Sabine Harrer

Uppsala University | UU

In games, loss is as ubiquitous as it is trivial. One reason for this has been found in the established convention of on-screen character death as a signifier for failure (Klastrup 2006; Grant 2011; Johnson 2011). If that’s all that games have to offer in terms of addressing an existential trope of human experience, the worried protectionist conclu...

As a media form entwined in the U.S. military-industrial complex, video games continue to celebrate imperialist imagery and Western-centric narratives of the great white explorer (Breger, 2008; Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009; Geyser & Tshalabala, 2011; Mukherjee, 2016). While much ink has been spilt on the detrimental effects of colonial imagery...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

This article is based on two observations about game production culture, first that there is a demographic mismatch between those who make games and those who play them [1], and secondly that through their organization, setting, and constraints, game jams and other creation events can encourage radical game design principles, values beyond the comm...

Withing the fields of HCI and game design, conventional design practices have been criticised for perpetuating the status quo and marginalising users beyond the norm [11], [1], e.g. through genderized assumptions about user interaction [13]. To solve this problem of conservatism in HCI, one recommended strategy has been queering; the use of mischiv...

This chapter analyzes the ways in which colonial board games represent European-coded atrocities, by way of locating the presence of the white perpetrator. Using as its case study the popular Finnish board game Afrikan Tähti, originally published in 1951, the chapter shows how playful aesthetics and rules can simultaneously lead to the affirmation...

Game design processes, just like games themselves, are infused with unconscious values which need to be made transparent to ensure a successful outcome. Building on previous studies in edu- cational and queer game design, this paper critically reflects on the values of our game design process with Allied Forces, a game which aims to teach trans all...

Background Building on previous studies on racism and whiteness in video games, this article investigates how deck building games provide platforms for identity tourism, the symbolic appropriation of marginalised experiences, through their coupling of mechanics and racial stereotypes. Aims The aim is to contribute to our understanding how dominant...

This article explores how game jams, a rapid collaborative game production format, can work to support the revitalisation of Indigenous self-narratives in the context of Sámi culture. The study focuses on the Sami Game Jam, an event designed and carried out in the Northern Finish Sámi community in Utsjoki, in February 2018. Using an ethnographic me...

This paper reviews the experiences of game workshop facilitators in a culturally mixed activist setting based on narrative interviews with representatives of the Game Girl Workshop (GGW), a Denmark-based feminist initiative established in 2010. By identifying emergent themes and concerns in the organizers' self-narratives, this study aims to unpack...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

How can videogames portray love and loss? Games and Bereavement answers this question by looking at five videogames and carrying out a participatory design study with grievers. Sabine Harrer highlights possible connections between grief and videogames, arguing that game design may help make difficult personal feelings tangible. After a brief litera...

Fitness trackers promise a longer and better life for the people who engage with them. What is forgotten in their analysis for HCI, though, is how they re-conceptualise the very notion of what constitutes a 'step'. We discuss everyday edge cases illustrating how fitness trackers fail to address goals and ideals of people using them. They merely re-...

Sex is a uniquely individual matter. Kinks and desires, pleasure and satisfaction are embodied and situated experiences. However, the design of commercial sex toys and the research about them has notoriously neglected the needs and desires of disabled people – and more so those with invisible disabilities. Neurodiverse people perceive the world dif...

This paper talks about the manifestation of colonial thinking in the Japanese video game Resident Evil 5. Through three gameplay vignettes, the tension between unreflected colonial tropes and enjoyable gameplay mechanics is discussed. The white authors' first-hand enjoyment of racist interactive entertainment is problematised through Frantz Fanon's...

This paper announces the "Games Against Health" (GAH) research agenda, a criticism of, and response to, the cultural imperialism of the "Games for Health" paradigm. Committed to player-centric design ethics, GAH seeks to dismantle the "games for health" myth as neo-liberal elitist diktat. We acknowledge the values, tastes and pleasures of billions...

How can game design be used to foster critical reflection and render cultural studies less boring (Grossberg, 2006)? This paper discusses the design process of Cutting Edges, an abstract mini-game made to encourage students and scholars of cultural theory to actively explore abstract philosophical claims. The initial intention was to produce a well...