| As
the Digital Games Research Association prepares for its second international
conference and also begins the long process of nomination and election
of a new board, we are seeking participants in the envisioning and
planning of future directions for this Association. The discussion
will begin online at www.digra.org and will culminate in a seminar
on 13th May 2005 in Bristol to precede the Playful Subjects symposium.
What
are we doing? As game researchers we are busy doing game studies:
researching, writing and publishing articles, organizing conferences
and creating a curriculum. In December 2004 Espen Aarseth organized
the PhD course Game Studies –The early years: “The
last few years have seen a phenomenal rise in games research,
culminating with the 600-delegate Level Up conference in 2003.
There can be little doubt that the field of games research, often
known as game studies, is in the process of becoming an established
academic field. How should this process be handled? What are the
pitfalls, and how and where should we construct the borders to
other fields?”
We
are inviting you to join a discussion of these questions and others.
We would like to focus this discussion on the specific role and
identity of the Digital Games Research Association. DiGRA is part
of the process of establishing game studies as an academic field.
What is the function and process of a research association? What
is the relationship between ‘building’ an association
and ‘defining’ a discipline? How can researchers participate
in an association such as DiGRA? How does game research and DiGRA
work on an international, national and regional level?
The
discussion will be launched online through the DiGRA site and
the gamesnetwork discussion list. It will then culminate in a
seminar on the 13th of May 2005 in Bristol where these issues
will be debated and some concrete plans of action put forward.
We anticipate that the discussion and the seminar would have a
critical and contextualising aspect (so that we reflect very carefully
about issues around disciplinarity and the identity and function
of DiGRA) informing a more practical focus (what specific action(s)
can we take to develop DiGRA in line with a consensus around its
role and purpose). The results of the seminar will be disseminated
to the widest possible audience at the Vancouver ‘Worlds
In Play’ DiGRA conference through a panel presentation and
are intended to feed directly into the forthcoming round of DiGRA
board nominations and elections.
The
DiGRA Futures seminar will take place at Spike Island, Bristol
on Friday, May 13, from 10am – 1pm. We invite you to write
a short position paper (1000 – 1500) on these and/or related
questions. A selection of papers will be made and the authors
will be invited to speak to their paper at the seminar. Their
papers will also be posted on the Gamesnetwork in advance of the
seminar. Presenters will be asked to review the online discussion
on the Gamesnetwork list concerning this topic and respond to
this in their presentation.
All
interested parties are encouraged to contribute to discussion
of DiGRA Futures on the Gamesnetwork List.
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