#Gamergate Steffan’s Challenge – Does DiGRA have an ID Politics Problem?

TL;DR – Even being as generous as I could, Steffan’s ‘25%’ challenge was blown through in an examination of DiGRAs 2015 conference schedule, even being mindful of personal prejudices and erring on the side of caution in judgements. This is only an informal survey, and a bit of fun (in examining how much ‘bollocks’ there was as well) but I believe it is genuinely indicative of a problem and a motivation behind the attempt to create alternatives via L4G and PopLud. Scientifically speaking statistical significance is usually set around 5%, a ‘p-level of 0.05. The results here show a p-level of ~0.32. Perhaps more concerning even than the ID politics, at least for me, was that over half of what was presented was ‘useless bollocks’, and that the presentation and language was nigh impenetrable. It was also disturbing to see how much bias was embraced and openly expressed and how many papers and presentations were concerned with efforts to alter people in some way, re-educate rather than educate, if you will. I do not buy into the DiGRA/DARPA conspiracy theory (funding is just funding) but I do wish people will strive for some objectivity and consider what they’re doing.

Information drawn from…

http://projects.digital-cultures.net/digra2015/files/2014/09/DiGRA2015_program.pdf

Some presentations were not detailed enough to make a judgement and so were excluded, as were some workshops and all ‘break activities’.

Presentation Title	ID Politics? (Running total)	Bollocks? (Running Total)	Total
From Game Studies to Studies of Play in Society	1	1	1
Game Elements-Attributes Model: a First Step towards a Structured Comparison of Educational Games	–	2	2
Costume Agency in German LARP	–	3	3
The Ludic, the Cinematic and the Paratextual: Towards a Typology of Video Game Trailers	–	4	4
Minigames as Metaleptic Self-Referentiality	–	5	5
Subversive Narrative Emergence in Gamer Poop: Queering Video Game Stories and Selves	2	6	6
Moral Panics in and Around 1980s Videogames	3	–	7
Roleplaying and Rituals For Heritage Orientated Games	4	–	8
EVE is Real	5	7	9
The Transtextual Screen: Exploring Crossmedia Intertextuality in Competitive Games and eSports	–	8	10
Start Up, Cash In, Sell Out, Bro Down: The Historical, Social, and Technological Context of a Toxic New Gaming Public	6	9	11
You Always BM in Hearthstone: Players’ Negotiation of Limited Communication Affordances	–	–	12
Better Off Alone? On the Significance of Asocial Gaming	7	10	13
Ludic Selfies: Playing with Mobile Phones in Grand Theft Auto V	–	11	14
Selective Realism: Suffering, Violence, and War in First- and Third-Person Shooters	8	12	15
Animal Crossing: New Leaf and The Diversity of Horror in Video Games	9	13	16
The Limits of the Evolution of Female Characters in the Bioshock Franchise	10	14	17
Authors from 3 continents presenting the book by Mark Wolf (ed.) Video Games Around the World	–	–	18
Real World, Real Monsters: Adapting Gothic Horror for Location-Based Augmented-Reality Games	–	–	19
Who Needs Enemies? Architecture as Sole or Dominant Agent in Game Design	–	–	20
GameChanger: Designing Co-Located Games that Utilize Player Proximity	–	–	21
The Gamification of the Gothic	–	15	22
A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Video Games: A Ludonarrative Model	–	16	23
Analyzing Game Discourse Using Moral Foundations Theory	11	17	24
Exploring Multimodal Annotation of Videogames	–	18	25
A Double-Edged Sword: Work Practices in a Norwegian Game Company	–	–	26
App advertising: The rise of the player commodity	–	–	27
On Trash and Games – Tracing the Problems Targeted by Gamification	–	19	28
Central European Game Studies panel: History and the state of the art of game studies in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic	–	–	29
Independent gamework and identity: Social problems and subjective nuances	12	20	30
Hybrid Play and the Aesthetics of Recruitment	–	–	31
Game Studies in the Cinquecento	–	21	32
Games as a Genre of Historical Discourse. The Past on Fast Forward	–	–	33
It‘s the game you don‘t play: Sonic X-Treme and its self-appointed keepers	–	22	34
Towards a ludonarrative toolbox	–	23	35
Utopia, Ludonarrative Archaeologies and Cultural Knowledge	–	24	36
The Implied Player: between the Structural and the Fragmentary	13	25	37
Gotta Go Fast: A Study in Speedrunning	–	–	38
Bullet Hell: The Globalized Growth of danmaku games and the Digital Culture of High Scores and World Records	–	–	39
Chicago‘s Pinball Paradox: Understanding the Role of Pinball Regulation in Early Videogame Censorship	14	–	40
“Piece of Art” or “Nice to Have”: What Professional Video Game Critics Say About Music in Games	–	26	41
Procedural Deformation and the Close Playing /Reading of Code: An Analysis of Jason Rohrer’s Code in Passage	–	27	42
Designing the Future of Democracy – Postmortem of the Near Future Expansion for Democracy 3*	–	27	42
How to Outplay a Power Outage	–	–	43
Player Superstition as a Design Resource	–	28	44
Workshop: Nonlinear Histories of Independent games	–	–	45
Analysing Cultural Heritage and its Representation in Video Games	15	–	46
Early Computer Game Genre Preferences (1980-1984)	–	–	48
Time to Reminisce and Die: Representing Old Age in Art Games	16	29	48
Workshop: Games and Transgressive Aesthetics	17	30	49
Ethical Recognition of Marginalized Groups in Digital Games Culture	18	31	50
The Concept and Research of Gendered Game Culture	19	32	51
Hackers and Cyborgs: Binary Domain and Two Formative Videogame Technicities	20	33	52
Get Milk – A Game of Lenses	21	34	53
Deep Springs and Dry Wells: A Study of the Casual Civic Game Get Water!	–	–	54
Keep on Moving: Designing a Physiotherapeutic Exergame for Different Devices and Exercises	–	–	55
The persuasive properties of games for change. A case based analysis	22	35	56
How do ‚gamers‘ empathise? Suspension of disbelief and narrative empathy in games	23	36	57
Libidinal Player Types Framework for Gamification	–	37	58
The Well-Played MOBA: How DotA 2 and League of Legends use Dramatic Dynamics	–	–	59
Editors of Play: The Scripts and Practices of Co-creativity in Minecraft and LittleBigPlanet	–	38	60
Videogames and Slavery	24	–	61
Playful Laboratories. The significance of games for knowledge production in the digital age	–	–	62
Protest games in the 1980s Czechoslovakia: Beyond procedural rhetoric	–	–	63
Between the political and the post-political: exposing and concealing social conflicts in Polish history-themed board games	–	–	64
Inviting Grief into Games: The Game Design Process as Personal Dialogue	25	39	65
Digitising Boardgames: Issues and Tensions	–	–	66
Co-creative Game Design in MMORPGs	–	–	67
International Cultures of Creativity and Imitation	26	–	68
God and Gods in Digital Games	–	–	69
The Palimpsest and Gesamtkunstwerk of Dead Space: a Close Readin	–	40	70
The Stanley Parable: Dystopia and the Implied Player	27	41	71
Applying the Two-Factor Theory to the PLAY Heuristics	–	42	72
Defining the Global Ludo Polychotomy	–	–	73
The Tragedy of Betrayal: How the design of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus elicits emotion	–	–	75
Creating Stealth Game Interventions for Attitude and Behavior Change: An “Embedded Design” Model	–	–	75
The Pressures of Games on History	–	43	76
#GamerGate Birds of a Feather Session	28	44	77
Towards a historical analysis of the video game experience. The evolution of marketing discourse in the specialized press (1981-1995)	–	45	78
How gaming became sexist: a study of UK gaming magazines 1981-1995	29	46	79
Electronic Arts versus Blizzard: Real Games and the Large Studios that Make Them	–	–	80
Is Hacking the Brain the Future of Gaming?	–	–	81
Game and Videogame Ontologies	–	47	82
Teaching Game Studies: Course Post-Mortems and Syllabus Design	–	–	83
The Use of Theory in Designing a Serious Game for the Reduction of Cognitive Biases	30	48	84
How enterprises play: Towards a taxonomy for enterprise gamification	–	–	85
Understanding Player Experience Through the Use of Similarity Matrix	–	–	86
The Authority of Discourse Communities. Disseminating Technological and Industrial Celebration from Marketers to Academics.	–	49	87
Roguelike Universe: Drawing 36 Years of Roguelike Influence	–	–	88
Playing between rules: negotiating the ludic innovations of the MOBA genre	–	–	89
Interactive storytelling for open game worlds.	–	–	90
Taking a Look at the Player’s Gaze: The Effects of Gaze Visualizations on the Perceived Presence in Games	–	–	91
Cues and insinuations: Indicating affordances of non-player character using visual indicators	–	–	92
Failed Games: Lessons Learned from Promising but Problematic Game Prototypes in Designing for Diversity	31	50	93
From Theory-Based Design to Validation and Back	–	51	94
The Game of Georg Klaus	–	–	95
GameOff – a critical analysis of a digital game exhibition	–	–	96
Videogames as ‘Minor Literature’: Reading Videogame Stories through Paratexts	–	52	97
Whose mind is the signal? Focalization in video game narratives	32	53	98
Ideological Narratives of Play In Tropico 4 and Crusader Kings II	33	54	99
How gaming achieves popularity. The case of The Smash Brothers	–	–	100
Research on Prosocial Behaviors in Video Games: Content Analysis and Empirical Study	34	55	101
“I wanna be a…”; the role(s) of gaming in teenage boys‘ decisions to study ICT	35	–	102
Problem gaming in an everyday perspective	–	–	103
What’s so funny about glitches: The practice of making glitch based gameplay videos	–	56	104
Video Games and the Culture of Laughter	–	57	105
The Joy of Discovery, Experimentation or Just Exploitation? The Roles of Glitches in Video Game Culture	–	58	106
Systematic Analysis of In-game Purchases and Social Features of Mobile Social Games in Japan	–	–	107
Exploring Playful Experiences in Social Network Games	–	–	108
Reflecting on the History of the Game Engine in Japan	–	–	109
Design and Role of Play Features in LEGO Brand Toys	–	–	110
Exploring ‘Iteration’ in Game Development: Elaborative, Opportunistic and Omissive	–	–	111
The jumpscare and the gamergasm: Embodied displays of affect in gaming videos	–	–	112
Intersecting Vulnerabilities in Game Culture: The Effects of Inequities and Stereotype Threat on Player Confidence, Identification and Persistence Across Gender and Race	36	59	113
Towards a non-binary configuration of coalition: Feminism, queer theory, and GamerGate	37	60	114
Affective and Bodily Involvement in Children’s Tablet Play	–	–	115
Gaming Experience as a Prerequisite for the Adoption of Digital Games in the Classroom?	–	–	116
A Practical Model for Exploring the Usefulness of Games for Classrooms	–	–	117
Integrating the Threads of Game Studies? Toward a Unified Account of Game, Gameplay, Player, Value and Aesthetics	–	61	118
We are Never Alone: Sharing Culture through “World Games”	38	–	119
Dealing with Uncertainty. Ludic Epistemology in an Age of new Essentialisms	–	62	120
Typology of realisms. An ontology-based model of types of realism in video games.	–	63	121
Shooting the game: filming and editing in video games	–	–	122
What We Leave Out: Diversity, Games, and Paying-to-Win	39	–	123
The player/ game dualism and its dialectical resolution: philosophical praxis, mimesis and techne	–	64	124
Workshop: Meta-Games and Meta-Gaming. An Anthology	–	–	125
Authenticity Quest: On the conditions of possibility for ‘being yourself’ in a computer game	40	–	126
Forced to Be Free, Partially: Participation Norms in Video Gaming Encounter	–	65	127
The Gaiety: Meditations on Arcade Player Practices	–	66	128
Digital gaming as a gendered technology: Nerdcore porn, intimacy and control	41	67	129
Poetic Thought: Making and thinking for transdisciplinary innovation	–	68	130
Playing with Love: Representations and Exclusions in Narrative and Mechanics	42	69	131
Hegemony As Process? The Communication of Ideology in Video Games and Its Effects	43	70	132
Performing in MOBAs: The Myth of Neutral Bodies and Game Design	44	71	133
Technological innovation and game design	–	–	134
On Board Games Played On Tablets, Smartphones, and other Computing Devices	–	–	135
Commodifying Gameplay	–	–	136
Total	44	72	136
Percentage	32.1	52.6	–

Notes:

NB the Designing the Future paper was originally included, but on review has been removed from the presented categories. This will have thrown the results off, but not significantly.

This informal survey/study is a response to Steffan B’s challenge to examine DiGRA’s work and to show an inherent bias of 25% or more towards feminist/identity politics presentations and work.

25% is quite a high margin. Speaking for myself I would consider 5% (a standard definition of ‘significance’ in scientific circles) to be indicative of a problem, especially in a field so wide and diverse as gaming.

The conference’s theme was diversity, so one would expect a higher percentage of presented material to reflect this theme, so keep that in mind. As such this analysis is only a snapshop of DiGRA in 2015 reflected through their conference – which also occurred during #Gamergate – something that may also skew results.

I am one person, with a bias, who believes going into this that DiGRA has a major problem and that it, and the established Game Studies/Ludology structure needs challenge and reform. That said I also had biases that worked in their favour, my fondness for history for example. In an attempt to counter any bias I also erred on the side of caution (in DiGRA’s favour) wherever I felt there was sufficient questions about whether a topic or presentation was ID politics or not.

Definitionally, I considered ID politics to be at play with relation to the following broad topics. Diversity, representation, feminism, race and other *isms, PoMo philosophical denial of objectivity and, in a couple of places, a staggering lack of self-examination when reporting on past moral panics, without recognising that DiGRA is producing and perpetuating a current moral panic about representation and diversity.

As a little side bit of fun for myself I also examined the articles for whether they were ‘bollocks’ or not. ‘Bollocks’ being a slang term not dissimilar to ‘bullshit’ or ‘pure applesauce’ as Scalia might put it. Did these articles pass the smell test? Were they nothing but opinion dressed up in shiny language? Were they functionally useless? Were they offering any useful insight at all?

There were problems accessing some papers and presentations. The conference was not well documented and the papers from which the presentations were drawn were often hard to find or inaccessible.

It’s important to note a couple more things here.

1. It is possible for ID politics motivated studies to produce useful and rigorous information. It’s just vanishingly rare. The mere invocation of ID politics does not, itself, render a study useless.

2. Much of the material that got a pass may still be ID politics or bollocks.

3. There was very little that I would have considered good enough to publish in Popular Ludology. Even things that escaped the ID or Bollocks labels were often useless and offered no insight into game design or betterment.

I have a few suggestions for DiGRA and contributors for the future.

1. I am not an unintelligent guy and do not lack for vocabulary, even specialist vocabulary, yet many of these papers were virtually impenetrable in their language and presentation even for me. You need to work on your communication skills and this has reinforced for me the necessity of PopLud aiming for a more readable presentation.

2. Video your panels and presentations.

3. Provide links and/or downloads to the papers and materials presented at your conferences. Remote and post-hoc participation improves conferences.

As it happens, Steffan’s challenge was met, with a 32% level of ID politics. Perhaps more concerning was that well over half (52%) was bollocks. Bollocks material, while not directly harmful, is a huge waste of time and effort that could otherwise be spent genuinely improving games. Very few presentations or paper here, even from the non-bollocks ones, would be considered for use in PopLud. Only 21 (15.3%) were material I would consider suitable for publishing – and this is purely on the basis of whether they contribute in any useful fashion to understanding or improving games.

This is a problem.