Mental Health | Atmospheres | Video Games

Gaming has never been disconnected from reality. When we engage with ever more lavish virtual worlds, something happens to us. The game imposes itself on us and influences how we feel about it, the world, and ourselves. How do games accomplish this and to what end? The contributors explore the video game as an atmospheric medium of hitherto unimagined potential. Is the medium too powerful, too influential? A danger to our mental health or an ally through even the darkest of times? This volume compiles papers from the Young Academics Workshop at the Clash of Realities conferences of 2019 and 2020 to provide answers to these questions.

Jimena Aguilar Rodríguez is the head of digital narratives at ifs internationale filmschule köln, and is the co-founder and creative director of Alharaca, a Salvadorean feminist news media organization.

Federico Alvarez Igarzábal is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany, working in the EU-funded project VIRTUALTIMES. His research focuses primarily on the temporality of video games from a formalist and cognitive-scientific perspective. He obtained his PhD at the Institute of Media Culture and Theatre of the University of Cologne and the Cologne Game Lab of the TH Köln in 2018 with his thesis »Time and Space in Video Games«.

Michael S. Debus conducted his PhD research as part of the Making Sense of Games project at the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen from 2016-2019. His research focuses on the analysis and synthesis of existing game ontologies into a clearer terminology for the study of games. He has published papers about the ontology of navigation in videogames and metagames.

Curtis L. Maughan is a PhD candidate in the Department of German, Russian and East European Studies at Vanderbilt University. From 2016-2019, Curtis managed the Master's program in Game Development and Research at the Cologne Game Lab. His research interests include surveillance and interactivity, narratology and digital games, and the novellas of Thomas Mann and Heinrich von Kleist. His dissertation project examines flanerie in the context of open world gameplay trends and game design practices.

Su-Jin Song is a teaching and research assistant at the Cologne Game Lab of TH Köln, teaching in the field of media and game studies. She is also a film producer and director based in Germany.