With the first modality, Einspielen or: Making the Game Work, we address the game in its making (its becoming) and observe how and what it means when someone becomes a player. From a genealogical perspective, we focus on the playability of rules, structures, and specific game elements. In this first modality, we capture the emergence of relational structures between players, game elements, and situations that translate practices of playing between gamification and workification, where play can turn into work or vice versa.
Subprojects
A01: Game and World – Real World References of Serious Gaming
Prof. Dr Jochen Koubek, Dept of Media Studies, Universität Bayreuth
Serious gaming is a gaming practice in which players recognize and relate similarites between a game world and the real world. This relationship can be established in various ways. In the project A01 serious gaming will be examined from a ludic perspective as the practice of artistic simulation which on the one hand is acting in dynamic models with epistemic affordance, but on the other hand are multi-layered in their goal to create meaning.
A02: En-/Disabling Practices Be-tween Gamification and Workification
Prof. Dr Beate Ochsner, Dept of Literature, Art, and Media Studies, Universität Konstanz
For several years now, accessibility and (digital) participation have played a substantial role in HCI. For a long time, however, the gaming industry paid little attention to people with disabilities. In the course of various agreements, legal regulations, guidelines on accessibility, and dis/ability activism, these have recently come into sharper focus. While the economic impact of these efforts is difficult to measure, it is necessary to examine the extent to which these efforts not only lead to an increasing autonomy and creativity of dis/abled gamers and gaming (gamification) but, at the same time, they are associated with an intensification of neoliberalist objectives of work(ification) on the self in ‘serious’ contexts like education and health but also in the entertainment sector. Beyond thinking about individual physical or mental impairments or their possible “fixing”, the sub-project considers dis/ability as a method 1) to focus the social and cultural norms that are inscribed in the in/accessibility of gaming and 2) explore the creative potential of adaptive infrastructures of gaming.
A03: Deepening and Transcending the Game. Medieval Court Culture Between Routines and Transgression
Prof. Dr Bent Gebert, Dept of Literature, Art, and Media Studies , Universität Konstanz
The project focuses on the formation of routines and their transgression in (1) Middle High German love poetry and (2) didactic writings from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. Following the historical semantics of ‘spil’ (play), ‘arebeit’ (labour) and their interferences, we will investigate practices of serious gaming in courtly poetry and moral discourses, which are not endangered, but constituted and stimulated by variation and transgression of rules and boundaries. (3) In a comparative perspective, special attention will be paid to how this reciprocal dynamic shapes the cultural history of serious gaming both in models of courtly interaction and their aesthetic potentials.
A04: Gamification and Psychic Health. Cultural and Interactional Perspectives on Analogous and Digital Therapy Games
Prof. Dr Christian Meyer, Dept of History, Sociology, Sport Science and Empirical Educational Research, Universität Konstanz
Subproject A04 studies therapeutic games and methods of play therapy (systems constellation, psychodrama and sandplay therapy) as forms of social gaming. It specifically focuses on their moments of symbolization, simulation, and free variation (play) within a clearly delineated and controlled context of explicit regulatory rules, restricted material resources and temporal limits (game). They will be investigated in digital and analogue application with regard to (1) incremental interactional dynamics, (2) modalities of symbolization, simulation, and free variation as well as (3) culturally specific resources and (4) socio-technical characteristics.
A05: Decision Paths and Escape Routes in Serious Gaming Arrangements. On the Algorithmic and Cultural Formation of (Im)possible Choice
Prof. Dr Isabell Otto, Dept of Literature, Art, and Media Studies, Universität Konstanz
A05 focuses on the interweaving of algorithmic and cultural knowledge production on the topic of flight and migration in digital games. Algorithmic formation refers to the game-mechanical adaptation of players to the rule system of digital games, while cultural formation refers to the knowledge that is negotiated and newly produced in the game process. The focus is on situations of decision-making, in which the encodings of branching data architectures are interconnected with normative requests to players to make the ‘right’ choice.
A06: User Modelling for Personalisation: Learning from Serious Gaming Approaches
Prof. Dr Daniel Keim, Dept of Computer Science, Universität Konstanz
Our primary research objective is to explore how to design personalized user models forvisual analytics applications. To develop user models and derive user-representative features, we will draw insights from the serious games research field and collaborate closely with CRC researchers from psychology, cultural studies, and other domains. Moreover, we will build on our previous work on gameful visual analytics and explore the potential of incorporating game elements into visual analytics applications to boost user motivation. To gather the required data for user modelling and game element adaptation, we will focus on a specific use case, i.e.,a visual analytics application for enhancing visualisation literacy.