zombies, I can probably laugh at it. If I take a distance towards what is happening on the screen, and I look at myself as this person in the couch, pressing the buttons. If I do that, I can see that whatever is happening on the screen is actually just the game and quite funny. And I think that's what makes video games so inherently funny. Now there are different kinds of game comedy. Based on whether the comic situation is caused unintentionally or intentionally, and whether they are caused by the player or by the game itself. So I kind of want to discuss these four categories with some examples from video games. If a comic situation is caused unintentionally by the player, it's often because the player is failing at playing the game. If it's caused unintentionally by the game, it's often because the game is failing. Think about glitches, for example. If it is caused intentionally by the player, it's because they are mocking themselves or playing mischievously. And also games can mock themselves. And then they kind of intentionally create the situation in which you can objectively reflect on what is happening in the game. So I'm going to talk about these four categories now. Let's first look at failing players. Always funny to see. In fact, you see a lot of videos online of people trying VR and failing at it in this way. So what you have here is somebody who is too immersed in the game, right? They try to lean on a mountain that only exists virtually. It doesn't make any sense. Very clumsy behavior. But again, very inherent to the way we tend to get immersed into video game worlds. And of course, players can fail in many, many ways. You can also just fail at the challenge of the video game. And very often that is funny, especially for people looking at you play the game like this. In fact, it's so funny that some games are designed to have this kind of effect. To be too difficult to play to cause funny situations. Maybe you know this game. It's called QWOP, because with the Q and the W, you control the thighs of the runner and with OMP, the cows. Super difficult. In fact, you could say that game design-wise, this is probably a horrible game. Not a lot of people can play it at all. Most playthroughs take only seconds and look like this. So what is fun about this game? Why do people play this game? Well, because it's just funny. It makes you laugh. You fail and it's in a funny way, because the clumsy behavior of the avatar and your failure to mash buttons correctly can be objectively reflected on. So games like this called Fumblecore actually try to have this kind of comic effect. Now look at Failing Games. Always very funny. Like I said, glitches are a crucial way in which games can fail. They fail to represent the correct fictional world. Here you see an important mission into Assassin's Creed Unity. This person is having a very serious conversation about the fate of the world, except their face disappeared. So it's just floating eyeballs and teeth for some reason. Instantly, that makes it very funny, because so many you are reflecting on the fact that, well, this is not a serious life-changing, world-changing mission. This is just a flawed piece of software that I'm looking at. And you have many examples of this, of course. Here you see something that can happen in FIFA. You can see a glitch in Skyrim, which makes fire... Well, the fire breathing dragon... Well, the fire doesn't come out of his mouth anymore. And here you see the introduction to Fallout New Vegas, where again, you have this serious psychological evaluation with this doctor, but his head keeps spinning around for some reason. So again, all of these situations reveal that the game is just the game, just kind of a malfunctioning machine, and that can be very funny. Games can also feel like this. Here you see a difficult enemy in Dark Souls 3, and he just yeets himself off a cliff easily. So again, what you see here is a failing game, and it is funny. I'm glad you laughed. It's funny. But also, of course, game comedy can be foregrounded intentionally. When players do this, it's often because they are playing mischievously. For example, you see a lot of YouTube videos like this. Dangerously funny says, I placed 150 sims inside a very flammable house in the Sims 4, and it goes exactly like you expect. The house catches on fire and everybody dies. Why is that funny? Well, again, because what he is foregrounding here is the clumsy, rigid way in which the people in the house behave, right? Why don't they just run away? The kitchen is on fire, and yet they still stand there eating there, whatever. So it doesn't make any sense, and that's also what makes it funny. You have a lot of videos like this as well. A market player literally throws a chair in range while playing, getting over it. Again, a very difficult game. Why is this funny? Because as an outsider, you are not as involved in the game as a market player is at the moment of playing. So when he completely overreacts, when he dies for the 10th time or 100th time, it's funny. You're like, what a loser, but it's actually very fun to see. Another very nice example, I think, of mischievous play is this way in which people tend to cheese boss battles, for example, in Sekiro, the game that you see here. There's this incredibly hard boss you see in here, the demon of hatred, and a lot of players actually found a stupid and silly way to defeat him. As soon as you enter his arena, instead of actually fighting him, you can just retreat to a nearby roof of a pagoda. And when you stand there, he cannot reach you, this boss. He still tries to though, so he jumps at you and falls into a cliff and dies. So again, he falls into a chasm, death, and then the game says, she know be execution, and you get a lot of experience points. You get nothing, you just stood on a roof. Again, what you have here is a kind of revelation of how clumsy and rigidly characters in the game behave. You have this kind of objective reflection on this complete contradiction. These super powerful balls just kill themselves. Lastly, games can also mug themselves. They can foreground their own rigidity themselves. A very nice example, I think, is Space Quest 3. At one point in Space Quest 3, you can find a ladder, which of course you need later on in the game. And like in almost every game of that kind, you can take the ladder and put it in your pocket, in your inventory, which is magically infinite in space, right? So when you click the ladder, the game says, you grab the ladder and jam it in your pocket. Ouch. What the game is doing here is of course foregrounding that that is supposed to be impossible. Like what are we doing here? We're just picking up items that are bigger than ourselves and putting them in our backpack or our pocket. Doesn't make any sense. Happens constantly in video games and here they just kind of muck it. Like yeah, we know it's silly, but this is how the game was designed. A game that does that very funnily as well is, I believe this is Uncharted 4. And I don't know if you know, but by the fourth game of course, Uncharted series was already very famous and people knew all about Nathan Drake, the main character that you see here, who is supposedly a super nice guy. Like he's sympathetic, everybody likes him. But throughout the series, throughout the first three games, he killed thousands of people. That doesn't make any sense. In fact, in philosophy or in game studies, reflections on video games, we call that ludonarrative dissonance. There's literally a contradiction between the game itself, ludos, and the narrative, the story, right? In the story, super nice guy. In the gameplay, murderer, mass murderer. Doesn't make any sense. So by the time the fourth game was published, in fact, if in this game you kill 1,000 enemies, you get an achievement. And ludonarrative dissonance. What you see here again is of course the game mocking itself. Like yeah, we know this doesn't make sense, but let's just have a laugh. So those are kind of the four categories of game comedy that I wanted to discuss. So just in conclusion, I hope it's clear how the story of Play-Doh is very much reflected in video game play. When we are playing games, we are kind of at the same time darlis stumbling in the well and the girl laughing at him from the outside. Thank you. And thank you very much Nele for this lovely presentation. I hope you all learned a bit. And if you have any questions at the end of the event, we will have a Q&A. So please think of, keep them in mind and then we can ask them all. And then I start this. I would actually like to ask our next speaker to come to the stage, which is Joyce Stickerman. A product developer manager at GamePoint, one of the larger game development companies. And she's going to tell us a little bit about game marketing and how we're going to do all of that. So in that case, I will give the floor to Joyce. Would you like to stand here? I think I've been good with my microphone. So let's just go forward. Right. So I'm going to shortly talk about fun for a little bit. And it's in quotation marks for a reason. Then we're going to slowly move on towards what motivates player. And then we're going to look at it from a perspective of game design. And then I'm going to shortly talk about marketing because I didn't die in my presentation and we're going to figure out how long I'm talking. So who am I? I am Joyce. I worked at these companies. Alpha Sound 4 was a PlayStation home fan site. So not really a company, but it started my career in game. Then I moved to Code Glue where I did a little bit of work on Rocket Riot, which was kind of their claim to fame. If you wonder why the DLC is so easy, my secondary job there was to balance it. It's a twin stick shooter. I am shit at it. So download it, play it. You'll thank me later because it's actually a really hard game. And then I decided to go into journalism for a little bit and moved on to Game Point where I community marketing and I now do product. So that's all kind of boring. So let's talk about my gaming achievements. Killzone 2. I was in the top 50 with my old girls clan. Even had a transgender person in there. So it was really early on. Kind of struggle. Then moved to playing Destiny. I was the first Dutch person with light armor. I played a lot of Dota. Too much Dota. So much Dota that I probably didn't really study that much. So then went on to the finals of Buzz, the smartest person of the Netherlands. Got aired on Discovery Channel. And at the moment I have over 800 hours in Modern Warfare 3 and never touched a single moment of single player. Also I have a cat. He was as disappointed in Anthem as the rest of the world because Anthem managed to over promise and under deliver. So why is that important? Because Anthem clearly wasn't fun to people. So what is fun? This is according to the dictionary, the definition of fun. A mode for finding or making amusement. Well, fun as this is descriptive as the Dutch word gezellig. We all instinctively know as Dutch people what it means, but I can't actually tell you what it means because how do you describe gezellig to somebody? So that's kind of tricky. So how does fun exist? According to Raph Koster, fun is another word for learning. Well, I don't know, but as a child school wasn't really fun for me. Who associated learning with fun ever? Right, so then how does fun occur? Fun occurs according to pattern recognition, according to Koster, and he says that it is about mastering your skill, having influence on that, having a channel to work towards, but still having a certain level of uncertainty and that's what makes it fun. It makes it challenging. In the animal kingdom, you see that quite often because play is the safest way to develop skills to manage their hunting. And the fun is the reward. That's why kids like playing, they are actually hunting the little mouse and also children, children develop patterns and that makes them very good at maths, good at learning, good at language. So it's very important that we stimulate children at an early age to develop these patterns. Right, so I mentioned play. Play is a very important next word for fun. What motivates a player? Well, I like to challenge this from the self-determination theory which is a psychological framework that looks at the motivation of players and it's based on three things. Autonomy, competence, as well as relatedness. Well, autonomy means the ability to be yourself, freedom. And then you have confidence which is developing the skill and the manage to have actions and interact with the world and then there is relatedness which, you know, being part of this larger world. Well, my cat is still looking for motivation to come out of bed. So what really motivates a player? There's two types. And I'm going to stumble over these words a million times, extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is all the external reward systems that you see. It is influenced from the outside to keep the player playing. That also means that I keep the player engaged doing things that they don't like doing to reward them with something that they actually want. And then there's the intrinsic motivation which is fulfilling one of the earlier mentioned psychological needs and that's actually fun. That's where the fun comes from. So it is important to note that not every player has the same motivations. And what is fun to a person also kind of differs. I mean, as you can imagine, my physique isn't made to run a marathon even though as I've proven I'm a very competitive person with my gaming achievements. You wouldn't make me happy. But somebody who is genetically blessed is competitive. Oh, he'll run that marathon and he'll be first. Unfortunately, not everybody's the same. So my cat would like to point you towards Bartol's player types for gamification where you can see four different player types that everybody kind of fits into. One person is more competitive. The next person is more of a gatherer. They like to collect all the achievements. So definitely go check that out. It is somewhat older in theory. And why I mentioned this is because society has evolved. So also people's motivations and their player types have evolved. Hence, as mentioned before, souls like are now more prevalent. And for example, RTS, Starcraft, Original Warcraft are a little less common in genre at the moment because the interest just isn't there of people anymore. It doesn't motivate them to play anymore because that has shifted. So at Game Point, we develop social games. They are casino games. Bingo is interesting because Bingo's fun comes from chance. And I don't want to dive in that too far. Please, if you want that, ask questions later, find me, email me, and I'll dive into the fun of chance. However, let's keep that very, very flat. Bingo is a boring game because nine out of 10 times, you don't win. For some people, that's very exciting, by the way. So good for you. I am not here to make Bingo more awesome. I am at Game Point to make everything around Bingo more awesome. And one of the things that you have to keep in mind is one of the greatest things to a player that is really engaged with our game is the coins. Coins is what these players in the world go round. Why? Because they need coins to play. So how do we motivate a player to keep playing? Well, we developed a mission system. The mission system is on the verge of being an extrinsic system motivator because it gives rewards. But it's also a very natural thing to do because you can do it by playing. So it's also intrinsic. We have a requirement and we have a reward. Easy. I've dangled the carrot and you do it. As you can see, the first two give a currency called stamps and the bottom one gives a currency called coins. Why is this a motivator? Well, as a player, as you can see, the second mission and the third mission are both in the five coins, so I can combine those. I can make it so that I spend as little coins as possible to get both rewards. And then at the same time, I'm also completing number one. So I have a great sense of self-influence, of optimization, of strategy in completing these missions. And I know I'm keeping it very basic because, as you can imagine in games that are like Call of Duty, all these missions are way more complicated. You have to do special requirements. This is quite simple. Additionally, you can do this in any order. I mean, if you think away the time, you even can do them whenever you want. So that's the first step of a motivational layer to a player. But, as I already said, everybody's different. But if I keep doing these missions, I'll get bored because I've optimized them. According to Costner, fun only exists if I'm learning. So we have a great guy called Brian Upton who said, I've supposed there was a long time ago when playing free cell taught me something new. Now I just play it because it's familiar to me. This little sense of nostalgia kind of breaks. Costner's fun equals learning. And I'm doing this little interlude because I hope it makes you think. Because it goes against everything that Costner says. And he had a response to this and he actually says, you're playing the game wrong. You are playing the game wrong. The game is done. The game is done. And then you wonder, okay, but you had 800 hours in Call of Duty. You're playing the game wrong. I know. I know. I play those 800 hours because I hope I get match made into a very easy match where I can pawn those noobs. That's me. And that's also what Costner says. If you have played the game and if you have finished learning everything, you're just doing it for a power trip. You are doing it for a power trip. So with Bingo, with a chance game, the power trip isn't really there. But let's move on. I finally set the word board. So yeah, the mission feature is not for everyone. It becomes less challenging over time. We become less satisfied with the factor competence. And we need another layer. So we added another layer where if you collect the stamps from the first two missions, you fuel the second reward tier. And as you can see, I said coins are the most important thing to our player. 10,000 coins is about 50 euros in game currency. So as a player, you want to keep going. It is very important to note that it does have a time limit. It ends in four days and 12 hours. Why is that important? Because it's finished. That means that even though this event runs for seven days, yeah, I'm an highly engaged player. I finish it in two because I'm that competitive. And these kind of things are made so that it looks achievable for everyone. But if you're just casual, you'll never see the end of it. And that's the point for us as game designers, as a games company that wants to make money. It doesn't really help the player. So yeah, I had fun once. It's now awful. So we developed another extrinsic motivator because rewards motivate people. A leaderboard. We actually never developed it for missions. We decided that we're a social game, so we're going to do it in this club feature. That's why suddenly this interface looks entirely different. It's actually a very bad design for a good leaderboard because as you can see, you don't know which position Yoni Naikamp is. Is she first place? Is she second place? Normally, I say you're number one. And you're number two. You need to play harder to beat him. And that either motivates you or it doesn't. It comes by proxy and maybe you'll get a reward for it. Great. Clearly this feature wasn't for you. But you are going for it. So all these tracks together touch all three motivators, psychological needs based on the self-determination theory. Mainly autonomy, competence, and relatedness. All of these, of course, have a reward. Either it's an intrinsic reward or an extrinsic reward. Then you could also go in to show off, etc. Some of them are timed. Some of them are timeless because I need to get these to keep these players going. So this one, hopefully you can see that this is an entire package. It's a layer. It's like an onion. This is just one example of making Bingo exciting. Because like I said, Bingo is a loser's game. Yeah? There's only one Bingo. There's 150 people in this hall. You're not going to win it. There's no chance. The chance is one in 700 million that you're a card will be the winning card. Right. So marketing. You've all seen the very cool story trailers for Dark Souls, as already mentioned. I'm very competitive, but I have no patience. So I just need to get good. Because a Dark Souls game is a game that inherently teaches you this very high-skill game. It teaches you by failing. And I don't like suffering. I mean, I already hate Call of Duty is if I'm continuously losing, I'll stop. I just I'll wait until I have a new punning match again. So what do mobile games do? Or what do most games do? They also release a gameplay trailer. And this gameplay trailer is usually focused on intrinsic rewards. As you can see here, the Bingo in the bottom is a competitor of Game Point. They focus on playing with multiple cards, more skill, more competence. Play with your friends, relatedness. And then customize your game, unlock rewards. You can show off what you're doing. You can measure yourself against others. You get rewards. You're working for something. It's exciting. You get a lot of, well, let's say dopamine from playing these reward games. So in conclusion, your takeaway should be fun is learning. It's mastering skills. There are some, yeah, let's say edge cases where this doesn't apply. There's also some edge cases, as we just learned, that have nothing to do with what the game is actually doing. Good game design for me is understanding what motivates a player. That's also why you keep going back to something or that you're actually driven to finish something. For me, game design comes from the self-determination theory. There's two types. Intrinsic, the actual fun. Extrinsic, everything that keeps you going to have this fun. And then, yeah, game design is nothing else, but an onion of layers and layers and layers that keep you going. And I would like to leave you with this quote. Everyone's fun is different, but fun works the same for everybody. Thank you so much. All right then. Thank you very much for your presentation. All right. Next up, I would like to welcome Gideon de Pan to the stage. A graduate from Tilba University with a focus in research on the narratology of video games. Take it away. Oh, thank you. Let's see. Can I have the PowerPoint up, please? Oh, is it right here? Okay. This looks familiar. Oh, hello. My name is Gideon de Pan. I recently graduated from Tilba University with a massive thesis on cosy games, not on cosy games, on cosy games and the sublime. Let's see. My special interest is video games, and I sort of accidentally stumbled into cosy games during my thesis, because I was writing about a game called Gris, which was actually, which I actually talked more about in relation to the sublime, but then I accidentally stumbled into cosy games and what cosy games were. And well, it's sort of my special interest at the moment. So the first question, what is a cosy game? A cosy game is a game that is supposed to make the player relax. The idea is that in contrast to more competitive or more hardcore games, such as, well, let's keep the trend going, such as Dark Souls, for example, where you have to put in a lot of time and effort, and you're constantly bombarded with hard enemies, and you're constantly at the risk of dying. Cosy games supposedly offer an environment where there is no stress, where you are just playing the game, you are fulfilling the game's mechanics, you are fulfilling objectives, but there is no stress involved, there is no danger, you can just relax while playing the game. And the idea is that this relaxation is further improved by soft colors, pastel colors, autumn colors. There is very often a sort of autumn theme going on, for example, in Animal Crossing. There is also a very ambient sound design, so a lot of noises of birds rain tickling against the window, all sorts of sounds that are meant to make you as the player relax. And the idea is that you, as a player, can focus more on appreciating a game's visuals, thinking through narrative themes, and actually focusing on completing the game's objectives, you're sort of completing the game's objectives just by virtue of playing the game. So, just to start with a quote from Daniel Cook. Cozy Games gives special space to deal with emotional and social maintenance and growth. Players don't need to worry about the high stress immediate trials of mere survival, and can instead put their intention toward the delicate work of becoming a better person. That sort of all sounds a little bit too utopia for me, but it sort of does give away that Cozy Games are more about improving your own mental state than actually focusing on achieving hard things in video games. This entire idea is based on Muscle of Pyramid. The idea is that most video games, most competitive video games, focus on the lower needs, such as safety, hunger, thirst, and shelter. The idea is that you're focused on surviving, you're focused on competing, but however in Cozy Games, because your survival is basically guaranteed, you can focus on more on getting a positive mental state through contemplation of the game's themes or appreciating visuals. Agata Vaskevice and Martina Bakun thought about the different types of Cozy Games that exist. They came up with three different general categories. The first category is a coherent Cozy Game. A coherent Cozy Game is the type of Cozy Game that I just talked about. It is a game with very soft visuals and a very low bar of difficulty where you are just playing the game and thinking about its themes, while not necessarily paying attention to the difficulty of fulfilling the game's objectives. Then there are the Dissonant Cozy Games, and the Dissonant Cozy Games are a little bit of a more controversial category, where there is a very low bar of difficulty, and there are the soft visuals and the ambient audio design that do characterize Cozy Games. However, the idea is that narratively, the games deal with topics of mental health or death or grief, and these topics are not necessarily Cozy. So there is a bit of a contradiction there. And then there is also the situational Cozy Game category, and to refer once again to Dark Souls as an example, situational Cozy Games are situational moments of Cozyness in games appear in video games that are very decidedly not Cozy. So in Dark Souls, everything is out to kill you and you are out to kill everything else. However, there are these very sparse moments of relaxation at the bonfires where you can sit down and regain your items, spend experience points in order to improve yourself in the game, and there is just a very relaxed atmosphere. There is relaxed music playing, there are other non-playable characters you can talk to, so the focus is not necessarily on succeeding in the game there. The idea where these Cozy Games sort of came from is a little bit still up for debate. Vaskevic Sembakun indicated a shift in the casual hardcore economy that characterizes a lot of video game history. So broadly speaking, there are the hardcore games and the hardcore players, and the hardcore games ask of the hardcore players that they insert a lot of time and energy into playing the video game, into learning how to play the game, into improving and into succeeding. And then there are the casual games that have a lower barrier of entry and you are just playing the game. And well, certainly you want to win, but there is a less punishing, I would say, than the more hardcore games. And also often their visual presentation is different. Oftentimes they feature more bright colors. They are very much more cheerful than more hardcore games. However, as video games continue to reach more and more people, the idea is that as video games reach more people, more people are becoming interested in video games and not everyone has the time and the energy to continue to play hardcore games all the time. So, cosy games are very much meant for relaxation and just a very casual escape from the world and its troubles. What I found particularly interesting while writing my thesis about cosy games is the idea that there are video games that are not necessarily predicated on interaction as its most important part. The most important part of a cosy game is thinking about this game, thinking about the themes or relaxing instead of playing the game. And this sort of goes up against a lot of different definitions about what is the most important part of a video game, which is often stated as to be the interaction. So just video games do exist of a lot of different parts. However, the idea is that once you are playing a video game, you are most preoccupied with playing and succeeding. So a game does have graphics, a game does have music, a game does have a narrative. However, when push comes to shove, you need to succeed, you are mostly focused on the interaction. An interaction, as Jesper Yu correctly points out, can also form a bit of a barrier of entry compared to other art forms. Because in order to progress in a video game, you need to reach a certain skill level when compared to, for example, when you watch a movie or read a book, which can be harder to understand, but generally evolve, progress more on themselves than video games do. So in order to think about how exactly or what plays interaction takes in cozy games, I moved to the field of neo-formalism, which is a method of looking at media, as consisted of different devices. And this might sound a bit abstract, but the idea is that a device is a specific element that the works consist of. So for example, if you look at a painting, there are forms, there are colors, and the forms and colors are different devices. If you look at a movie, sound is a device, and the narrative is a device, visual design is a device, the costumes are a device, and these all communicate something to you as you are watching the movie. When it comes to video games, as Jasper von Wucht points out, for example, aspects of the game, such as mechanics, graphics, soundtrack, or sound effects are also devices. And what you do as a player while playing the video game is you think about the motivations behind the inclusion of these different devices. So for example, so to give you an example, you see Mario 64 right there at the bottom right corner, where you are playing Mario 64, you take a look at, for example, Bowser's boss arena. The arena is blue, there is spooky music playing, and what you are thinking about when you are thinking about the motivations of these specific devices is thinking about what exact effect they have on you as a player. However, when compared to other artworks, there is still the matter of interaction to discuss when it comes to video games, and as Jasper von Wucht points out, the ludic motivation, the idea that something is included in a video game in order for you to interact with, is a very important part. And most of the times when you play a video game, you are thinking about the things in front of you in the ways that you can interact with, in the ways that you can succeed. So the idea is that ludic devices are relevant to your progression. So to, for example, move on to another example, you see Kirby there in the bottom right corner. The idea is that Kirby swallows this apple and spits it back, and this apple exists. This apple might be part of the narrative. This apple has a sort of artistic shape. It exists as a depiction of an apple. However, the idea is still that you interact ludically with it. You are supposed to spit it back at the tree in order to succeed. And what I found interesting about cozy games is that cozy games place a lesser emphasis on this interaction. So in cozy games, you are still playing. However, the ludic motivation, the idea that things are included in order for you to interact with and the fact that you are constantly considering the different aspects of the game as for their value on how to interact with them, sort of take a lesser space, sort of take a lesser place in this hierarchy. It becomes less important to think about how you interact with the game than rather to think about its narrative implications or its thematic implications or how it makes you feel. Some important factors to keep in mind with cozy games is that Daniel Cook, who sort of was one of the first researchers who wrote about this idea of cozy games, points out that cozy design is an aesthetic goal. It is not guaranteed that everything in a cozy game is perceived as cozy. And this depends on several factors. For example, there is the player's mindset. If I want to play Dark Souls and I go on to play Stardew Valley, the slow tempo of the game might annoy me. So it really depends on what you as a player want to play. Secondly, what is also important is the player's knowledge of genre conventions. I mentioned earlier that I wrote my thesis on Gris. I showed Gris to my thesis supervisor. However, she was very unfamiliar with video games. So this video game that is supposed to make people feel cozy was aggravating to her because she didn't know how it worked. There is still the barrier of entry there when it comes to cozy games. And there are also criteria within the game itself. Just to give another example, Disney Dreamlight Valley. My little cousin from 7 years old was playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, which is a cozy game. However, he got quite upset when he couldn't understand what was being said because the game wasn't English. So there was also a lot of personal factors to keep in mind when considering something cozy. So once again, cozy game becomes less about forcing an ideal utopian state and more about facilitating these feelings as best as possible, giving a widespread of player motivations and emotional states. So it is more about facilitating an emotional state rather than guaranteeing an emotional state. Another thing I found interesting and what I recently wrote about is the idea that players interpret non cozy games as cozy. So with all the different criteria that are just established, some gamers do think that games that are very decidedly not cozy, according to the criteria I mentioned before, are cozy simply because of how it makes them feel. And this is often dependent either on their skill level within the game or on the audio visual presentation of the game. So to give an example, one of my friends, for example, considers Dark Souls 1 a cozy game because he can relax while playing it. I have no idea how he does that, but. And there is also the idea of a cosification of non cozy games. And that is the idea that players make non cozy games, cozy games, or consider them cozy games because they use cheat codes or hacks in order to make the game easier in order to remove that, in order to remove the ludic element from the game or make it so that they don't have to pay as much attention as in other games. So just a couple of examples. Probably my favorite is the person who considers Valheim a cozy game because he cheated. Well, Valheim is a game where you play as a Viking and you are supposed to survive. You're supposed to survive in a world that is very, yeah, what's the word, threatening, you're supposed to collect your own food, create your own shelter, all things that are very much decidedly not cozy. So in the end, what this leads us with is two definitions of cosiness. There is sort of an academic definition of cosiness as defined by Daniel Kuk and Washkewitz and Bakun, where in there is guidelines for what can be considered a cozy game. However, there is also the idea that cosiness is defined by the players. It's defined by how it makes the player feel rather than what distinct criteria the game fulfills. So yeah, cozy games are simultaneously defined in that sense and also very much subjectively defined by the players. And that's about it. All right, thank you Gideon. All right. Before we go into a small break, I would like to please attend you all. The fact that all the slides for these presentations are available if you scan the follow-on QR code, of course. We are going to have a short 10 minute break after which there will be the possibility to ask all three of our speakers questions about their presentations. All right, it is now time for the Q&A section of the symposium. How this is going to work is I am going to walk into the audience. If you have a question, please raise your hand. I'll walk towards you. I'll hand you the microphone and you can ask your question to one or multiple of the speakers. And with that, Michelle Bin, is anybody who would like to start with a question? Okay, I had a question that comes to motivation factors and also like dailies and stuff. There's a, with newly developing games, there's a recent discourse going on, especially on Twitter, because there's always discourse going on Twitter about these motivation factors are actually killing a lot of online games and games like Helldivers, too, that are coming with a complete package, but still with online features are more satisfactory to customers. So how does that reflect to game developers? Because there's always a live service game coming out, and a lot of them are failing like Anthem is an example and Kill the Just leak was another example as well. Well, as we already shortly discussed, there's an amazing thing in game development that is called unfortunately the stakeholders. And they also have demands. They want to invest this amount of money and have a game that lives forever. That also means that I have to develop as a developer mechanics that also can support this living forever. But that isn't always fun. And also you as a player know exactly when you are forced or blocked and you need to pay to continue. Helldivers is not necessarily, I would say, life as a service game, but it has so much potential and there's so much fun by failing deliberately or indeliberately that it keeps people coming back and keeps going. And that's also why as a developer, they are currently looking to expand their current levels and add more mechanics. So I hope that answers your question. Sorry. I think this is a question for all of you because I thought about it, but in regards to multiplayer affecting each kind of one of these areas, which be it the fun aspect where we find funny and watching your friend fall in the hole or you falling in a hole and your friend watching, or how it affects kind of a coziness aspect or the fun and boredom, does multiplayer really have a major effect or does it just kind of play into what's already there? Does it change it or kind of belong? I'll start off. For where I currently am at, of course, it's very important because it's one of the USPs that GamePoint was built on. So yeah, it's something that we try to actively pursue within our current game envelope, but it doesn't have to. Yeah, for sure. So I'm focused on philosophical theories about humor that don't specifically focus on the social aspect of comedy, but there are philosophers who say like comedy is social. It is something that we do to kind of write someone else's behavior when we laugh at them. We actually are telling them like you should be better. So in that sense, those theories would be very apt to talk about multiplayer games. And that is also kind of what I tried to talk about when I talked about the Let's Plays or the YouTube videos where people kind of broadcast their gameplay, right? Because also there you introduce this kind of social aspect or like, okay, look at me play and you can laugh at me. So definitely the social aspect is a big thing as well. I think when it comes to cozy games, multiplayer can be relevant. But if you want to experience a cozy game as cozy in the case of a multiplayer game, you do have to take into account that cogent is a very subjective feeling that player experiences and conflict can arise, for example, when you're playing with people that are not playing a cozy game to be cozy in that sense. I would like to hook into that. For example, it takes two, I think is a great game as a cozy game. If you are with the right person to play it together, I'm sure that with in the Let's Play space on YouTube, for example, I made my girlfriend play, those two are so aligned in their behavior that for them, the social aspect is very important. But yeah, if you want to create dissonance, then yeah, multiplayer will not be cozy. Hi, thank you all, all three of you for your talks, very different sort of answers to this question. I really appreciate the different perspectives and also have a game developer here at the University, I think it's so cool. What I was wondering, and this is going to show where I come from, so I work in literature. And so when we talk about what do we like in literature, we always talk about narrativity, so stories and plots and characters and twists in a storyline and all these kinds of things. So me being very much a novice gamer, let me put that out. This is one of the things that I always look for. When I look for a new game, what is it about? What is happening in it? Who are the characters in this? And I know that sort of comes from my world of books that I live in most of the time. But I was wondering, because it seemed to me that none of you mentioned that even. Is that something that is not really big in understanding this question as a player role? Because a lot of the games that you mentioned seem to sort of actively resist narrative. For example, the bingo, and I do play a lot of bingo actually, so I'm not, I do see the fun in it, yes. But does this narrativity and characters and plots and all these things that, for example, we look in the enjoyment of literature, does that play an important role in video games as well? Well, so I'm going to sneak in and answer before I pass on the microphone. Somebody just mentioned, Merge mentioned, that does have some sort of a narrative that gets people hooked, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that makes the game for you in the sense of mobile games. There's a great game by Trollmix called Love and Pies. They specialize, they focus on this narrative part, and the merging is just extra for 80% of the players. But the other 20%, like me, I just want to merge. I skip the story. No, yeah, that's really interesting, because normally I actually work on philosophy of fiction, so I'm all about the fiction and the story. And the reason why I kind of shifted focus here is because, of course, video game stories can also be fun, like you can have fictional jokes, you can have fictional situations that are funny as such. I find that a bit less interesting, because video games are not unique in that sense. So I started thinking about comedy as this, taking a distance with regard to meta fiction. So that's also what I tried to get through with the self mocking games. Very often what is funny about them is that they are meta fictional. They take you out of the fiction, they break immersion to then show you like, hey, remember this fiction, this story that you were taking so seriously? It's just a game, it's not that important. But definitely what is important about the story, even in my presentation, is that it is only comic to suddenly take this distance if you were immersed in the story in the first place. You first need to be very immersed, very caught up in the story, to then see that you were silly by taking a distance. So definitely the story in the first phase of that comic situation is very important still. I think in regard to cosy games, the narrative becomes, well in my presentation not so much, because I focused on the role that interaction has in it. However cosy games, or at least the narrative is very important for cosy games, especially because the interaction with the game has sort of taken a backseat to things such as narrative or thematic contemplation. So they actually make more room in order to think about the narrative or think about characters or interact with characters, rather than thinking of everything in the game as a means to win, in that sense. Thank you all three for this presentation. I have a different lens to look at gaming. It's more related to serious games and I was wondering serious and games can join, but can they also be fun? And if you look at, you mentioned the mechanics, there is this, the teachers from the HQ, the applied science in Utrecht, they also teach game design and they have this theory of the mechanics dynamics and aesthetics model and how do you relate to this? I mean this is about social games or cosy games, but serious games could also have a fun element and we are trying to develop in a project, in an Erasmus, a European project, a game, a serious game for students and vets and vet students so to become more financial literate. This could be very serious, but it can also have fun elements and I was interested in maybe if you could dive into this maybe. So I think that yeah, definitely serious games can have fun elements. I mean gamification as a term is obviously very well known across everybody because it can be as simple as seeing a progress bar. It doesn't necessarily make it fun, I know, I'm very much aware, but some people can be motivated by just seeing the number go up and that sounds very, very basic and very childish, but this is also how idle games work. There's nothing but the number goes up and there's no real reward except this. Up, up, up, up, up. Kind of like Bitcoin, but not really. I hope that answers your question. Exactly. The two offer additional rewards, maybe something in-game to show off to other people like, hey, I've managed my wallet this way. I think there's a lot of ways of still gamifying, yeah for sure. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I find it funny that everybody here says like, oh yeah, serious games can have fun elements. I think they should have fun elements. I think they should have fun, right? So I think that and also that is very related to what I was saying about comedy in philosophy of comedy. Comedy is a very rational, objective, reflective thing, right? So it is actually one of the best mechanisms to have people learn about something, take a distance, look at it for what it is and learn about it that way. In fact, I've been doing a lot of like research on doing philosophy or teaching philosophy through video games. And I think especially for doing philosophy, humor is the way to get people to reflect on very banal things, right? Philosophy is very often about banal things, like things that we all just do and see and then philosophers are like, wait a minute, take a distance. Isn't that funny? It is. You should think about it more. And I think that's also what I try to do with the one game that I designed that has a more serious goal. So definitely use comedy to have players reflect on things. I would find that very important. When it comes to the relation between cozy games and serious games, I think cozy games definitely have the potential to be used as a teaching mechanism in that sense. However, you are still walking a sort of a fine line between still being cozy and teaching something serious about the world. So you're walking a very fine line in that sense, although it is possible. Yeah, implicit in that sense. Thank you. I was actually thinking about something I was kind of wondering. And this is more, I guess, both marketing aspect and maybe a bit of a funny aspect. It's more about games that are so frustratingly difficult. Why are they being produced? What is the fun in that? What do you think of that? For example, things like getting over it, which was mentioned before, which is a game that is specifically designed, I think, to be fun to watch, but necessarily to play, perhaps? Or what would then appeal be for a player to be like, I want to play this? Because of course, it's funny to watch someone scream on the internet because he fails. I, of course, he tried it. I basically gave up after 20 minutes because it was like, yeah, there's no point to this. There's no reward for it. And it's basically impossible for me to do it. And nobody's going to watch me play it. So why am I doing this? And there are multiple examples of games out there which are specifically designed to make you feel. And I'm kind of wondering what is the point of that? Because you don't really encourage a player, in my opinion, if you're basically only designing a game that's impossible for you to do anything in. I would say, I don't know, if you know Surgeon Simulator, probably a little bit older. From a gameplay perspective, it was created to just be very hard-skilled game. And at the same time, very, very funny because everything flies everywhere because you have to control the hands and the gravity is weird. And at some point during the spaceship and in the back of a driving ambulance and everything flies everywhere, which is amazingly funny to watch. And that's the second factor. It was just, I want to show off my failure to the rest of the world. People relate to me or try it yourself and see how you get along because you're going to feel just like me. No, I think it's also very interesting that you said it might be fun to watch but not to play. And I think that we have to take into account that a lot of game designers nowadays know that there is a social community surrounding games. Twitch is super big. If your game gets big on Twitch, then you have a big game on your hands, right? So a lot of games aren't supposed to be fun to play, but they are supposed to be fun to watch other people play, right? So some games are actually designed for it being watched, yeah. Basically in the creative video game, that's not meant to be played, but meant to be watched or sort of making not necessarily a movie, but more like something that is specifically aimed at the entertainment of a watcher then. To get a reaction from the person that plays it and that you then perceive. For example, Hellgivers was mentioned. Helldivers specifically thought about where to place all the UI elements because they knew people were going to stream it. They knew they were going to add a facecam. They tried to avoid bright greens because they chroma keyed the background and that kind of stuff. So the game designer thought about this. Do you think this is something more recent or is this like something that has been going on? Well, let's say it started four years ago when the first talks at conferences came up where game designers were presenting ways to deal with Twitch. Thank you. Hi again. This one's a question more to Gideon in regards to the cozy games. Because now VR is becoming more and more of a thing. And how do you think VR is going to affect the future of cozy games? Will it be a major platform because it's more immersive or will it fail because of its more physical aspect and being less more clunky and less cozy and comfortable in that case? I think it depends on the individual game in question. So if you have, for example, a game such as Stardew Valley, for instance, which is pretty easy to control because you have a third person perspective and you don't get annoyed with the controls as much. However, as soon as you move into VR and you have that first person perspective, indeed it can become clunky and annoying very easily. But at the same time, you could also argue that VR in that sense also sets you up in a different headspace than we are just playing with a screen and a controller. So it can actually become more immersive in that sense and perhaps more cozy. But it really depends on the individual game in question and how it's going to be implemented. My question kind of goes back to the previous question about whether it's fun to play a game which is basically set into a failing part and it's more based on it's fun to watch. But couldn't you then say it's also making a game that inevitably makes you fail is also a marketing strategy, especially if it's big on Twitch and stuff. I'm sure that if you played any mobile game, there's like a million ads that you get bombarded with where they show you two options. The first time it always picks the right option, but the second time it always picks the failing option, 100% the marketing strategy, because I'm trying to get into your brain that you can do better as this person. You're better than this person. You're 100% going to pick the right answer when you download this game and start playing and paying. So yes, for me that's totally a marketing advice. I have a question about the cozy games as well, because to me it kind of seems like there's a clash within cozy games and extrinsic motivation, because what it feels like is that cozy games basically are there to build off of intrinsic motivation, like to be in the game and to experience the atmosphere and the vibes, I guess. How do games then kind of control the extrinsic motivation? Like how do they keep you wanting to play the game when you're just there for the atmosphere? I think cozy games go for that extrinsic motivation in the sense that they offer a lot of easily, uh, succeedable repetitive tasks and you as a player keep wanting to return to that relaxed mindset. So you just continue playing and playing and playing. So you, for example, if you have a game in which you collect things, you can just start collecting and collecting and collecting, and you can just enjoy the mindset that comes with it. Thank you. And can I ask a question again? I was actually wondering concerning the game development and marketing perspective, the role of perhaps ethics in this to a certain degree, like how do you present, because of course the game has to be designed to be fun, people need to keep on playing, but especially with mobile games, especially consideration of freemium games, which are free, which have to pay for certain features and get an extra. Is that like a consideration you take in when you develop a design or marketing? I'm not here to demonize my employer, of course, right? But in the end, every game company is there to make money. And obviously a mobile game makes money differently than any boxed, shipped game or even serious games. They make money in a different way. And yes, I, of course, there's this fine line of ethics. I can give you a very concrete example. We designed a real fortune with double or nothing. But our real fortune is actually our mechanic that keeps you playing. Every three hours you get coins from this real fortune to keep you in this loop of coming back, right? It's a retention mechanic. And our employer wanted to add double or nothing to it. But that means that if I click nothing, the person cannot play if they're out of coins. That is a very, very silly idea. And then one of the stakeholders said like, oh, but then we'll make them pay. No, no, no, no. From a game designer perspective, that is the dumbest thing you can do, because I want you to get these coins and stay in this loop. But yes, of course, there are predatory practices. Most, let's say one of the first examples of Farmfill was literally add your friends or buy to continue or unlock this next part faster. So yeah, there is a certain line of ethics and we all know predatory practices. We hear them the whole time in trying to get people to spend money. So yeah. Perhaps can I ask something, addition that aside from like the monitor aspect, also maybe the addictive aspect of video games? Yes, there is an addictive aspect to video games. But that is the problem is I would like to say that is the fault of the player. But that is not true. We all know that this is not true. I mean, I'm creating these gameplay loops to keep you in this loop. So yes, there is an addiction value. And that's also why, for example, because we're a social game, we don't pay out, for example, at Game Point. But we do try to still look at gambling laws and we do try to limit the player in their behavior by having mechanics that slow you down at some point. But I can't speak for other developers. Thank you. That's very interesting. Yeah, I don't have a question. In regards also the element of narrative design was already mentioned due to books and all stuff. And also the element of ludonarativity came up a lot as well. There are certain games where it's argued that the only way that their narrative works is precisely due to the fact that they are a video game. But they are still mechanics wise, just simply point and click adventures in the sense. Favourite of mine in this regard that recently came out, for instance, Slay the Princess. It's very fun, mechanics wise, very unchallenging. You could say it's a cozy game of sorts, but some people would absolutely say it's not because there are horror elements in it. But what makes a narrative of video games in that sense so interesting, I want to know. For me, from a motivational standpoint, is the relatedness. It is still also, I mean, I like it when I ignore clicking here and then see what happens. I mean, there's a great section in Portal 2 where if you just ignore the requirement, they recorded like two hours of lines. But I think from a motivational standpoint, it's just going through the story and experiencing it. But I like to give this to the ones that are more into narrative than I am. It's funny because in game studies, we have this unspoken rule which is don't mention the war. With that, we mean the war between ludology versus narratology. Like, oh, are there game mechanics versus the narrative? Do you have to pick one of them when you design a game? Which is of course not true. And this debate actually never took place. But it's interesting because what I as a philosopher of fiction find so strange is that people often make this distinction between gameplay versus narrative. And you have to pick one or one is fun when the other is like less so. But I don't see how you can talk about the fiction or the story without taking into account the game mechanics. For me, that is all part of the fiction. That shapes the fiction. Even the way you hold your controller can shape the way you experience the story, right? And this is so ingrained, I think, in literature studies. Like, of course, the way you say something is going to matter to the content of what you say. Games, it's just the exact same thing. The way it is programmed as a game, very much, for me at least, influences the way I enjoy the story as well. So for me, it's really that combination that makes it so interesting. I like to add to that. I think it's, Justice Shell, who wrote the art of game design, which is a book of lenses, like 136 ways or something to look at designing a game or how to approach designing a game. He also mentioned on a recent talk where if you start standing like Superman, you start feeling like Superman. So, yes, gameplay and narrative in that sense are very intertwined. I think it's a good example. I don't really have anything to add. I think your answer was very inclusive. Yeah, in that regard also to hook a little bit onto that answer. For instance, then, because you say the combination of gameplay and the narrative, essentially, would an example for that, for instance, be to keep beating a dead horse in Dark Souls. For instance, the way that the gameplay and the world is presented to you is essentially forms the narrative without being explicitly told. Yes, you can. I do have a personal qualm with people who say Dark Souls has such amazing narrative. It doesn't. It really doesn't. What is interesting about Dark Souls is that it is so incomplete in the way it presents its story that people have to fill in all the gaps themselves. And people enjoy this. But when they say Dark Souls has such a good narrative, what they are basically saying is, I picked up the crumbs and I made it into this amazing narrative. But it's almost like the community of Dark Souls is almost like they're almost conspiracy theorists, right? They grab onto the smallest crumbs of a story and then you have YouTube videos that take hours and hours explaining the story. It's not found in the game. It's found outside of that game. So I find it weird to say that they have good stories, but I do think it's genius design because it creates engagement and it makes people think about their own stories or what they want to find in the game. So very interesting in that regard. Are there, in your opinion, in any games that do do a good job of telling the narrative of the story mostly just through the gameplay without necessarily having anything spoken about it? So purely through gameplay. Because I was gonna immediately say I really love The Last of Us. Majoratively through gameplay. I need to think about this. So okay, can I spoil the game? Do people know Brothers A Tale of Two Sons? I'm gonna spoil the game now so you can leave the room or something. So this is obviously a story about two brothers and at one point here comes a spoiler. One of them dies. What is so special about this game and why I mention it now is that you control one brother in the game with the left control stick and the other brother with the right control stick. So after one of the brothers dies, you suddenly feel it in a very bodily way. Like you feel sad because suddenly your right hand is useless. You're just sitting there and doing like this and like, this feels weird. And then at one point in the game the little brother who is still alive needs to swim but he has always had a fear of water and swimming and his older brother always was there to support him. So at that point when you need to cross the ponds to survive the game suddenly you have to use your right hand again to kind of guide the little brother across it. And it's beautifully done and that is really how, yeah that was really what I was talking about. Like that is such a good way of conveying a story through purely just the way you use the controller and that's what I would like to see a lot more in video games. Hi, again just a question for Gideon, the cozy games. I love Stardew Valley to death and it's, of course, I think no one here would disagree with me saying it's a cozy game. It's kind of its design. But of course it also has some not cozy aspects, be it the, you know, ever being the, you know, efficiency you might want to be farming everything with and you don't want to, you want to make sure everything's planted right to the 28th so you don't, nothing goes bad and everything grows in time. Or be it all the mining and the chance of death and losing all the items in your inventory. How does that, those, these issues, these less cozy aspects fit into this cozy game? Well that's a very good point. I think it does factor into it but it depends on how much as a player you let it bother you, how much you let it bother you, that you can, that you have to plan your supplies for the month for example, how much does that let you bother you in that sense? Or how much of an achievement hunter are you? And that comes back to the subjective sense or the subjectivity of the term cozy, that it really depends on your own mindset as a player as well as what the game facilitates to you. So I've never played Stardew Valley myself but just yesterday I was watching a streamer, Junimal Kart, so also named after a minigame in Stardew Valley, play Stardew Valley. And it was a very cozy thing and she was kind of like decorating the farm and this and that and then she was kind of collecting eggs or something and she was super fast about it like they just went like take the eggs go there, give the eggs to this person and they started laughing and said like oh it's so funny how at one point when playing this game you inevitably become this kind of capitalist and I was like how is this still cozy right? Like you're just maximizing efficiency and I mean of course it was still cozy but also kind of questionable and I think as a philosopher you also often think about these kinds of hidden ideologies in games like it's presented as this little cozy thing but then still you still have these kinds of ingrained values of capitalism and so it's very worrisome sometimes how that is presented as a cozy activity yeah. Then maybe just a quick follow-up in regards to the because part of Stardew Valley when you go mining is you collect raw minerals and these minerals can be used to then unlock things later in the game and you kind of need to do them to access further parts of the maybe not necessarily narrative but hidden parts of the world as is be it the hidden casino or the does anyone care if I spoil part of this? Wonderful. Or the extra island and all the stuff on there but how does that balance with the you know calm cozy thing where you know that if you don't do some of these less cozy activities you don't truly experience the full game? Well it depends on the difficulty of getting these items are these items hard to get? I don't think they're necessarily too hard they might require a little bit of grinding every now and then but when it comes to those again the minerals like if you want the I don't know the purple one you have to go into these mines and if you spend too long there you get swarmed by a bunch of flying enemies and stuff and there can be difficult to deal with if you don't have extremely powerful gear and even then it's a lot of effort you have to time everything as well which actually also adds a little bit of that stress because you need to make sure you're home by 2 a.m. each day otherwise you pass out and if you're not at your place you lose money or items and stuff like that. Yeah it sort of comes back to the to the thing that coaginess is an aesthetic goal and it's something that cannot always be guaranteed in every game. So any cozy game and even the literature on cozy game talks about this that's even games that are defined as cozy games sometimes but almost definitely always features some cozy some cozy non cozy elements in that sense. So for example activity such as grinding can be considered part of the cozy experience because they are very repetitive and they sort of get you into this yeah this very chill grind set I would say but as soon as for example dangerous enemies come looking then the coaginess certainly stops. Yes then I have another question more to do with the social aspects of games so very much so with multiplayer games in regards to also how difficulty works with that. A bit of an observation I've made also when playing Helldivers is that a lot of people constantly seem to want to push to play the highest difficulty they keep pushing each other to do the highest difficulty well for some people that starts ruining their experience because they just don't want to or cannot play at that level so but at the same time also that the social aspect of Helldivers with all the random memory and team killing that's going on also is a big selling point of the game so mostly to what extent can that interaction between the players and very much so with each other and the game itself be used also to help the longevity of a game. Well you said it yourself already it's memeifiable it's stick talk it's Instagram it's reals it's short I've seen myself I only played the original Helldivers which is a twin stick shooter which I've already touched upon I am absolute shit at so that didn't go really well but I did play a lot of payday too in my time and of course people want to play on the highest difficulty there as well and I just wanted to grind so that some friendships were ruined maybe I don't I'm not sure I can't remember it's been a while but there's a certain level of twitch interaction that then serves the longevity because I want to try that too or I want to have that fun too so yes it definitely adds to it. So I'm actually working on a project that kind of deals with game difficulty right now and one of the things that is very interesting about this is that some players make games even more difficult than they already are by trying to speedrun them for example or trying to there's this very funny debate about difficulty on the subreddit of Elden Ring of course a from software game uh some people a lot of people actually were posting that they cheesed millennia millennia millennia uh one of the hardest bosses of this game and then you always have a bunch of comments saying like oh you ruined your own game experience you didn't actually have fun these people I don't know I I think I did I think I liked it better this way so there's this very funny debate going on between what I call snobs who don't actually um evaluate the game based on what the game is but based on what they believe the game must be like it must be this challenge you must prove yourself that is where the fun is at and these people who just kind of invent new cheeses and just try to play with the game as this kind of flawed machine right like how can I break the game how can I make this more fun and this interaction between these two people actually is good for the longevity of the game because you can always find ways in both categories to find new ways to be better at the game or find new ways to break the game so that's actually interesting I think a recent example that was in the news is somebody beat Tetris because they went way beyond the actual levels they went until the game crashed like literally it stopped working it's the the actual end of the game but to get there they had to do a certain amount of sequences etc they they played their own way and for me Tetris is just you know to pass the time and they just they they went to the end yeah all right because in this matter also um partially because I also want to involve Gideon in this discussion is a part of just like because some people also back going back to the fact that I mentioned hell divers and this really do think hell divers is a very cozy game if you just play on low difficulty and you just continuously blast a bunch of bugs with a flamethrower or something but also um in the sense does this sort of culture that basically says just like hey we need to all play at higher difficulty the snobs as we're mentioned does this sometimes inadvertently also get into cozy games that therefore makes them less cozy if they're multiplayer based um yeah it can definitely get into them I personally don't know any examples but hypothetically speaking it is something that can absolutely happen and um as you mentioned it also happens with cozy games as well the stardew valley example of people of someone playing as a capitalist it is something that I've seen in other games as well Final Fantasy 14 recently added a sort of a stardew valley part of the game where you tend to your own little farm however there are a lot of rewards locked behind it so people have already released guides on how to completely exploit that part of the game so um yeah I definitely think that sort of the competitive element or the achieving element is definitely present in cozy games as well but but the question is then if it prevents them from being cozy or if it's just part of the cozy experience and you are just achieving something perhaps you're that good at the game that playing as a capitalist the capitalist can also be cozy oh you know you consider Dark Souls one a cozy game yeah those people are insane I think if there are no more questions oh sorry I didn't see you you said that the chat could add a little bit fun to the game in a serious game could the chat be fun or I think within a serious game depending on of course what the core of that game is it will very quickly turn into helping each other progressing um I mean as you can imagine in bingo it also there's no reason to help each other I mean I want to win you want to I don't want you to win um so the chat in our games has a different function I can imagine in a serious game that they can help each other or ask each other for help there's also some games that ask each other for help uh to get like this rewards I recently played this new game called afk journey it's I think it released last week on mobile I see some people nodding there in a back there's a guild section where oh no there's a certain quest where you need to ask help of other people and three people need to join you to beat I think that's nothing to do with serious games I get that but there is a factor there where yeah you start helping each other I think that's a very natural progression for a serious this is the factor I'm asking about okay thank you anyone more questions and if we have none then I would like to thank our speakers for this lovely Q&A I hope you learned a lot and we would hereby like to thank everyone for coming as this is the end of our event today