Autoethnography and Authenticity, and Making Friends with Death: DiGRA 2025 conference

This year I attended the Digital Games Research Association 2025 conference hosted by the University of Malta, with Dr Daniel Vella and Dr Stefano Gualeni acting as local organising committee chairs, and Dr Víctor Navarro-Remesal, Dr Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone, and Dr Jing Sun as Programme Committee Chairs. In the below video I give a recap of my conference experience, from acting as track chair, responding to student papers in the PhD consortium, and presenting both a co-authored paper and solo authored paper.

A transcript of the video is available here.

You can read mine and Nick Webber‘s abstract for our paper “A Plague Tale: Autoethnography and Authenticity in Historical Games Research” here. You can also read my abstract for my solo paper “Making Friends with Death: Posthuman Post-Life Play“.

Joining us in the panel on autoethnographies was Jess Rahbek, with his paper “Beyond the Rulebook: An Autoethnographic Journey into the Craft of Game Design“.

In the posthumanism panel with me, first up was Nikolas Matovinovic with his paper “Tentacle to the Metal: Ecosophy, Metamodernism, and Splatoon 3“. Finally Wing Tung Jamie Tse and Eric Peterson presented on “Posthuman Gaming in a Time of Planetary Crisis: Human Agency at the Crossroads of Technology and Ecology in Signalis“.

The three PhD students who I was senior respondent to in the PhD Consortium were Caitlin Veal, based at York St John University, with her paper “Navigating the ‘Gamer Space'”, Ariel Grez Valdenegro, from University of Santiago de Chile, with his paper “Creative strategies for understanding ludic listening in Latin America: an exercise on Abyss Odyssey”, and Daniele Monaco, Università degli studi di Perugia, with his paper “A Philosophical Exploration of Genius Loci: Becoming-at-Home in Virtual Worlds”.