In this interactive workshop, researchers from the University of Zurich present their projects on and about games and then offer you the opportunity to try out these different projects – i.e. digital games – yourself on various platforms. You will gain a playful insight into the current scientific debate on games.

Game studies research games: for example, how they have an increasing influence on our popular culture (e.g. cinematic adaptations such as Uncharted, Arcane or The Last of Us) or how game-specific narrative mechanisms differ from traditional literary narrative types (e.g. in strongly story-based games such as Red Dead Redemption 2, Elden Ring or The Legends of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom).

In the field of game-based research, for example, millions of gamers help scientists to analyze data in a short time by playing games (e.g. in Eve Online or Borderlands 3). In addition, in the field of game-based learning, game-specific mechanisms are used to make language learning more motivating or to simplify the understanding of complex contexts, e.g. in banking or healthcare, through role-play games (RPGs).