Category: Announcements

The British DiGRA board is excited to let you know that the election process for our new board is officially underway! Over the next month (until 13 May), we’ll be accepting candidate statements from anyone interested in standing for election. Once the deadline passes, we’ll share all the statements on the British DiGRA website.

About the Board

The board currently consists of a maximum of 8 members, with 2 of those 8 seats reserved for PGRs (although there can be more PGRs on the board).

Roles are currently held for a standard 2 years, renewable via regular elections.

We envision the board as a nexus of British games research, organising events and providing spaces for communities to come together. We seek to promote networking between researchers, industry, policy-makers and educators; interdisciplinary connections; student support and mentoring; advocacy and visibility; and educational standards. You can find more information on our website.

About the Board Election

Who are our members/electorate?

British DiGRA membership has historically been very open so we do not have a defined membership – broadly speaking, BDiGRA members are potentially anyone who is part of the UK games research community.

Who can run for Board?

Any member of the British DiGRA community. We particularly encourage members of historically marginalised communities, as well as early-career researchers, to join the board.

How do you run for Board?

If you would like to stand for election to the board, you should submit a 300-word maximum statement of candidature by 13 May 2025, to bdigraelections@gmail.com. Your statement should include your name, position and affiliation (not included in the word count). To help members to make their choice, your statement should explain your suitability for the role, including a sense of how you are part of the UK games research community, why you want to be a member of the board, and what kinds of activities and approaches you think British DiGRA should pursue. Board seats are usually held for 2 years, with potential for re-election. There are currently a maximum of 8 seats on the board, with a minimum of 2 held by PGRs.

How do you vote for Board?

Voting will take place at our Annual General Meeting at the British DiGRA Conference 2025 at Birmingham City University, May 20-21. Please register here. Voting will be open to in-person as well as online attendance.

Votes will be tallied and results announced the following week. Subsequently, the incoming and outgoing board will meet to elect a chair and other core roles (vice-chair, secretary, etc.) and to hand over social media accounts (Twitter, Discord, Facebook), website access and so on.

Links

Conference registration is available: here

British DiGRA website: https://bdigra.co.uk/

Submission address for candidate statements: bdigraelections@gmail.com. Please also direct any questions to this email address.

Please do pass this information on to other relevant contacts who are part of the British games research community.

Best wishes,

The British DiGRA Board

We are happy to announce that the British DiGRA conference for 2025 will take place at Birmingham City University, from 20-21 May! Hosted by the Game Cultures research cluster, part of the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, the conference asks the question ‘What is British Games Research?’. Scholars from across the country are invited to contribute to a discussion about what kinds of games research we do in the UK and, by sharing their work, to help build up a picture of our research field.

The local chairs are Poppy Wilde and Nick Webber, and this event builds on previous successful games conferences at BCU in 2024 – History of Games, and Video Game Cultures. The call for papers follows below.

Submission should be made via OpenConf, at https://bcmcr.org/bdigra25, by the deadline of 24 January 2025.

—

What is “British Games Research”?

British DiGRA annual conference, 2025

Host: Game Cultures research cluster, Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research

Venue: Parkside Building, Birmingham City University (and online)

Date: 20-21 May 2025

Conference duration: 2 days, 09:30-17:30

Closing date for abstracts: 24 January 2025, 23:59 (anywhere in the world)

What follows will be familiar to you. British scholars have been consistent participants in the field of games research since its inception. There is an established tradition of game making across the nation; indeed, game development is the most widely dispersed of the UK’s creative industries beyond London. Our universities were early adopters of games into the curriculum, and we host a long-running national chapter of DiGRA – British DiGRA – that holds a remit to promote, support and develop British (digital) games research.

But hang on <record scratch> what is that? What, exactly, is British games research?

As researchers, we often gesture towards distinct national or regional games research cultures, to some extent characterised by publication in specific journals (with, for example, Game Studies having strong associations with Scandinavian game research traditions, Games and Culture a North American flavour, and GAME an alignment with Italian game studies). Researchers in Britain lack a similar venue, so how can we and do we imagine what “British games research” is? What are we about, intellectually?

Researchers have pointed to the importance of understanding games as both global (Kerr 2017) and local (Swalwell 2021), and recent years have seen increasing scholarly interest in both national and regional traditions in connection with games (e.g. Navarro-Remesal and Pérez-Latorre 2021; Švelch 2022). This has been parallelled by growing attention to the idea of regional/local games studies as well (e.g. Liboriussen and Martin 2016) but this has not yet extended to work on British game studies specifically.

If literature has addressed the idea of what a British game could be (e.g. Wade 2016; Webber 2020), we still don’t know – perhaps have not even thought about – what British games research is. This year, the British DiGRA conference seeks to answer that question. We will use this conference as an opportunity to map and take stock of current games research taking place in Britain, and/or in relation to Britishness.

The conference takes place in Birmingham, the heartland of British cultural studies, hosted by a research centre indebted to that distinctive intellectual tradition, characterised by attention to representation, ideology, identities, and the tension between the global and the local. Inspired by this critical approach, we ask: what is distinguishable, and even distinctive, about British games research? How can we talk about British games research in a way that embraces the diversity of culture in Britain? How do constructions of Britishness relate to ideas of Europeanness and to the constituent countries of the UK? As we negotiate these questions, we want to hear what your work is about, and what it does to shape this emerging space of scholarship.

Submissions:

Submissions might engage with the following themes, from the perspective of research happening in Britain, or in British contexts:

• Inclusive and decolonial approaches to defining British game studies
• Cities and the (hyper)local in British game studies
• Government policy in/and British games research
• Game cultures and communities: a view from Britain
• The theoretical underpinning of British game studies
• Game design traditions and futures in Britain
• Global influences on British games and games research
• Game development and creative industries discourse
• Historicising games research: key contributions and approaches from Britain
• Future directions for British games research
• British game technologies and their impact
• Games and AI in/and the UK
• Applied games in British contexts
• British art and British games
• The rural and British games (including landscape and folk horror)
• British narrative and hypertext
• Digital cultural heritage in British contexts
• Serious games and immersive experiences in British contexts

Submissions should be made to one of two tracks:

Track 1: Defining the field: abstracts of 200 words for 5-minute lightning talks about your research, helping us to build a picture of games research taking place in, or otherwise connected with, Britain.

Track 2: Traditional conference papers: abstracts of 500 words for 20-minute paper presentations, connecting with the idea of British games research.

To ensure equity and access to the conference, no author may present more than two contributions to the conference. This includes single and joint-authored submissions.

Submission link: https://bcmcr.org/bdigra25

Please write everything in the form, with no attachments.

Important dates

Call closes: 24 January 2025, 23:59 (anywhere in the world)

Notifications of acceptance: sent to authors by 21 March 2025

Event schedule

The event will run from 09:30-17:30 on both days.

Expected registration costs

Registration will be no more than £50 for in-person attendance for employed delegates. There will be a limited number of discounted tickets for PGR/unwaged delegates. The in-person fee covers refreshments and lunches on both conference days.

Online attendance will attract a fee of £10. We encourage in-person attendance as far as possible for delegates presenting at the conference.

If you have any queries, please contact the conference chairs, Poppy Wilde (poppy.wilde@bcu.ac.uk) and Nick Webber (nick.webber@bcu.ac.uk).

CALL FOR A PAPERS

 DIGRA Brazil / British DIGRA Joint Hybrid Conference

The In-Betweenness of Play

As part of a broader initiative aimed at amplifying diverse voices within the interdisciplinary field of game studies, DIGRA Brazil and British DIGRA invite short panel and paper proposals to a special two-day joint hybrid conference on the ‘in-betweenness’ of play that will take place from April 12-13 at Staffordshire University London.

In 1971, Brazilian Cultural Critic Silviano Santiago introduced the concept of ‘in-betweenness’ as a vital lens for understanding the intricate dynamics emerging from the clash of modern Western theories with the complexities of contemporary non-Western cultural production. It offered depth to the experiences of artists and intellectuals involved in the production of identities, economies, and aesthetic strategies caught between nativism and cosmopolitanism while challenging the untrustworthy, often exploitative, Western notions of cultural originality. It also helped shape the understanding of the ongoing influence of colonial legacies and power dynamics in cultural encounters.

In addition to outlining a critical position, the concept of in-betweenness also refers to productive spaces where new collaborations can flourish—spaces where shared feelings of cultural in-betweenness give-rise to the creative reimagining of ontologies, technologies, methodologies and practices. A space in-between, in other words, is also a place of learning by way of emulation, adaptation, collaboration and critical reflection.  

To promote as much participation as possible, panel (750-1000 words including bibliography) and paper (250-500 words including bibliography) proposals on any aspect of game or gaming adjacent research written in English or Portuguese are welcome. Attendees can present online or in person; the deadline for submissions is Tuesday, December 12, 2023, and proposals can be sent to inbetweenessofplay@googlegroups.com. Last but not least, both organizations are also seeking postgraduate student support for this and future events, so if you are an MA or PhD student interested in volunteering for the event planning committee please send a short email expressing your interest to inbetweenessofplay@googlegroups.com.

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to, research on the spaces in-between:

– Sustainability and Development

– Accessibility and Design

– Analog and Digital Games

– Amateurs and Professionals

– Studios, Workers, and Publishers

– Players, Fans, and Spectators

– Bodies and Affects

– Labour and Leisure

– Storytelling and Design

– Platforms and Cultures

– Learning and Teaching

– Institutions and Esports

– Research and Practice

– Representation and Identity

– Post-colonialism and Decolonization

– Posthumanism and Agency

– Automation and Art

CHAMADA DE TRABALHOS

Conferência Híbrida Conjunta DIGRA Brasil/British DIGRA

Os Entre-Lugares do Jogo

Como parte de uma iniciativa mais ampla destinada a ampliar vozes diversas no campo interdisciplinar dos game studies, os chapters brasileiro e britânico da Digital Games Research Association – DIGRA Brasil e British DIGRA, respectivamente – convidam propostas curtas de painéis e artigos para uma conferência híbrida especial de dois dias sobre a ‘intermediariedade’ do jogo, que acontecerá de 12 a 13 de abril de 2024 na Universidade de Staffordshire, em Londres.

Em 1971, o crítico cultural brasileiro Silviano Santiago introduziu o conceito de ‘Entre-Lugar’ como uma lente vital para entender as dinâmicas intrincadas que surgem do choque das teorias ocidentais modernas com as complexidades da produção cultural contemporânea não-ocidental. Isso ofereceu profundidade às experiências de artistas e intelectuais envolvidos na produção de identidades, economias e estratégias estéticas presas entre o nativismo e o cosmopolitismo, desafiando também as noções ocidentais de originalidade cultural. Além disso, ajudou a moldar a compreensão da influência contínua das heranças coloniais e das dinâmicas de poder nos encontros culturais.

Além de delinear uma posição crítica, o conceito de Entre-Lugar também se refere a espaços produtivos onde novas colaborações podem florescer – espaços onde sentimentos compartilhados dão origem à recriação criativa de ontologias, tecnologias, metodologias e práticas. Um espaço intermediário, em outras palavras, é também um lugar de aprendizado por meio de emulação, adaptação, colaboração e reflexão crítica.

Para promover o máximo de participação possível, são bem-vindas propostas de painéis (750-1000 palavras) e artigos (250-500 palavras) sobre qualquer aspecto da pesquisa de jogos ou relacionada a jogos, escritas em inglês ou português. Os participantes podem apresentar online ou presencialmente; o prazo para envio de propostas é terça-feira, 12 de dezembro de 2023, e as propostas podem ser enviadas para  inbetweenessofplay@googlegroups.com.

Tópicos sugeridos incluem, mas não se limitam a, pesquisa sobre os espaços intermediários:

– Sustentabilidade e Desenvolvimento

– Acessibilidade e Design

– Jogos Analógicos e Digitais

– Amadores e Profissionais

– Estúdios, Trabalhadores e Editores

– Jogadores, Fãs e Espectadores

– Corpos e Afetos

– Trabalho e Lazer

– Narrativa e Design

– Plataformas e Culturas

– Aprendizado e Ensino

– Instituições e Esportes Eletrônicos

– Pesquisa e Prática

– Representação e Identidade

– Pós-colonialismo e Descolonização

– Pós-humanismo e Agência

– Automação e Arte

– Bibliografia Selecionada

Selected Bibliography

Amaro, M., & Fragoso, S. (2020). East meets South: The creative appropriation of Nintendo and Sega videogames in Brazil. In Proceedings of the 2020 DIGRA International Conference: Play Anywhere. http://www.digra.org/digital-library/forums/digra2020/page/11/.

Blanco, B., & Job Da Silca, A. C. (2021). From The Scratchware Manifesto to Game Workers Unite: manifestos and labor claims in two decades of indie video games. Contracampo, 40(2).

Chia, A. (2022). The artist and the automaton in digital game production. Convergence, 28(2), 389-412.

de Paula, B. (2021). “Emergent countries play, too!”: The Zeebo console as a (partial) decolonial project.Contracampo, 40(2).

Gallagher, R. (2022). Humanising gaming? The politics of posthuman agency in autobiographical videogames. Convergence, 28(2), 359-373.

MacCallum-Stewart, E. (2013). Diggy Holes and Jaffa Cakes: The rise of the elite fanproducer in video-gaming culture. Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, 5(2), 165-182.

Ruffino, P., & Woodcock, J. (2021). Game workers and the empire: Unionisation in the UK video game industry. Games and Culture, 16(3), 317-328.

Trigo, A. (2004). The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture. By Silviano Santiago. Edited by Anna Lúcia Gazzola. Translated by Tom Burns, Ana Lúcia Gazzola, and Gareth Williams. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. 188.

Webber, N. (2020). The Britishness of ‘British Video Games’. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 26(2), 135-149.

Understanding the World of Esports

Register for free here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/understanding-the-world-of-esports-esports-science-series-2023-tickets-645852360797

Hosted by the Digital Society Research Group in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

Date: August 29 and 30, 2023

Time: 9:30 AM – 5:00PM

Location: Benzie BZ303

Admission: Free for all students, faculty, and staff

About the event:

Are you intrigued by the fast-growing world of esports? Do you wonder how esports intersects with sports science, business and law, media studies, and philosophy? Then please consider attenting the upcoming symposium, Understanding the World of Esports, hosted by the Digital Society Research Group in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

Key topics include:

• Applied Esports Psychology
• Esports Education  
• Esports Hospitality and Tourism
• Esports Venue Design and Management
• Esports and Environmental Sustainability
• Esports Cultures in Europe, Asia, and Oceania
• Esports Fandom
• Toxicity in Esports
• Human Resource Management and Esports
• Esports and Gambling

Speakers include:

Dr Seth Jenny, Associate Professor of Exercise Science and Athletic Training

Dr Julia Hiltscher, Director of Corporate Responsibility ESL FACEIT Group

Peter Varga, Senior Engineer FNATIC

Danielle Rourke, Senior Higher Education Strategist DELL Technologies

Dr Laura Swettenham, Sports Psychologist

Pia Büßecker, CEO – The Metagame

Professor Raine Koskimaa, Professor of Contemporary Culture Studies

Please contact Dr Tom Brock (t.brock@mmu.ac.uk) for more details or sign up here

Hello everyone!

As your new board, we would like to thank all previous board members for their work and effort to develop British DiGRA as a community and a chapter. We are honoured and delighted to represent the chapter and hope you will join us in building this community even further.

Over the next two years the board will work with members to achieve the following:

1. Develop further as a strong community of scholars, game designers and  developers, as well as wider communities of games professionals. 
2. We aim to make British DiGRA a vibrant and diverse network more visible to its members, and  develop ways to support all our members to have better access and contacts within British DiGRA and beyond. We are thus planning to identify key areas of interest and research through consultations with our members. If you currently have suggestions or recommendations for the board, please do not hesitate to contact us.
3. Develop more content and increase our engagement with different game-related communities. We are planning to develop content around introducing some of the great work game scholars, developers, and other professionals are doing around diversity, ecology, LGBTQ+ and other challenges and opportunities our industry and research have in hand. 
4. Bring together the diverse communities and groups working in UK games research – from academia to industry,  from AI to music, from storytelling to data analytics – as a cohesive games research network that shares its values and strengths, and works together on the challenges facing games research in the UK.
5. Keep Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion at the centre of our activities and considerations. 

Please do not hesitate to get in touch to keep up to date with our upcoming activities on :

Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Mailing List?

Chair – Dr Tom Brock

Co-chair – Dr Charlie Hargood

Co-chair – Dr Andra Ivănescu

Communication and Content Officer – Dr Hadi Mehrpouya

Marco Benoît Carbone

Videogames are intrinsically political texts, even when political messages are not explicitly presented, but there is still uncertainty on how game studies can take that into account. Within our field of research, since the earliest debates and publications, we have been interrogating interactive texts for their political messages, and aiming to establish a method for making sense of how videogames exist in the world. The early work of art historian Julian Stallabrass, for example, was already identifying in videogames a representation of economic systems, which inevitably reflects on the ‘real life’ economy in which the game has been produced and is played (Stallabrass, 1993; Giddings, 2018).

This year British DiGRA conference explores politics in games from various angles and approaches from design to analysis and from impact evaluations to philosophical issues. The focus is not just on games as designed artefacts but also includes, among other aspects, the production and circulation of games, forms of public discourse around games and how they are made. Submissions on all kinds of games from board games through LARPs to videogames are welcome.

The conference invites submissions in topics including, but not limited to:    

• Civic engagement and activism
• Digital misinformation proliferation
• Loss of confidence in democracy
• Fake News
• Stretching of truth
• Accountability
• Parody and disinformation
• Promoting engagement with voters
• Knowledge and awareness of politics
• Activism
• Politics and art
• Politics in online communities
• Politics of videogame industry
• Political uses of gamification

The conference is fully online using Zoom and consists of paper sessions of three hours spread over the course of three days and workshop sessions of four hours the day before.

Selected papers from the conference will be invited to a special issue of ToDiGRA journal to be published in 2022.

Full Call for Papers here

Paper submission guidelines

The papers will be selected for presentation based on extended abstracts of 500-1000 words (plus references). Abstracts should be delivered in PDF format. Please use 12 pt Times New Roman, double-spaced, for your text. Guidelines for submitting full papers and 10 minute prerecorded presentations will be provided with the notification of acceptance.

Our aim is that all participants can familiarise themselves with the papers in advance and the participants get access to all submitted full papers one week before the conference. The maximum length for a full paper is 5000 words (plus references). The prerecorded 10 minute seminar presentations should encourage discussion, instead of repeating the information presented in the papers. After the presentation the designated commentator and the audience will have 20 minutes to discuss the paper online. 

Workshop proposal submission guidelines

The workshops will be selected based on proposals of maximum 1000 words (plus references). The proposals should include a description of the workshop focus and format, technical and online venue requirements, maximum and minimum number of participants, and how the workshop participants are selected (e.g. drop-in session, position paper submission). 

Submissions and any questions regarding the conference should be sent to: bdigra21@lincoln.ac.uk.

Maximum of 15 papers and 2 workshop proposals will be accepted to the conference.

Important dates

Abstract and workshop proposal deadline: April 4, 2021

Notification of acceptance: April 12, 2021

Full Paper deadline: July 12, 2021

Conference dates: Workshops July 20, paper sessions July 21 – 23, 2021

Venue

British DiGRA 2020 Conference is organised by University of Lincoln in collaboration with University of Liverpool, Brunel University London, and British Digital Games Research Association (http://bdigra.org.uk/). The conference is hosted by University of Lincoln Games Research Network. More information at the conference web-site http://lncn.ac/bdigra21.

PhD students at the University of Glasgow have made a mobile game and are looking for more players. The game is called RPGLite and is available on iOS and Android. More information and links to the store pages are available at rpglite.github.io.

Download it, play against your friends, climb the leaderboard, earn medals, all that nonsense, whilst aiding a PhD student’s research. If you have any questions feel free to email w.kavanagh.1@research.gla.ac.uk.