Game Cultures cluster at DiGRA 2024
Several members of the Game Cultures research cluster attended this year’s Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference.
DiGRA is an international association for academics and professionals who research digital games and associated phenomena. At the time of the 2024 annual conference there are 18 national/regional chapters, each with their own activity, and the international organisation holds an annual conference. This year it was held at the University of Guadalajara, in Mexico. Four BCMCR Game Cultures cluster members attended in person (Charlotte Stevens, Nick Webber, Poppy Wilde, and Will McKeown), and one presented online (Reuben Mount, a Media & Cultural Studies PGR). Between the five of us, we chair one half-day workshop, delivered seven paper presentations (two joint and five solo) in the main programme, and chaired a number of other panels. The workshop and one of the paper presentations are collaborations with external partners in Australia and Brazil.
Beyond sharing great research, it’s important that so much of the cluster’s work is being shared at this prestigious international event. This is particularly the case as the quality of questions and feedback at DiGRA tends to be excellent, meaning that attendance at an event like this is a significant site for our own professional development as well as an important forum to disseminate work in progress. It speaks to the quality of the cluster as a space to support researchers across career stages that so many of us can be part of this vibrant international community.
The impact is primarily for games research, maintaining the international visibility of the Game Cultures research cluster as a vibrant site for high-quality games research. It follows on from our successful hosting of History of Games 2024 in May, and leads into the Video Game Cultures conference this coming September.
Workshop:
Poppy Wilde, Larry May, Will McKeown, Postanthropocenic, posthumanist, postapocalyptic play
Presentations:
Will McKeown, Rhizomatic Playgrounds and Virtual Machine Ecologies in Horizon: Forbidden West
Reuben Mount, Furry Ex Machina: How does VRChat allow for modern instances of digital identity generation and immersion in the furry fandom?
Charlotte Stevens, Good Gamer, Good Citizen: Representing Video Games in Chinese Television
Charlotte Stevens, Nick Webber, Marcelo, Fontoura and Marcelo de Vasconcellos, ‘Jogos de Mesa contra Fake News’: Reflections on Serious Analogue Games for Media Literacy
Nick Webber, History, Time and the Past in Radiant Historia
Poppy Wilde, A Stray Autoethnography: Becoming-animal, or Anthropomorphic Humanism?
Poppy Wilde and Will McKeown, Playgrounds of Authority: Space, Power, and Agency in Dying Light