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Where we stand: Our scientific mid-term report

by the CH Ludens Team

Anyone who has already worked on a scientific project knows that an interim scientific report has to be written for the funding body halfway through the project. This is probably one of the less popular text genres. You are under time pressure and the number of readers is very limited. In most cases, such interim reports are probably only read by two or three employees of the funding body in order to hopefully be approved. This is actually a shame, because we realized that writing the scientific report together was extremely beneficial for our project. On the one hand, it helped us to realize how much we have already achieved and on the other, it pointed out problems (mostly concerning the communication in between four universities) that we could tackle accordingly.

As a first step, we had to collect all papers written, all lectures and workshops held, but also datajams, media coverage, exhibitions and other project-relevant events at all three locations. This quickly showed us, for example, how much had almost been forgotten despite our bi-weekly meetings and thorough minutes. From this, Eugen Pfister wrote a first, much too long and still somewhat unstructured report, which Tobias Hodel then shaped into a narrative in the next step, which was then thoroughly proofread by Yannick Rochat. In the meantime, the majority of our other 20-strong team was also working on the text, adding to it, rephrasing it and improving it.

We have decided to publish the finished text because it actually gives a good insight into our work to date. We have left the following text almost unchanged and have only shortened two short sub-chapters on deviations from the original schedule (we are only starting the podcast this year) and on unplanned staff changes (there were none).

1.1 Confoederatio Ludens: Swiss History of Games, Play and Game Design 1968-2000

The “Confoederatio Ludens” research project, launched in February 2023, investigates the history of Swiss digital games, play, and game design. This collaborative project, involving teams across four universities (Bern Academy of Arts (HKB Bern), University of Bern, University of Lausanne, and Zurich University of the Arts), aims to comprehensively analyze the development of Swiss game culture from its early stages to the year 2000. The project’s core objectives, as outlined in the initial research plan, include: documenting and analyzing the Swiss game landscape, understanding the socio-cultural context of game development and reception in Switzerland, and exploring the specific characteristics of Swiss game design and production. This report summarizes the research activities and key findings during the project’s first two years (February 2023 – March 2025), aligning with the project’s calendar and addressing any deviations from the initial plan.

1.2 Research Activities and Results

The project activities are structured chronologically into phases: Kick-Off Phase (February-June 2023), Implementation Phase (July 2023-June 2024), and Consolidation Phase (July 2024-March 2025).

1.2.1 Kick-Off Phase (February 2023 – June 2023)

The project commenced with a kick-off meeting in Bern in February 2023, bringing together the entire team for introductions and initial planning. A structured approach to project management and communication was established, including bi-weekly meetings of the leads, monthly doctoral student meetings (‘Coffee Ludens’), further  on-demand-meetings on specific topics (finances, publications, etc.) and regular team meetings at each location. Discord was implemented as the central communication platform, and shared reference management and data repositories (Zotero, Switch Drive) were introduced. A collaborative dynamic was established through regular online meetings, thematic channels on the Discord server, and cross-location exchanges, particularly amongst the doctoral students.

Organizationally, the initial phase focused on establishing workflows and collaborative structures across the geographically distributed teams. The first joint workshop, held in La Tour-de-Peilz in July 2023, focused on developing a standardized approach to interviews. Keynote speaker Dr. Felicitas Söhner shared expertise on oral history methodologies. Intensive discussions during this workshop addressed legal and ethical considerations for interviews, resulting in the development of standardized consent forms and metadata protocols, and solidified a shared methodological framework. This workshop also served as a team-building exercise, fostering a promising collaborative spirit essential for a multi-site project.

Identification of key stakeholders in the Swiss game scene began immediately. All the teams started to look for and gather information through research in libraries and archives, press archives, online resources (personal websites, databases, blog posts, etc.) and, most importantly, through some sort of snowball sampling (during interviews, respondents would be asked to cite other game developers or persons relevant for this project). To facilitate project communication and dissemination, a research blog was launched on the academic platform Hypothèses with Aurelia Brandenburg as chief editor. The blog is used for ongoing project reporting and initial research dissemination, with all posts undergoing team review prior to publication.

Image by Gilles Sulzberger

Early dissemination efforts focused on presenting the project’s aims and methodologies at international conferences to gain initial feedback and engage with related research. For example, a workshop on “Local History of Games, Play and Game Design” was organised at the 2023 DIGRA conference in Seville – the main international conference on the study of digital games. This workshop facilitated valuable exchanges with international colleagues from Europe and beyond (Montréal, Swinburne). Larissa Wild and Sophie Bémelmans presented their PhD projects at the DIGRA PhD consortium, further expanding the project’s international visibility. Two conference papers by Pierre-Yves Hurel and Sophie Bémelmans, Pierre-Yves Hurel, and Yannick Rochat, focusing on “Leisure Electronics as a Cultural Context for the Emergence of the Swiss Video Game,” were accepted, marking the project’s initial academic output.

Alongside organizational and dissemination activities, foundational research projects were initiated. The team in Bern prepared extensive case studies in search of a ‘Swiss Game Design’, written jointly by the whole team. The team in Lausanne focussed on the history (and repairing) of Swiss hardware and the contact between a specialist network and an interested public (trade fairs).The team in Zurich concentrated on publishers (Linel), experimental archaeology and developer networks. 

1.2.2 Implementation Phase (July 2023 – June 2024)

The implementation phase saw the consolidation of established workflows and the expansion of research activities. Regular bi-weekly lead meetings and team meetings at each location continued. Doctoral students maintained their monthly ‘Coffee Ludens’ meetings, and, at their suggestion, a doctoral student was regularly invited to lead meetings to enhance student input and communication. A shared online spreadsheet was implemented for data collection.

Project management included one-on-one meetings between the Principal Investigator, and team members to discuss individual goals and challenges, alongside bi-annual supervisory meetings for PhD students. The “Reading Salon,” a hybrid format for text discussion, was introduced, fostering intellectual exchange among PhD students and senior researchers. An online workshop, organized by Mela Kocher and Eugen Pfister in January 2024, engaged the entire team and international partners to exchange feedback and experiences.

External communication remained a priority, with the blog and social media channels, already launched at the start of the project,  actively utilized to disseminate project updates and research findings to academic and developer communities but also to reach out to game-developers. For example, a ‘game of the week’ is showcased regularly.

Cooperative efforts during this phase centered on building core project resources: a comprehensive game dataset and a shared interview database. Noemi Chow spearheaded the development of a shared spreadsheet for the game dataset, establishing together as a team standardized categories and metadata. Data collection involved the entire team, leveraging crowd-sourced online databases, magazine listings, and media research on computer fairs and telegames. Hybrid ‘datajam’ workshops (14 in total, organized by the Zurich team with participation from all locations) facilitated collaborative data entry and refinement. This systematic approach significantly expanded the initial game list from 58 confirmed Swiss games to 228 entries, with ongoing discoveries generating further research leads.

Following the interview protocol established at the La Tour-de-Peilz workshop, the team initiated a large-scale interview program. Leveraging existing networks, the project team conducted 102 interviews, primarily focusing on game making, reception, and telematics. These interviews, totaling over 90 hours of recordings, are securely stored on the project’s Switch Drive, along with metadata and consent forms. Transcription of interviews is ongoing, with 60% completed, and plans are in place to archive the complete collection in an institutional repository. Addrich Mauch and Arno Görgen conducted 40 interviews focusing on early player cultures and communities as part of the ‘Swiss Gamescapes’ subproject, uncovering valuable primary source materials, including forgotten game magazines and fanzines, and identifying enduring networks within the Swiss gaming industry. Pierre-Yves Hurel conducted a significant number of interviews with game developers, BBS admins, arcade machine repairers, demosceners, Videotex developers, etc., starting to map the diversity of ludic practices in the French-speaking territory. Collectively, PhD students have also been conducting interviews related to their research topics (exploring game development communities, the practice of coding, the practice of hacking software and hardware, etc.). Most of these interviews are being used locally and will join the whole interview dataset by the end of the project – the priority being conducting their own research. Some of the lead members also conducted interviews, but at a smaller similar scale.

In the meantime, the joint and individual sub-projects were in full progress: In Bern, the first case studies were conducted and written jointly by the entire team: one on ‘Ballraider’ and one on ‘Necronom’. Both were published on the blog. In both cases, as announced in the application, the so-called HGP method was used and tried out for analysis and proved to be effective. At the same time Beat Suter has researched Linel’s company history intensively and published eight blog posts. Pierre-Yves Hurel conducted a detailed analysis of the Lausanne Computer Expo coverage, publishing his discourse analysis in twelve blog posts. David Krummenacher and René Bauer engaged in experimental archaeology, coding ZX-81 games from listings to understand early coding practices, sharing this knowledge with the team at a Zurich workshop. Larissa Wild developed a network visualization of Swiss game developers and publishers. Aurelia Brandenburg compiled a dataset on the sales data of German-language magazines on digital games, publishing it in 2023.

The set already got quoted on the Wikipedia page for “Computerspieljournalismus”. Adrian Demleitner explored distant viewing and image clustering methods for video game graphics in the form of a publication as part of his cumulative dissertation. Sophie Bémelmans has been working on the social, cultural and technical history of Smaky microcomputers in the leisure electronics context. Hiloko Kato dedicated her research to the Swiss early evening TV show “Karussell”, showing how games and gaming culture remains a niche despite the show’s innovative take. Mela Kocher has researched arcade culture and amusement arcades. Johan Cuda developed a tool to help transcribe interviews, a tool to conduct OCR and analysis of large collection digitised press, an interactive historical map of Swiss gaming locations with Mela Kocher, and conducted a deep research on a Swiss Multi-user dungeon game. Laura Strub primarily built up our social media communication, which was first taken over by Gilles Sulzberger and then by Corinne Hiltscher, who also help with the design of posters and graphics. Kevin Negele is now helping to catalogue the collection of games and, above all, game magazines in Bern, which has grown enormously in the meantime, as well as helping to transcribe interviews. Guillaume Guenat, a UNIL PhD student co-supervised by Yannick Rochat, started to collaborate with the project due to his research on the practice of video games in the Canton of Vaud in the 20th century.

The Hypothèses research blog became a central platform for disseminating research. Established in June 2023, it hosts over 40 articles by March 2025. Initial posts reported on the project kick-off and DIGRA conference participation. Regular blog content included conference and workshop reports, internal workshop summaries, PhD research highlights, and joint case studies, e.g, the “Necronom” analysis. The blog served dual functions: public project communication and, unexpectedly, developer outreach, with two developers contacting the team directly based on blog content, indicating the blog’s reach.

Blog publications since late 2023 included Beat Suter’s studies on Linel and “Galactic Empires,” and Aurelia Brandenburg’s dataset of game journalists. Several blog posts are currently in preparation, including a joint case study on “Gate,” collaborative texts on media discourse surrounding computer games and Swiss arcades, and a computer history of Switzerland.

Project members actively presented research at talks and lectures. In summer 2023, Adrian Demleitner and Eugen Pfister presented the preliminary DACH games dataset, and René Bauer and Beat Suter delivered a keynote on game archiving at a conference at the German Literature Archive (Marbach). Beat Suter presented on Swiss game publisher LINEL at a Marbach follow-up workshop in February 2024. In May 2024, the History of Games conference in Birmingham featured four project talks by Pierre-Yves Hurel, Sophie Bémelmans, Hiloko Kato, and Yannick Rochat. Pierre-Yves Hurel, Sophie Bémelmans, and Yannick Rochat also presented research at UNIL seminars. Beat Suter presented at the Retro Game Level 1-1 Festival Burgdorf 2023 and, with Larissa Wild, David Krummenacher, Hiloko Kato and René Bauer, hosted a booth at the Vintage Computer Festival Zurich 2023 (VCF), which proved valuable for developer networking. René Bauer organized a workshop on game magazines at ZHdK in autumn 2023. From late 2023 on UNIL hosted 17 electronics workshops, learning the basics of electronics and electricity through hands-on practice, and by repairing a Smaky 6 and Commodore Amigas for example.

Aurelia Brandenburg presented her games journalism research at five international conferences, and co-lectured with Adrian Demleitner at the University of Leipzig on masculinity in early digital games. David Krummenacher and Larissa Wild networked at a COST Action “Grade” workshop, leading to a joint paper (under review) on “digital game nationality”. Pierre-Yves Hurel, also a member of this network, took part in a workshop in Finland, leading to the invitation of Maria Garda as a keynote speaker at the 2024 international Leisure Electronics conference. Sophie Bémelmans and Adrian Demleitner attended a summer school on retrogaming in June 2024 at the University of Concordia, in Québec, during which they not only presented the Confoederatio Ludens project, but also actively worked to strengthen our international relations with computer-engineering researchers as well as collaborators from the LUDOV game studies laboratory, the Technoculture, Art, and Games laboratory (TAG), and the Residual Media Depot (RMD) research collection, all based in Montréal, Canada.

Cross-location collaboration was facilitated by a Ringvorlesung at the University of Bern in Winter Semester 2023, organized by Addrich Mauch and Tobias Hodel, featuring presentations from Sophie Bémelmans, Aurelia Brandenburg, Arno Görgen, Pierre-Yves Hurel, Mela Kocher, David Krummenacher, Adrich Mauch, Eugen Pfister, Yannick Rochat and Larissa Wild, demonstrating commitment to inter-site collaboration. A major highlight of 2024 was the international conference “Leisure Electronics and the Emergence of Video Games,” organized by Pierre-Yves Hurel, Sophie Bémelmans, Guillaume Guenat and Yannick Rochat, with presentations from Adrian Demleitner, David Krummenacher and Larissa Wild, showcasing the project’s international reach.

1.2.3 Consolidation Phase (July 2024 – March 2025)

The Lausanne international conference in May 2024 marked a transition to a consolidation phase, focusing on refining methodologies and synthesizing research findings. Interviewing activity increased, and PhD theses progress remained a central focus. The Zurich workshop in June 2024, organized by Mela Kocher, Larissa Wild, and David Krummenacher, facilitated methodological consolidation. Zurich colleagues provided intensive training in experimental archaeology techniques, including game coding, sprite animation, 1980s graphics design, and game magazine analysis. This intensive workshop reinforced positive team dynamics and collaboration. Planning for project outputs intensified, including finalizing plans for two joint publications, a joint exhibition at the La Tour-de-Peilz games museum, and the final international conference, for which a detailed application was submitted to the Congresso Stefano Franscini at ETH Zurich.

The project team began producing joint papers, leveraging the research conducted in the initial phases. In addition to a joint paper by Larissa Wild and David Krummenacher and European colleagues deconstructing the “nationality” of games (in review), another joint paper synthesized findings from all four project locations, with contributions from Pierre-Yves Hurel, Hiloko Kato, Sophie Bémelmanns, and Eugen Pfister. Pierre-Yves Hurel, Yannick Rochat, and Eugen Pfister also collaborated on a paper documenting their methodology for identifying local games. A joint blog post on autobiographical classification in game research, involving seven team members, explored researchers’ personal gaming socialization and its influence on research perspectives. Another joint paper by Mela Kocher and Arno Görgen is in progress.

During this consolidation phase, the blog continued to feature research outputs, including Beat Suter’s studies and Aurelia Brandenburg’s dataset. Several blog posts are currently in preparation, encompassing a joint case study on “Gate,” media discourse analysis, and a computer history of Switzerland. Project presentations also continued, with Adrian Demleitner and Eugen Pfister presenting the project to the Swiss Design History Network and at the Computer Festival in 2025 and Sophie Bémelmans and Adrian Demleitner presenting at a summer school in Quebec, furthering project dissemination and network building.

Noemi Chow, with Adrian Demleitner’s support, developed a functional prototype of the online database of historical Swiss games, a key project deliverable. This involved iterative development and feedback incorporation through offline and online meetings. The prototype, now functioning, is ready for further refinement as well as display the game data which will be collected over the next two years.

1.3 Significant Research Results and their Importance

The project’s first two years have yielded significant results across several key areas:

  • Expanded Dataset of Swiss Games: The systematic data collection effort has more than quadrupled the documented number of Swiss games, providing a substantially richer foundation for historical analysis. This expanded dataset is a crucial resource for future research in Swiss game history and game studies more broadly.
  • Extensive Interview Corpus: The collection of over 100 interviews with game developers, players, and industry stakeholders constitutes a unique and invaluable primary source archive. This oral history record provides critical insights into the lived experiences and perspectives shaping the Swiss game scene. It is being studied by the project members in order to advance their research.
  • Methodological Innovations: The project has developed, refined, or adapted methodologies for studying local game histories, including the ‘HGP method’ for game analysis, and innovative approaches to data collection, experimental archaeology, and media discourse analysis. These methodological contributions are significant for the field of game studies and digital culture research.
  • Dissemination and Networking: Active participation in international conferences, workshops, and public events, coupled with the project blog and social media presence, has effectively disseminated research findings and built a strong international network of collaborators. The blog, in particular, has proven to be a valuable platform for both academic outreach and unexpected engagement with game developers.
  • Collaborative Research Model: The successful establishment and operation of a geographically distributed, interdisciplinary research team demonstrates a viable model for collaborative humanities research, particularly relevant for studying geographically dispersed cultural phenomena like game development.

1.4 Contributions of Project Members

The success of the project’s first two years is attributable to the dedicated contributions of all team members. The project lead provided overall project management, strategic direction, and actively participated in research and dissemination activities, as well as project leads locally. All project members have made substantial contributions to research, data collection, analysis, dissemination, and project organization, as detailed throughout this report. The collaborative spirit and interdisciplinary expertise of each team member proved to be highly relevant for the smooth running of the project, regardless of whether scholars were junior or senior, and coming from fields such as historical science, political science, social science, literary studies, game studies, game design, digital humanities, or computer science. This Sinergia project and its multi-faceted object of study require scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds to find or build ways to collaborate. In light of this observation, we believe that the project is heading in the right direction, as scholars begin to learn from their colleagues’ interests and areas of expertise. This collaboration is leading to an increase in scientific knowledge among project members, particularly in terms of interdisciplinarity, the study of local game history, and game studies.

 


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
CH Ludens (June 23, 2025). Where we stand: Our scientific mid-term report. Confoederatio Ludens. Retrieved November 14, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/146hf


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