Category: Announcements

The British DiGRA board is excited share the candidate statements for the upcoming BDiGRA Board Election. Please find them below. As a quick reminder, elections with take place at our AGM on the second day of the BDiGRA Conference next week.

The British DiGRA Conference 2025 is taking place at Birmingham City University, May 20-21. The AGM will take place at 4pm on May 21st. Online voting will be available.

Candidate statements:

Amanda Nicole Curtis

DPhil candidate in Information, Communications and the Social Sciences at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford

I look forward to positively impacting BDiGRA’s community as I wrap up my PhD at the University of Oxford. In my PhD, I investigate how playing games reconfigures the ways players think, know, and make meaning in their lives. I also bring professional experience as a user experience researcher, having worked with companies such as Sony and Adobe researching young players, online friendships, and digital authenticity. This dual perspective has shown me the importance of building strong bridges between academia and industry, ensuring research findings reach and benefit the communities we study.

My commitment to inclusive and socially-engaged research is demonstrated through my roles as the founder of the Oxford Games & Technologies group (G&T), a Women in Games Ambassador, and a Limit Break 2025 mentor. I’ve been leading G&T for three years, fostering dialogue between researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts. Our recent Inclusive Gaming Conference brought together nearly 100 attendees, with presenters including BDiGRA members, industry professionals, graduate students, and researchers, showcasing my ability to facilitate meaningful interdisciplinary conversations about inclusion, accessibility, identity, and gaming. I’m particularly passionate about exploring alternative career paths in games research and making our work more accessible to broader audiences.

British DiGRA plays a vital role in fostering community and visibility within UK games research. I am committed to help expand that reach—especially through initiatives that build bridges between academia and industry, support ECRs, and promote safe, inclusive spaces for all. Looking ahead, I’d love to see British DiGRA host more informal gatherings, run skills-sharing programs, and explore collaborative ways to reflect on methods, ethics, and social impacts of our work — all of which I have experience carrying out. It would be an honour to serve on the board and help shape the future of British DiGRA as a dynamic, welcoming, and forward-looking community.

Joanne Mills

Independent early career researcher and artist

I would welcome the opportunity to be a member of the BDiGRA board to help shape the future of UK games research. I am particularly interested in working with BDiGRA to explore the cross-over between art and gaming, and the relevance of playable narratives in educating and exploring real-world topics; and to supporting spaces for independent early career researchers to network and develop their academic careers.

I completed my PhD in 2022, examining the development of immersive artistic practice from the 1960s, and I remain interested in audience engagement, creation and curation, and opportunities for games to educate and inform.

As an independent ECR and artist (photography, installation, interactivity within physical, digital, and digitally-augmented spaces), I feel I have a relatively unique approach to games research – and this is reflected in the publication and presenting opportunities I pursue. I have recently had a chapter published in a volume on Virtual Reality Gaming: embodiment, presence, and immersion (L. Evans, Ed., Emerald, 2025), and am developing a co-authored chapter for a forthcoming volume on monsters in video games (S. Harley, ed., publisher TBC), with a paper due to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Virtual Creativity Journal. This year I am presenting on my work at EVA London 2025, and BDiGRA. I have also recently been awarded seed funding from the BA ECR Network for a short project exploring player ownership, creativity, curation, and interactivity within Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Minecraft, Superliminal and The Unfinished Swan.

I also bring professional experience in working within HEI research culture, engagement, and impact to the role, together with forging links with other academic networks which I am a part of – including Multiplay, the network for multidisciplinary research on digital play and games, where I also sit on the editorial board.

Dr Adam Jerrett

Senior Lecturer in Game Design and Development, University of Portsmouth

As the current Industry Relations Officer for DiGRA internationally, I’m passionate about the intersections between academic research, industry practice, and how our individual and communal values affect them all. I’m standing for the British DiGRA board because I believe this chapter has enormous potential to help define and articulate how games research and development can intersect meaningfully with both broad national identity and the specific struggles within games academia and industry in the UK. We have a chance to clarify what best practices might look like for our unique island context.

The UK has a long, complex history of both game creation and study, which I am currently exploring through my own autoethnographic research. However, despite being so well-established, UK contributions can often be overshadowed by larger regions like North America or continental Europe. Whether due to geography, the political landscape, or our diverse regional identities, British contributions can sometimes feel scattered or undersung. British DiGRA can help change that by carving out a distinct role grounded in values like collaboration, criticality, and community, alongside its organizational values.

If elected, I want to help shape British DiGRA as a hub that supports early-career researchers, strengthens ties between education and industry, and brings people together around thoughtful, sometimes uncomfortable, conversations about identity, power, and culture in games. I’m especially invested in helping the chapter clarify its purpose: what we stand for, who we serve, and how we amplify underrepresented voices without losing sight of our regional chapter identity that make the UK so special. In terms of how this might occur, I envision supporting a culture of impact through collaboration with industry, academic/industry mentorship, and reflection on our unique positionalities to allow British DiGRA to be a stronger voice for games research and development internationally.

Dr Charlie Hargood

Associate Professor in Games Technology, Bournemouth University

As someone who has been a part of games and narrative systems research in the UK for over 17 years I have substantial experience in games academia. However, the reason I am putting myself forward for re-election to the BDiGRA board is because I care deeply about the communities that make up that research and connect scholars and their work. The community, connections, dialogue, and collaboration that come from organisations, such as BDiGRA, are an essential part of the research that comes from our field, and I hope to help facilitate that going forward.

BDiGRA has made good progress in the last two years reaching new communities and researchers in the UK, and participation in the upcoming conference is very encouraging. If elected, I hope to continue this trend and help to continue to make BDiGRA a broad church for the UK’s varied games research communities. This includes games studies, but also research in games art and design, storytelling, games engineers, and domains that apply games research such as education and cultural heritage. By broadening our reach we build the potential for interdisciplinary collaboration and as a community we can draw on a wider more diverse set of expertise.

I would like to use my connections in different UK games research sectors from narrative and hypertext to games education to help build that community. I would also like to use my long experience in running academic research events, which includes numerous international conferences, to help run events and build spaces for that community to connect through.

Dr Harrison Charles

Associate Lecturer, Birmingham City University

As an active member of the UK Games Studies community, who has supported and contributed to various games research events (including DiGRA 2023, BDiGRA 2024 & 2025; History of Games 2024, Video Games Cultures 2024), I would like to contribute more directly to our community by becoming a member of the board as an early career researcher.

Being a part of the British DiGRA board would allow me to work towards strengthening research and community exchange between British DiGRA members, inspired by the theme of the 2025 conference. Since the theme of the conference intended to reflect on the rich diversity of research in/on Britain in our chapter, I think British DiGRA should move towards the establishment of various working groups and networks that brings together similarly aligned research to highlight the work being done by members and hopefully curate further activities (e.g., British Queer Games Studies, British EDI working groups, research networks on Race, Policy and Politics, and a PGR Network).

British DiGRA’s involvement in facilitating these networks would support and encourage further activity building upon research that was presented at the conference, as well as expand the engagement and presence of the British DiGRA chapter itself. With my current responsibilities at Birmingham City University focusing heavily on building strong environments of research and engagement (particularly for PGRs), I am ideally placed to undertake this work as a member of the British DiGRA board, strengthening the connections between members across our chapter and enhancing our presence globally.

Mark Chapman

PhD Candidate, Birmingham City University

I am excited to apply for a position on the board of BDiGRA. As a first-year PhD candidate, I am only at the beginning of my journey in academia, so I am keen to join the community of academics, developers, and designers who make up DiGRA both in Britain and across the world. My PhD project concerns the nature of contemporary British education and its impact on videogame designers’ depictions of Britishness within their games, focussing on historical settings and personal stories which take place in ‘Britain’, and how they reflect on what ‘Britishness’ means to developers. I see BDiGRA as an excellent opportunity to bring together the criticality of academic work with the creativity of videogame designers to interrogat what it means to be an artist in contemporary Britain and how academic learning can inform how British history, society, and culture are understood by creatives and represented in contemporary gaming.

Dr Andra Ivănescu

Senior Lecturer, Brunel University of London

I am honoured to stand for re-election to the British DiGRA board and to continue contributing to the community in any way I can.

I am a Senior Lecturer at Brunel University London and Programme Lead for our Games Design BA. I’m also a ludomusicologist and co-run the Ludomusicology Research Group, including our annual Ludomusicology conference. My research explores the cultural politics of video games — initially through the lens of popular music, and more recently with a broader focus, including issues around censorship and regulation.

Over the past couple of years on the British DiGRA board, I’ve worked to support and grow our network of scholars, practitioners, and students by building bridges across different games research communities. This has included producing and co-hosting our new podcast WordPlay, as well as contributing to the development of a more welcoming, vibrant, and responsive academic space — one that reflects the diversity and richness of games scholarship in the UK today.

I believe that all of this — our community, our shared knowledge, and the connections we build — is especially vital given the current political climate and the ongoing crisis in the university sector, both nationally and internationally. At a time when academic freedom, critical research, and public education are under increasing pressure, spaces like British DiGRA offer crucial support, solidarity, and a platform for engaged, socially conscious scholarship.

British DiGRA is a community I care deeply about: a space for collaboration, critical engagement, and mutual support across disciplines and career stages. I’m standing again for the board, and also putting myself forward for the role of Chair, because I want to help continue building on that foundation — fostering an active, inclusive network that supports meaningful research, dialogue, and connection.

I really appreciate your consideration.

Robin Longobardi Zingarelli

Doctoral Researcher in Games Design, Brunel University of London

As a PhD student researching transgender subjectivities in Games within the UK context, I am deeply engaged with issues of representation, ethics, and community in game studies. I’m active in networks and conferences such as GamesLit and DiGRA, and I have long advocated for gender diverse subjectivities both in primary and higher Education, in Italy, my home country, and in the UK. Most importantly, I’m passionate about the field of game studies—drawn to its innovation, its transdisciplinarity, and the vibrant network of scholars and creators who shape it.

I’m running for the British DiGRA Board because I’m committed to supporting such a diverse, dynamic, and responsive research environment.

My experience supporting game design teams also fuels my interest in building stronger connections between academia and industry.

If elected, I would work to broaden British DiGRA’s reach—supporting more opportunities specifically for PGRs, as recurring meetings and/or writing groups, and workshops tailored to early career researcher, to strengthen ties with the game studies community both within and outside the UK.

I would also advocate for a comprehensive diversity policy that reflects the complexity of the UK context, with the aim of supporting any marginalised researcher, and particularly every transgender researcher within the UK context at this challenging time.

Dr Hadi Mehrpouya

Lecturer in Computer Games Technology at Abertay University

I am an artist and lecturer in Computer Games Technology at Abertay University. My current research area focuses on the intersection of video games and ecology.

I am always inspired by the many colleagues I met at DiGRA, among them an exciting and cutting-edge community of post-graduate students. I worked well with the current committee and hope to work with the future committee of British DiGRA to develop more content and rhythm for our local chapter. I aim to further develop the wordplay podcast that Andra and I created, continue expanding the DiGRA network alongside other members, and maintain our chapter of DiGRA into a network accessible to all members, promoting, engaging, and supporting one another. I would also love to develop some content around failure as we “fail” to secure funding in an increasingly competitive and budget-constrained environment, how do we avoid failing to think? Additionally, I would like to explore other ways to learn from our members, such as playing/streaming together and reflecting on different aspects of our medium. This could involve taking our members on a walk, e.g., in Death Stranding, and discussing their work and research with them.

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.