Historicizing G.A.M.E.S. 2025

Gaming, Artifacts, Memory, Experience and Society

Welcome

Historicizing G.A.M.E.S. 2025 – Gaming, Artifacts, Memory, Experience and Society

International conference, 11-12 September 2025, Bern, Switzerland

Welcome to our website! Here, you will find:

• The conference program (including extended abstracts coming soon) .
• A presentation of the keynote speaker .
• The speakers’ guide .
• The call for papers (including organizing and scientific committees) .

This conference is co-organized by the DH, University of Bern and the research project Confoederatio Ludens.

You are more than welcome to attend on-site in room 205, Hallerstrasse 6, 3012 Bern.
No registration needed.

Historicizing G.A.M.E.S. – Conference Program

Day 0 - Wednesday 10 September 2025

When	What	Where
20:00	Let’s meet around a drink in town	TBD

Day 1 - Thursday 11 September 2025

When	What	Where
08:30 – 09:20	Arrival	University of Bern. Hallerstrasse 6. Room 203/205.
09:20 – 09:30	Welcome note	Room 205, Uni Bern
09:30 – 10:30	Keynote - Vincent Berry: Play culture and social distinction: what can we learn from a longitudinal study of play? Doctor in education science and professor at University Sorbonne Paris Nord, Vincent Berry is a sociologist of play, of players and of contemporary play culture. He works on all sorts of game practices : toys, board games, video games, roleplaying games, with a clear focus on the notion of experience. In his post doctoral degree research presented in 2022, “Le sens du jeu : culture et pratiques ludiques en France (1960-2000)” (The meaning of play : play cultures and practices in France, 1960-2000), Vincent Berry offers a vast and comprehensive social history of play in french society, from card games to video games. In this keynote, Vincent Berry will cover some of the soicological and historical results of his research, from the general increase of gaming practices at the turn of the 80s to the emergence of a “fun morality” as a way of legitimation of play and entertainement practices.	Room 205, Uni Bern
10’	Break	Room 203/205
10:40 – 12:00	Panel 1: History of player practices in national contexts	Room 205, Uni Bern
30’	David Betzing: „Ich will Strom!“ The Case of the Gamers Gathering LAN Party as an Ambivalent Milestone of the German LAN Scene When 1,600 gamers gathered at the Kraftzentrale in Duisburg in Germany on 10 December 1999, they were looking forward to the largest gaming LAN party in the world to date, the Gamers Gathering. In fact, it marked a milestone in the evolution of Germany’s LAN scene, not only due to its record-breaking scale. Issues with heat and power caused widespread dissatisfaction, while the youth welfare office prohibited Quake tournaments, due to the protection of minors. The planned case study examines the history and background of this early LAN party from the perspective of the organisers and visitors and places it in the history of the emerging LAN scene. The analysis draws upon interviews with contemporary witnesses, photos, videos, digital sources such as forums and scene platforms, and textual records from the private archive of an organiser of the Gamers Gathering. LAN parties, gatherings where participants connect their computers to play digital games in a local network, thrived in Germany between the mid-1990s and early 2000s with some parties becoming mass events. Among these was the Gamers Gathering, held from 10 to 12 December 1999. In addition to gaming, participants socialised and exchanged files. Organised by the Internet company GTN as part of a product launch and marketing strategy, it was to be remembered for its organisational difficulties. The Gamers Gathering set a precedent for subsequent LAN parties during the peak of the LAN scene, highlighting pitfalls to avoid. It stands both at the beginning of a history of scandals within the LAN scene surrounding failed LAN parties and at the beginning of LAN parties as mass events with thousands of participants. The Gamers Gathering thus exemplifies the professionalisation of supra-regional LAN parties, the associated problems, and the communalisation of LAN party participants into a cohesive LAN scene.
10’	Discussion
30’	Ayşe Bayrakci Gulyuz: From Soda Bottle Caps to Pokémon Go: The Evolution of Collecting and E-Commerce in Turkish Childhood Game Culture Coming soon…
10’	Discussion
12:00 – 13:30	Lunch	Restaurant Grosse Schanze Parkterrasse 10 3012 Bern
13:30 – 14:50	Panel 2: History of player subcultures and communities	Room 205, Uni Bern
30’	Ron Heckler: Unicorns thought to be dead live longer: The history of fan culture and branding in eSports through the example of the League of Legends organisation Unicorns of Love eSports has increasingly become a focus of game studies in recent years. However, cultural studies and, in particular, historical perspectives are still rare. Examples of cultural studies research include Gudrun Werdenich’s study “PC bang, e-sports and the magic of StarCraft”, which examines the special role of Korea in electronic sports, and Alexander Stoll’s work on the depiction of violence in digital games and their influence on professional gaming. Both works also contextualise the historical development of the individual games. The contributions of the edited volume by Markus Breuer on various perspectives on eSports from business and academia only marginally open up historical perspectives. In short, there have been few contributions to date that primarily examine the historical development of individual game titles, players or organisations. The presentation will examine the development of fan culture in the eSports title League of Legends using the organisation Unicorns of Love as an example. The Unicorns of Love were founded in 2013 and played in the top European league until 2018 (formerly known as EULCS). After the transformation of the EULCS into a franchise-based system, the Unicorns of Love competed in the Russian / Eastern European league and in the highest German league. The team quickly attracted attention, not only because of its name and bright pink team colour and its style of play. In particular, the marketing strategy and the rapid development of a large and still loyal (inter)national fan community of the German-based organisation became its trademark and an inspiration for other organisations. Therefore, the presentation will examine the development of the Unicorns Of Love, their constant reinvention (for example after the elimination from the highest European league in 2018 or the end of the Russian / Eastern European league in 2022) and their influence on the creation of a team-based fan culture in professional League of Legends.
10’	Discussion
30’	Markus Spöhrer: Disability and Video Game History: How Gamer Subcultures Negotiated Access to Digital Gaming The history of digital games has, for the most part, been written from an ableist perspective, which is unsurprising given that the gaming industry has predominantly produced gaming peripherals, developed game mechanics, and supported gamers that cater to ab able-bodied peer group (Parisi 2017). In the wake of diversity activism, disability and accessibility have become crucial factors in digital gaming culture in recent years, and the industry is eager to serve this market (Ochsner, Spöhrer 2024). However, laypeople, enthusiasts, and individuals affected by disabilities have been working to enable access to digital games since their popularization in the early 1970s (cf. Spöhrer 2024). While the history of circumventing the normative gaming dispositive and designing accessible games is rich, key figures and technological innovations are often not represented in canonical game histories, thus displaying an ableist perspective on game history (Campana 2017). This can be seen, for example, in disabled gamer networks such as the Audyssey magazine founded by Michael Feir in the 1990s, where blind players and programmers offered reviews, game hacks, or workarounds for commercial games or even audio-only games, enabling digital play without the need for sight. Similar trends can be observed since the 1980s in relation to peripherals: Controllers such as Atari’s iconic CX40 or Nintendo’s D-pad, functioned as ‘gatekeepers’ to digital games, rigorously excluding people with motor disabilities from the gaming process. Independent developers, such as the flight engineer Ken Yankelevitz, who extensively worked on creating and distributing mouth-controlled joysticks on a non-profit basis, were pioneers who played a central role in disabled gamer communities yet remain practically invisible in the discourse of video game history. In my presentation, I will address this research gap and illustrate how the gaming industry neglected disabled players from the late 1970s onward. Using the examples of Michael Feir and Ken Yankelevitz, I will show how these pioneers worked to counteract this situation and laid the groundwork for current developments in accessible gaming.
10’	Discussion
20’	Long break
15:10 – 16:30	Panel 3: Transmedia history of Player Cultures	Room 205, Uni Bern
30’	Aurelia Brandenburg: A Man’s Affair? Gaming as a masculine domain in German gaming magazines 1980–2000 In 1998, German gaming magazine PC Joker printed a survey article titled “Is PC entertainment a man’s affair?” (PC Joker 1998, 7) and asked people on the street whether games were only for boys and men. The answers were mixed with multiple women pushing back against the idea, and yet, the magazine claimed in the final article that, in fact, only 5% of all PC players were female – because only 5% of their own readers were. This points at a paradox that is typical for German gaming magazines, same as other instances of mainstream gaming cultures at the time: By the 1990s, journalists began to realize that there were remarkably few women present in gaming cultures as represented by gaming magazines. Sometimes, they pointed at reasons such as a lack of games for girls (e.g. Man!ac 1993), and in other cases, they simply treated this discrepancy as a natural state and thus, unchangeable. However, pedagogical research (e.g. Jungwirth 1993; Funken 1992; Schindler 1992) suggests that low quotas such as the 5% claimed by PC Joker cannot have mirrored the realities of girls engaging with digital games in (West) Germany, but rather the realities of gaming magazines. Yet, the idea of games as a boys’ toy was a discursive cornerstone not only but also in the way German gaming magazines constructed a specific version of mainstream gaming culture, and it also often remains influential in the way gender histories of digital games are imagined and understood until today. Meanwhile, gaming magazines, while being an “invaluable archive” (Kirkpatrick 2015, 13), cannot be considered neutral actors but need to be understood through the lens of geek masculinity (McDivitt 2020) and questioned accordingly. The proposed submission aims to build upon these distinctions and take some first tentative steps to gain a more nuanced understanding of the realities of gender relations sketched out above.
10’	Discussion
30’	Hanna Hammerich & Niayesh Ebrahimi: Player engagement in early music games of the 1980s While game music soundtracks in the 1980s were rarely interactive or adaptive, some titles explored novel ways of integrating music dynamically into gameplay, thereby changing both the role of music in the game and the role of the player. In this presentation, we examine three music games from the United States, Japan, and West Germany, that treated sound not merely as background ambience but as an essential element of the gameplay. Moondust by Jaron Lanier (Commodore 64, 1983), Otocky by Toshio Iwai (Famicom Disk System, 1987), and To Be on Top by Chris Hülsbeck (Commodore 64, 1987) allowed players to influence the musical events through spatial movement, rhythm-based shooting mechanics, or in-game sequencing tools. These games address questions of interactivity, participation, and agency, such as: To what extent can players manipulate the soundscape of the game and how does this control affect their perception of the virtual space? Yet, the musical outcome was not only shaped by player input but also by the technical affordances of the 1980s hardware and software. Moondust uses algorithmic composition with random elements; Otocky integrates an extra sound channel via the FDS disk drive; and To Be on Top showcases an innovative use of the SID chip, generating five voices on hardware originally designed for three. Building on these technical conditions, the in-game creation of the music can be positioned on a spectrum between computer performance and player performance, as outlined by Michael Liebe. To compare different forms of interactivity in music video games, Martin Pichlmair and Fares Kayali provide useful principles, that we draw upon. Methodologically, we take a hands-on approach by playing the games ourselves on the historical machines. Additionally, Let’s Play videos and interviews with the developers are taken into account. Putting together those different research perspectives, our presentation highlights how sound can enhance player engagement and how early music games introduced new forms of interaction.
10’	Discussion
16:30 – 16:35	Ending note	Room 205, Uni Bern
17:00 – 19:00	Free time
19:00	Social Event: Apero, dinner and a video game pubquiz	Erupt Bar Parkterrasse 14 3012 Bern

Day 2 - Friday 12 September 2025

When	What	Where
08:30 – 09:00	Arrival	Room 203/205, Uni Bern
09:00 – 09:05	Welcome note	Room 205, Uni Bern
09:05 – 10:15	Panel 4: History of the materiality of play	Room 205, Uni Bern
30’	Activity (TBD)	Room 203/205, Uni Bern
30’	Claudius Clüver: Games in Boxes When looking at the spectrum of historical analog games such as card and board games, we see an ‘old’ variety of games such as Chess or Rummy, and a ‘new’ variety of games such as Monopoly or Settlers of Catan.1 The difference between the two types is that players of the old games usually transmit rules separately from the material while the new type has material and rules packaged together as a ‘game in a box’. In my presentation, I will briefly describe the industrial commercialization, pedagogization, medialization and designed aestheticization that transform the the “old” traditional game into the “new” modern game in a box. This will bring together topics from the fields of economic theory, the history of pedagogy and the history of game design. Card and board games thus appear as a middle class and bourgeois means of education, which becomes paradigmatic for what is now considered of educational valuable.2 Digital games are also offered in boxes - but digital games have their own history, independent of analog game culture.3 This raises the question of the extent to which an all-encompassing game-historical perspective must distinguish between them and what exceptions there are to this parallel coexistence - at what points do analog games influence digital games and vice versa? These questions are also relevant because of the generalizations made about analogue games in early game studies.4 Finally, the focus will be on signs of dissolution, alternative models and the continued stability of the game box despite them.	Room 205, Uni Bern
10’	Discussion
10’	Break	Room 203/205
10:25 – 11:45	Panel 5: History of players as creators	Room 205, Uni Bern
30’	Javier Fernández Contreras: The Evolution of User-Generated Content in Video Gaming: The Case of Roblox The history of video gaming is deeply intertwined with player agency and creative participation. Moving beyond the traditional focus on industry developments, this paper explores how user-generated content (UGC) has shaped gaming history, using Roblox as a case study. Since its launch in 2006, Roblox has evolved into a vast digital ecosystem where users not only play but also create and share immersive gaming experiences. With over 40 million games and more than 210 million active monthly users as of 2024, Roblox exemplifies the convergence of gaming, social media, and participatory culture. While classic definitions of social media emphasize platforms that facilitate the creation and exchange of user-generated content, Roblox redefines this model by integrating game development with social interaction. Unlike traditional networks focused on text, image, and video sharing, Roblox enables users to design interactive 3D environments. This blurring of boundaries between player and developer mirrors historical trends in gaming culture, from early BASIC programming communities in the 1970s to the widespread phenomenon of game modding. This presentation also considers the architectural implications of user-generated video games within virtual worlds. In Roblox, diverse architectural styles—ranging from modern urban environments to medieval castles—serve as backdrops for social interaction, gameplay, and commerce. Popular games like Brookhaven RP, Adopt Me!, and Murder Mystery 2 illustrate how digital architecture influences user engagement and identity formation. As Roblox expands into VR, its evolving spatial dynamics offer insight into the broader cultural and societal shifts driven by digital environments. By examining Roblox through the lens of player-driven game development and architectural representation, this study contributes to the historical understanding of video games as participatory cultural artifacts. It highlights how digital spaces function not merely as entertainment venues but as platforms for socialization, creativity, and economic exchange, shaping the gaming experience and its broader cultural impact.
10’	Discussion
30’	Stefan Höltgen: Coding Games/Gaming Codes. BASIC Programming for Homecomputers in the 1970s and 1980s At the beginning of the computer game age, which only really took off with the emergence of the first game companies, there were hobbyist and private game developers who developed and published games themselves on their home computers of the 8-bit generation. This usually took place in one of the dialects of the programming language BASIC, which was built into the various home computer platforms. Depending on the level of knowledge of the programmers, simple action games, text adventures or puzzle games were developed - but also algorythmically complex and audiovisually complex games that often pushed the platforms to the limits of their possibilities (and sometimes beyond). The steadily growing knowledge of programming techniques and the possibilities of the programming language and hardware platforms was published in various (mostly paper) communication media and was thus available to all other hobbyists. In my lecture, I would like to take a look at this early history of BASIC programming of games using concrete examples and emphasize the playful character of hobbyist software developments. This is not only reflected in the titles of programming textbooks (“Learning to program through play”, “Computer Playground”, …), but also in a specific autodidactics that combines elements of gamification, learning by doing and trail-and-error approaches. Different variants of a game, implemented on different platforms, will be used to present the competitive and creative act of the “programming games”. The specific effects of this type of development of game programs on the results (the games) and the contrast between private, playful programming learning and contemporary curricular didacts will be described at the end.
10’	Discussion
11:45 – 13:30	Lunch	Mensa Gesellschaftsstrasse Gesellschaftsstrasse 2 3012 Bern
13:30 – 14:50	Panel 6: History, memory and nostalgia in play	Room 205, Uni Bern
30’	Tijana Rupcic: “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire”: Cold War and Future Nostalgia in the Post-Apocalyptic World of the Fallout Series This article examines the philosophical dimensions of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic themes in video games, particularly within the Fallout series. Once confined to niche online spaces, video games have now emerged as a cultural force, addressing collective anxieties about environmental catastrophes, technological risks, and hyper-capitalist landscapes. These fears—manifested in narratives of extinction, societal collapse, and dystopian futures—invite players to confront the possibilities of a self-destructive human trajectory and, paradoxically, provide a virtual space to process these existential threats. This article aims to explore in which ways the ideas and imaginaries of catastrophic scenarios of nuclear war and a post-apocalyptic world are depicted in the Fallout Series. The Fallout franchise is one of the most famous video games with a post-apocalyptic setting and unique exploration of a world in which the Cold War Red Scare took catastrophic proportions. The nuclear dread of 1950s Americana heavily influences the game franchise. In the Fallout universe, the Cold War lasted until 2077, when global superpowers, having used up all their oil supplies, decimated Earth with nuclear bombs in a struggle for economic supremacy. The Fallout series does not lose its relevance, and today more than ever, it depicts the possible catastrophic outcomes of resources shortage and nuclear war. The series’ depiction of post-apocalyptic survival—set in a world marked by nostalgia for an idealized past and warnings against ideological extremism—remains profoundly relevant today. Using a game-immanent approach, this article analyzes how Fallout’s narrative layers Cold War fears with critiques of war’s futility and the consequences of unrestrained ambition. Through this lens, the series emerges as a philosophical reflection on the cyclical nature of human conflict and the fragile threshold between survival and self-destruction.
10’	Discussion
30’	Oliver Vettermann: Stay Forever: The Legal Obstacles of Preserving and Collecting Video Games Imagine a world where a significant part of our digital cultural heritage simply vanishes. Video games containing groundbreaking works of entertainment and art are disappearing due to media degradation, hardware obsolescence and server shutdowns. The question is: how do we preserve them? And what legal barriers stand in our way?
10’	Discussion
14:50 – 15:00	Concluding note	Room 205, Uni Bern
30’	Travel through Bern to Museum of Communication
15:30 – 17:00	Visit of the Museum of Communication	Museum für Kommunikation Helvetiastrasse 16 3000 Bern 6

Coming soon…

Coming soon…

Historicizing G.A.M.E.S. 2025

Gaming, Artifacts, Memory, Experience and Society

Abstract submission deadline extended to March 31. 2025.

How do we write a history of video gaming? As scholars argue (Sicart, 2011; Triclot, 2011; Newman, 2017; Trépanier-Jobin, 2021; Berry, 2022), video gaming should be understood as an ongoing interaction between artifacts—such as games, rules, machines, screens, images, or stories—and players, whose practices are embedded in specific cultural contexts. Moving beyond an inventorying perspective and the history of the video game industry alone, this conference invites participants to explore the history of video games from the players’ perspectives.

Since its commercialization during the 1970s, the expansion of video game culture has not only been linked to the diffusion of its artifacts but has also been embedded in broader historical and cultural transformations. Indeed, throughout the 20th century—and particularly in the post-war period and within the context of the Cold War—Western countries experienced the massive development of leisure industries. This shift was supported by increases in free time, educational opportunities, and purchasing power. Such social, economic, political, and ideological transformations helped redefine the role of leisure, including play, in society (Blackshaw, 2015).

This period, during which video games emerge as an object, an industry and a set of media practices, corresponds to the advent of what Reckwitz (2020) calls the society of singularities. Although aspects of modernity, such as rationalization, standardization or quantification of society still provide the infrastructure for social processes, Reckwitz argues that late modernity is characterized by the sociocultural construction of the exceptionality of events, social roles, and artefacts that now determine how society is experienced in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

This shift is largely driven by the emerging cultural industries and their means of communication, including video games. On the one hand, gaming enables social, communicative, identity and meaning-generating processes between players and society, by offering spaces and tools for social exchange, distinction and communitization. On the other hand, it allows players to withdraw themselves and actively experience diverse narratives, worlds and situations providing a certain distance from their social environment. In short: in late modernity, a sphere of player and gaming cultures is developing that manifests itself in objects, subjects, spaces, temporalities and collectives around the medium “game”.

The conference aims to encourage participants from all disciplines to explore the sphere of gaming culture from the players’ perspectives. How has it evolved from its earliest days, and how can today’s phenomena in gaming culture be traced in relation to their historical heritage? How have relationships between objects, subjects, spaces, temporalities, and collectives shaped gaming cultures? How can these phenomena, relationships, and artifacts be categorized phenomenologically and epistemologically? What has been the nature of the connections between producers, consumers, artifacts, and their political and social environments in this developing cultural industry? How can these aspects be analyzed theoretically and methodologically, especially given their volatility and constant transformation?

Submission Guidelines

ntations and round tables will be conducted in English. Participation is expected to be on-site, with online participation available only in exceptional cases. Abstracts should outline the research problem, methodology, theoretical framework, and some results or hypotheses.

Guidelines for Abstract Submission:

Please submit your abstract through the conference easy chair website.

• Abstracts must be a maximum of 2,000 characters, including space.
• The proposal should be written in English, using Times New Roman, 12-point font, justified alignment, and 1.5 line spacing.
• Proposals must include a short bibliography, not included into the signs count.
• References must follow the Chicago Manual of Style.
• Submit both .doc and .pdf versions of your proposal.

Important: We use an anonymized review process. Please do not include personal information in the abstract or file names.

List of Topics

Possible topics for exploring and discussing this field of research could be, but are not limited to:

Collectives

• Community-building and institutionalization processes in early fan cultures
• Mutual development of gaming cultures by gamers and gaming journalism
• Public and/or collective play
• The role of play in conversations, interactions, relationships, and sociability

Spatial Settings

• The spatial organization of play: play at home, by a friend, in public spaces
• The publicity and intimacy of play, from teenage bedrooms to common living rooms and the arcade halls
• The Geography of play : gaming cultures in rural, urban, suburbs
• Local histories of play : gaming culture in non-american and non-western countries

Temporalities

• Memory, Nostalgia and retro communities
• Routines, rhythms, repetition : how videogames structured time and how time structured playing
• The impact of broader historical contexts on play and player cultures

Objects

• Consoles, controllers, Arcade, TV sets, consoles, boxes, booklets, magazines…
• Transmedial economic and social correlations and overlaps between electromechanical toys, board games and digital games

Subjects

• Geeks, freaks, nerds, otakus : Identities and self conceptions around gaming
• Gender relations and identity with game experience
• The video game experiences in different social classes
• Taste and distaste, construction and interiorization of cultural norms

Committees

Organizing committee

• Arno Görgen (Bern University of High Arts)
• Guillaume Guenat (University of Lausanne)
• Addrich Mauch (University of Bern)
• Yannick Rochat (University of Lausanne)

This conference is part of the Confoederatio Ludens, a collaboration among Swiss universities researching Swiss game cultures in the 20th century, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Scientific committee

• Fanny Barnabé (University of Namur)
• Sophie Bémelmans (University of Lausanne)
• Vincent Berry (Sorbonne Paris Nord University)
• Loïse Bilat (Education University of Fribourg)
• Alexis Blanchet (Sorbonne Nouvelle University)
• Björn Blankenheim (University of Wuppertal)
• Adrian Demleitner (Bern University of High Arts)
• Melanie Fritsch (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
• Renard Gluzman (Shenkar College of Engineering and Design)
• Pierre-Yves Hurel (University of Lausanne)
• Rudolf T. Inderst (IU International University of Applied Sciences)
• Mela Kocher (Zurich University of the Arts)
• Loeva La Ragione (University of Lausanne)
• Matthieu Letourneux (University of Paris-Nanterre)
• Damien Marguet (University of Paris-8)
• Bernard Perron (University of Montreal)
• Eugen Pfister (Bern University of High Arts)
• Fabian Ruz (University of Geneva)
• Chantal Savoie (Montreal University of Quebec)
• Carl Therrien (University of Montreal)
• Tobias Winnerling (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)

Venue

The conference will be held at the University of Bern (Switzerland), Hallerstrasse 6.

Contact

games.dh@unibe.ch