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In this research symposium, young scholars from iGGi and CDN present their work through 10 minutes lightening talks. 

Professors Kristine Jørgensen and Doris C. Rusch from CDN and professor Peter Cowling from iGGi will chair the symposium and lead the discussions. 

Each presenter will have 10 minutes for their presentation, and 5 minutes for Q&A.

Program

• 09.00-09.15: Welcome by Scott Rettberg, Kristine Jørgensen and Peter Cowling

Communities

• 09.15-09.30: Toby Best (Queen Mary University of London), How Do You Want To Do This: Different Cultures' Approaches To Tabletop Roleplaying Games
• 09.30-09.45: Lauren Winter (University of York), Social Presence is at the Centre of Your Multiplayer World
• 09.45-10.00: George Long (Queen Mary University of London), Direct-Democracy in Old School Runescape
• 10.00-10.15: Tom Legierse (University of Bergen), Changing the Game: Understanding Masculinity and Rethinking Inclusivity in Games
• 10.15-10.30: Break 

Authorship

• 10.30-10.45: Mick With Berland (University of Bergen), Empire of AI
• 10.45-11.00: Doruk Balci (University of York), Player Discretion is Advised: Designing for Rule Changing Play
• 11.00-11.15: Cameron Johnston (Queen Mary University of London), Organising chaos: an exploration of noise
• 11.15-11.30: Jessica Witte (University of Bergen), Measuring Plot Arcs in AI-Generated Narratives
• 11.30-11.45: Break 

Creativity and emergence

• 11.45-12.00: Tegan Pyke (University of Bergen), Digital Literature and Popular Culture: Literary bias, consumer culture, and postdigital writing practices
• 12.00-12.15: Philip Smith (Queen Mary University of London), Emergent Play in Citizen Science
• 12.15-12.30: Hanna Lauvli (University of Bergen), Recreating recreation: Making synthetic content popular culture
• 12.30-13.30: Lunch

Narrative design

• 13.30-13.45: Alex Flint (University of York), Behind the Story: How Indie Game Developers Use Feedback to Improve Game Narrative 
• 13.45-14.00: Tamsin Isaac (University of York), How Time Shapes Player Experience in Live-Service Games 
• 14.00-14.15: Joshua Kritz (Queen Mary University of London), Playing cards without words: How tabletop games explore narrative beyond plain text
• 14.15-14.30: Haoyuan Tang (University of Bergen), Integrating Large Language Models into Video Game Narratives through Non-Verbal Inputs
• 14.30-14.45: Prakriti Nayak (Queen Mary University of London), Belief, Uncertainty, and Story: Modelling Player Navigation Through Narrative Worlds
• 14.45-15.00: Break

Emotion, cognition and perception

• 15.00-15.15: Océane Lissillour (University of York), The story we tell ourselves
• 15.15-15.30: Dom Ford (University of Bergen), Bring me to life? Generative AI for nonplayer character dialogue in digital games
• 15.30-15.45: Luiza Stepanyan Gossian (Queen Mary University of London), The Heider-Simmel Illusion: How humans infer story when there is none
• 15.45-16.00: Nicole Levermore (University of York), What We Can Learn about Attention Using Tetris
• 16.00-16.15: Elin Festøy (Kristiania University College), Shaping agency to motivate non-biased reflection
• 16.15-16.30: Summary (Kristine Jørgensen)

• 19.00: Reception at CDN 

Abstracts

Communities panel: 

Toby Best (Queen Mary University of London)

How Do You Want To Do This: Different Cultures' Approaches To Tabletop Roleplaying Games

A brief exploration into the many various ways different cultures handle roleplaying games, for example the traditional Dungeons & Dragons in the Anglosphere, Nordic LARPing, and Japanese Tabletalk games, and how each culture values the narrative and rulesets of such games.

Lauren Winter (University of York)

Social Presence is at the Centre of Your Multiplayer World

Creating multiplayer worlds is complex. How do you ensure that the intended experience comes across when so many people can interfere with it? This talk will outline social presence in being fundamental to building a positive player experience. This will be shown through highlighting the combination of development choices and individual differences as important considerations when players share environments.

George Long (Queen Mary University of London)

Direct-Democracy in Old School Runescape

Old School Runescape (OSRS) is one of the most popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG), with a unique aspect, players decide what content gets added into the game. This talk will go why the game adopted direct democracy, how the polling system works, and how it has impacted the design & development of the game.

Tom Legierse (University of Bergen)

Changing the Game: Understanding Masculinity and Rethinking Inclusivity in Games

This research project ethnographically explores men’s practices and experiences in videogames. Specifically, his aim is to understand how men make sense of themselves as gamers and men; how they play a variety of games in a variety of ways; and how they anticipate the future for men in games and society at large. The overall goal for this research is to rethink how men can be part of inclusive futures.

Methodologically this research project is built on ethnographic tools, including participant observation, interviews and focus groups. Using these tools, I will focus on what men do and what they experience. I will ‘follow the people’ as they move from one context to the other, positioning themselves and constantly adapting to change. Doing so will allow for a more complicated and nuanced understanding of what it means to be a man in gaming spaces. We need this, as we currently fail to theorize what positive role there could be for men in moving toward equitable and inclusive gaming spaces.

Authorship panel: 

Mick With Berland (University of Bergen)

Empire of AI

Radical advances in the availability of data and computing power, combined with a chain of breakthroughs in training methods, has lead to a situation where  large language models (LLMs), can mass produce mostly well-written novels, scientific papers, or propagandistic media posts. On an infrastructural level, the overwhelming cascade of text produced by LLMs has caused disruption on key websites where literature is bought, sold, or judged. Moreover, award-winning authors have begun experimenting with more thoughtful partnerships with LLMs, launching what could be termed a post-artificial literature. While the availability of LLMs thus provides both opportunities and challenges for the production of literature, it is crucial to understand that LLMs are not culturally neutral technologies.  Both the selection of training data and the fine tuning of models raise questions of censorship, representation, and power. Furthermore, the costly development of neural networks effectively consolidates power in the hands of established technological hegemons. This means that the majority of LLMs serve as tools of cultural imperialism on behalf of tech-corporations from Silicon Valley, dictating what cultural notions and narratives can be reproduced by popular models. The research project therefore aims to investigate the following question: How does post-artificial literature contribute to and/or deconstruct the cultural imperialism of hegemonic LLMs?

Doruk Balci (University of York)

Player Discretion is Advised: Designing for Rule Changing Play

This paper uses research through game design to explore how we can make video games that invite players to invent their own personal play-practices through making and changing rules. Through a reflective process of designing and playtesting a multiplayer game in which changing rules and parameters is the central mechanic, we have identified how we can create opportunities for players to exert their own creative authority on the structure of their play-practices. As our contribution, we present three design themes which aim to invite player authorship on practices of gameplay: opening up digital rules and parameters, bringing internal rules to the surface, and leaving space for internal goals. We also bring a larger discussion of these design patterns in which we investigate the duality of responsibility and freedom in play when we design for player creativity, and the role of video games as tools to make metagames.

Cameron Johnston (Queen Mary University of London)

Organising chaos: an exploration of noise

This talk will be a light, high level overview of some of the different methods of noise generation. The talk will primarily be an exploration of how different noise algorithms are used to allow for more authorial intention within the randomness, and practical examples of these different algorithms in use in games and other digital media. The talk will also briefly explore different ways in which noise can be sourced.

Jessica Witte (University of Bergen)

Measuring Plot Arcs in AI-Generated Narratives

In digital humanities, researchers have adopted a variety of computational text analysis methods to examine patterns in narrative. Sentiment analysis, which aims to quantify positivity and negativity in text, has been used to map plot arcs in literary texts. Many sentiment analysis methods are lexicon-based, meaning that they assign words fixed numerical values that correspond to positivity or negativity. Because such methods assume that words have objective meaning and valence, lexicon-based sentiment analysis has been criticised as too reductive for analysing literary works that contain irony, metaphor, allusion, and other characteristics of human-authored texts.

This talk will focus on research in progress that examines whether sentiment analysis can reveal patterns in plot arcs of AI-generated texts, as these texts lack the qualities of human-authored texts that make it so difficult for the computer to understand them. I will first compare plots of sentiment arcs in a dataset of short stories generated by GPT-4o mini in order to identify patterns across narrative time. I will then examine the quantitative results through a close reading of a sample of the AI-generated stories.

Creativity and emergence panel:

Tegan Pyke (University of Bergen)

Digital Literature and Popular Culture: Literary bias, consumer culture, and postdigital writing practices

My research is focused on the field of electronic literature, postdigitality, and the ways the World Wide Web has affected folk storytelling practices. I place a particular emphasis on identifying born-digital, online-first narrative forms and documenting the practices of collaborative writing communities. Research produced during my fellowship period so far has focused on electronic literature's status as an essentially contested concept and the ways in which mascot horror—a popular web-first video game genre, exemplified by series such as Five Nights at Freddy’s, Poppy Playtime, and Garten of Banban—acts as a cultural reflection of contemporary, post-capitalist, platformised creator economies .My current research investigates the unique storytelling practices of Sims writing communities from the early 2000s to current day, with an aim to document the ways a primarily female player base influenced the Let’s Play entertainment format.

Philip Smith (Queen Mary University of London)

Emergent Play in Citizen Science

Abstract: Emergent play, defined as player behaviors arising from interactions with game systems rather than developer intent, offers a useful lens for examining citizen science, where public participants conduct scientific data collection and analysis (Silvertown, 2009). Although emergent play aligns with ‘Autonomy’ in Self-Determination Theory, its effects on data generation remain underexplored. Existing studies provide limited insight. Prestopnik et al. (2017) identified “cheating” behaviors in a citizen science game without examining player motivations, while Glas and Lammes (2019) argue that rule-breaking can mirror the creative inquiry of professional scientists. However, these perspectives overlook differences in game design and citizen science methods. This presentation looks into the benefits and drawbacks of emergent play in citizen science games. It identifies the variations of citizen science that are better suited to the creativity of emergent play and knowledge gaps that need to be explored to understand these dynamics and their implications for scientific outcomes.

Hanna Lauvli (University of Bergen)

Recreating recreation: Making synthetic content popular culture

Algorithmic effects on the internet ecosystem has generated a multitude of concerns; How can we differentiate between AI and human? How do we attribute value onto algorithmically generated content? Can human and AI content co-exist?

My research is focused on algorithmic folklore, speculative futures in relation to algorithms, and artistic practice. In my talk, I will be discussing an emerging phenomenon where people re-enact and recreate AI-generated content online. Using John Fiske's conception of mass and popular culture, I'll be discussing how this can be seen as a subverting act on mass culture, and as part of a broader narrative concerning AIs widespread effect on the internet ecosystem.

Narrative design panel:

Alex Flint (University of York)

Behind the Story: How Indie Game Developers Use Feedback to Improve Game Narrative

Narrative is a core element of many games, yet how indie developers evaluate and improve game narrative is not well understood - especially compared to AAA studios, who have more resources and established user research practices. This talk examines how indie developers think about, gather, and use feedback to improve game narratives during development, as well as the challenges they encounter in doing so.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten indie developers across different team sizes, countries, and narrative-focused projects. The data are currently being analysed using codebook thematic analysis.

Emerging findings show several patterns: (1) The usefulness of feedback depends on when it is collected, and (2) what is evaluated depends on the needs of the specific game, though often focuses on characters, player understanding, and creating the right experience. (3) Who gives feedback also matters, as different participants are perceived to provide different types of insight. (4) Feedback practices are shaped by time and resource constraints, and although developers value early testing, it is not always possible. Instead, they often rely on informal testing; such as self-testing, feedback from trusted peers, and playtesting at events. (5) Interpreting feedback is not straightforward and often relies on personal judgment, (6) while acting on it is influenced by both practical limits and attachment to the work or creative vision.

These preliminary insights highlight opportunities for HCI research to design tools and methods that help indie developers collect, interpret, and act on narrative feedback, narrowing the gap between indie and AAA development practices.

Tamsin Isaac (University of York)

How Time Shapes Player Experience in Live-Service Games

Live-service games are built around time. Through seasonal updates, recurring content, and limited-time events, they structure when players engage and how experiences unfold. While these systems are often discussed in terms of retention and monetisation, less attention has been paid to how they shape player experience in practice.

In this talk, I explore how time-based design influences player behaviour, expectations, and meaning-making in live-service games. Drawing on a large-scale analysis of over 2,600 games across Steam and Google Play, I introduce a taxonomy of limited-time events that captures key features such as event type, duration, reward structure, recurrence, and monetisation.

I then connect these structural patterns to findings from a diary and interview study examining how players experience time-limited content in everyday play. Players describe rhythms of anticipation, routine, urgency, and occasional pressure to return, highlighting how temporal systems shape not just when people play, but how they interpret and value their experiences.

By bringing together large-scale structural analysis and player experience data, this work positions time as a central design dimension in live-service games and invites discussion on how temporality contributes to meaning-making in contemporary digital play.

Joshua Kritz (Queen Mary University of London)

Playing cards without words: How tabletop games explore narrative beyond plain text

Tabletop RPGs have been a standard for building user-created narratives outside the constraints of a digital world. Board games, on the other hand, have a harder time conveying interesting narratives. In this talk, I'll explore how board game design navigates its limitations in an attempt to explore deep narratives.

Haoyuan Tang (University of Bergen)

Integrating Large Language Models into Video Game Narratives through Non-Verbal Inputs

My PhD research is about how Large Language Models can be used in video game narratives, specifically in mainstream commercial games where players interact mainly through actions rather than words.

 Mainstream commercial games mostly don’t ask players to say things. They ask players to do things, like movement, timing, combat patterns, resource use, how you approach a space, what you pay attention to. LLMs are good at producing language, but they also tend to want language as their main input.

So the project’s main research question is: how can LLMs create story content that fits conventional game design and matches non-verbal, mechanics-based player input?

My working direction is:

A) to develop a method for turning player actions into prompts for LLMs. Which means finding a way translate player actions and game-state signals into prompts that keep generated story content in sync with what the player have actually done.

B) In addition to more talkative NPCs or more automated quest descriptions, what new things can LLM bring to gameplay and narrative? Instead of an “story enhancer" or "mass production tool," is it possible for LLM to inspire new game genre? To inspire a new form of storytelling and game mechanics on top of what we have for today’s commercial games?

Prakriti Nayak (University of York)

Belief, Uncertainty, and Story: Modelling Player Navigation Through Narrative Worlds

This talk explores player experience through the lens of belief and uncertainty. When players engage with a digital narrative, they rarely encounter a fully transparent world. Players, instead, piece together meaning from partial information and unfolding events, constantly revising their understanding of what is happening, what matters, and what might happen next. My talk asks how we might model this process computationally. 

My current research uses Bayesian models to study navigation under uncertainty: hhow an agent forms beliefs about its environment, updates those beliefs based on incoming information, and selects actions when the true state of the world is only partially known. Although this work is grounded in spatial navigation, the same core ideas extend naturally to narrative experience. 

Players do not simply move through story worlds; they interpret them, generate expectations, and act on uncertain assumptions. In that sense, navigating a narrative world can be understood as both a cognitive and experiential process of inference. 

By drawing connections between spatial navigation and digital narrative, this talk considers how computational models of uncertainty might help us better understand suspense, curiosity, confusion, discovery, and engagement. It also reflects on what these models might offer designers of interactive narratives and adaptive systems that respond to player actions as well as the player’s evolving understanding of the world. More broadly, the talk aims to open a conversation between computational modelling, games research, and digital narrative studies around how players experience story worlds as spaces of uncertainty.

Emotion, cognition and perception panel:

Océane Lissillour (University of York)

The story we tell ourselves

In this talk we will explore the impact of gamified systems on frustration, engagement and feeling of the self. We will talk about the importance of having a good self narrative to keep engagement and how gamified systems help us create and resolve cognitive dissonance and confusion. This will be mainly focused on serious gamified systems but we will explore psychological theories around the self and the feeling of competence as a whole.

Luiza Stepanyan Gossian (Queen Mary University of London)

The Heider-Simmel Illusion: How humans infer story when there is none

Can abstract games contain narrative? In this talk I'll introduce the Heider-Simmel Illusion, an experiment that shows how people infer narrative, meaning and interpersonal relationships from the random movement of geometric shapes. Using examples from my own games, I'll show how this understanding of human behaviour opens up a new avenue to explore for narrative in games.

Nicole Levermore (University of York)

What We Can Learn about Attention Using Tetris

Video games have enormous potential for neuroscientific research. They are engaging, long-duration tasks that people can perform with little prior training. In my talk, I will be sharing how I am using Tetris to research attention. 

Dom Ford (University of Bergen)

Bring me to life? Generative AI for nonplayer character dialogue in digital games

The prospect of freely and endlessly talking to nonplayer digital game characters is an alluring one to anybody who has gotten tired or frustrated by characters who end up repeating the same lines, over and over: “I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took an arrow in the knee…”, as the commonly mocked example from Skyrim goes. Proponents and advertisers for AI-driven NPCs in games claim that large language models can make gameworlds more ‘alive’ by avoiding the need for scripts at all. But this could have significant consequences when we consider how it is we engage with fictional worlds. Does intent matter and, if so, does an AI have intentions? This project explores questions around fictional worlds, intentionality and the potential impact of AI in that. Is our experience of fictional worlds changed when we are, arguably, no longer interfacing with the designed intentions of another human, but with an AI whose intentions are only to imitate human speech? The project does this through three case studies exploring different realms of AI-generated NPC implementation, using qualitative content analysis to bring together player experiences to understand the lived, played experience of those using these technologies in gameplay.

Elin Festøy (Kristiania University College)

Shaping agency to motivate non-biased reflection

My PhD at the Norwegian Film School, University of Inland, was completed in 2023 and was an artistic research project exploring how to use agency and simulation to motivate reflection on non-fiction topics.

The work centers on an artistic exploration on the question "how can an adult look at a child and see an enemy", as a continuation of my work on the game "My Child Lebensborn", which was developed together with the Norwegian Lebensborn children and shows a representative simulation of the experiences of a Lebensborn child in Norway in the 1950'. The exploration ended in four concept sketches intended for a VR format and a deep-dive into human decision making as described in cognitive science, philosophy and social sciences. The end result of the PhD was a description of the challenges of bias when offering agency in an interactive and immersive experience with the aim to create personal reflection on non-fiction topics. It also describes the importance of crafting interactive environments that consider the varied personal truths of different participants and that utilise the personal user journey of individual decision making to let them explore spaces shaped for open reflection on the topics presented.

Since finishing the PhD, I have been working on creating simulations that can motivate players to reflect on mental health challenges and teach mental health best practice, resulting in the game "My Child New Beginnigs", that was launched on Nov 20 and has recently won the "Best game of the year - small screen" at the Norwegian Games Award.