Games Symposium for Oceania and the Asia Pacific 

Chinese DiGRA in partnership DiGRA Australia, and Pride at Play present: the Games Symposium for Oceania and the Asia Pacific.

June 14-15, 2023 occurring in St Kilda, Australia as well as online.

Exploring new perspectives of videogame, boardgame, and tabletop roleplaying culture with game artists, makers, and researchers in the Asia Pacific and Oceania, we especially encourage researchers into Chinese game industries, cultures, and practices and to submit their work or to attend in-person or online. 

You can find out more about the event here:
English / 简体中文 / 繁體中文 

Call for nominations to Chinese DiGRA board, 2022-24

We will be holding an election for new board members this coming autumn. As a first step, we’d like to solicit nominations. Please go to the following anonymous form to make your nomination.

https://forms.office.com/r/3WspXbqedt

You can nominate yourself and/or someone else. We will contact all nominees in October and confirm all nominees by October 14th, when voting in the election starts. We’re particularly keen to invite new members onto the board. Please send in your nominations by 10th October 2022. If you are considering putting your own name forward but aren’t sure, or would like to find out more about what the board does, feel free to contact any of the current board members, who would be happy to discuss with you.

Here are the positions:

  • President
  • Vice President
  • Secretary
  • Treasurer
  • Student member (2 positions)
  • Industry member
  • Social media
  • Open seat (2 positions)

2020 Board Election

These are the bios for the proposed new Chinese DiGRA board, to serve from 2020 to 2022. We do not have multiple nominations for any position, so we will finalise the board on the 1st of October unless there are any objections from CDiGRA members between now and then. Thanks to everyone who took part in the nominations and to those who have put their name forward to serve this time.

President: Paul Martin
Paul Martin is an Associate Professor in Digital Media and Communications at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. His research is mainly in the field of game studies, with three areas of particular focus. His work on meaning in digital games takes an approach based on hermeneutic phenomenology in order to understand how game interpretation takes place. His work on Chinese games and gaming focuses on the relationship between Chinese games and historical understanding and on e-sports in Chinese universities. He also publishes work on game studies as a field. Outside of game studies he has published work on Japanese manga as well as the uses of technology in the classroom. He is a founder member of the Chinese chapter of the Digital Games Research Association and currently serves as its president.

Vice President: Peter AC Nelson
Dr Peter AC Nelson is an art historian, game scholar and visual artist working at the intersection of computer game and landscape studies. He is engaged in a prolonged consideration of the history of landscape images, how they are remediated by technological shifts, and how these shifts absorb and reflect changes in our relationships with the physical environment. He has exhibited his artworks widely, including projects with HanArt TZ Gallery (Hong Kong), The National Palace Museum (Taiwan), The Sichuan Fine Art Academy Museum (Chongqing), the K11 Art Foundation (Hong Kong) and HowArt Museum (Shanghai) and is a regular contributor to the Philosophy of Computer Games Conference, DiGRA and Chinese DiGRA, of which he is a current board member. Peter is an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Visual Arts and the Augmented Creativity Lab at Hong Kong Baptist University where he is working on research projects that span player-generated content, landscape encoding using Generative Adversarial Networks and the ontology of the digital image.

Secretary: Jonathan Frome
Jonathan Frome is an independent scholar based in Hong Kong whose research focuses on emotional responses to interactive media. He received a PhD in Film Studies from University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has published in journals such as Games and Culture, Journal of Asthetics and Art Criticism, Projections, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His research interests include video game studies, film theory, aesthetics, and emotion.

Communications/Public relations: Hugh Davies 戴修
Dr Hugh Davies is a maker, curator and researcher. His practice explores histories of mobile devices and cultures of games and play in the Asia Pacific Region. Awarded a PhD in Art, Design and Architecture from Monash University in 2014, Davies’s research has been supported with fellowships from Tokyo Art and Space, M+ Museum of Visual Culture and the Hong Kong Design Trust. Davies is a postdoctoral research fellow at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. 戴修是藝術家、研究員,主要探索有趣的遊戲設備,並視城市為遊戲版圖。他透過以實踐為本的研究,探究玩樂如何成為分隔遊戲與日常、現實與虛擬的流動界線。他在2014年於蒙納殊大學取得藝術、設計及建築哲學博士學位,研究題材為跨媒體遊戲。近年,他成為Tokyo Arts and Space的資助研究員及香港M+ / Design Trust 研究學人,研究亞太區遊戲文化,目前擔任皇家墨爾本理工大學的博士後研究員。

Student representative: Benjamin Horn
Benjamin Horn is a PhD student at the City University of Hong Kong. Previously a teacher and Foreign Director at the College of Culture and Education at Guangxi Normal University, where he taught classes in English literature and cross-cultural communications, he became interested in the novel forms that narratives are taking in video games, and so left his position to pursue a doctorate. He is primarily concerned with research issues centered around game criticism, and is working on a new model for the study and analysis of narrative games, with an emphasis on the use of quests as a methodological tool, and combining theory with practice in the form of accompanying case studies. He is also deeply invested in Chinese culture and history, and can speak fluent Mandarin. When he is not writing, he is playing games, reading, or cooking.

Student representative: Yu Hao
HAO Yu is a PhD Candidate at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. She is researching the intersections of computer games, new media art, and media philosophy. Her current projects are focused around the process-relational aspect of computer games as digital objects and the social, political, and performative dimensions of computer gameplay. She holds an MA in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong and a BA in Communication from East China Normal University in Shanghai. Her recent publications include “Video Games about Politics as States of Exception” in Gamevironments (2020, in press) and “Computer Games as Social Sculptures: Toward a Reevaluation of the Social Potential of Games and Play” in the Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference. She has also presented at conferences internationally including Chinese DiGRA Conference (Beijing, 2019), Games and Literature Theory Conference (Kolkata, 2019), and Process, Performance and Mediation – Intermedia Studies Symposium (Lund, 2020).

Industry liaison: Yigang Liu
Yigang Liu (Neal), the Ph.D. candidate from SAFA, Shanghai University. From 2018 to the present, I served as the director of game design in Shanghai company of Beijing MeiXingSiYuan International Education Technology co., LTD. From 2018 to present, I have been a member of the academic advisory group of Shanghai Qihuang technology co., LTD. (Qihuang E-sports, the strategic partner of Tencent E-sports). Since 2014, I have been working as a news illustrator for Yixing Daily. From 2013 to 2018, I worked in the Wuxi Institute of Arts and Technology, Jiangsu Province, where I was responsible for digital game design lecturing and served as the director of the 3D printing laboratory. In 2013, I worked as the architectural design director of Cambodia Chen Group. From 2011 to 2012, I studied at Abertay Dundee University in the UK and obtained a master’s degree in game design and development. I studied in Shanghai university from 2007 to 2011 and received a bachelor’s degree in engineering.

Open seat 1: Chen Jiaqing
I am a lecturer of Communication at the University of Zhejiang (the School of Journalism and Communication). My current research preference is game spectatorship and I have been studying grassroot game-streaming behavior and game-spectating behavior. Meanwhile, I am planning on pushing forward the research to observe diverse patterns of game-playing-online-streaming behavior, including different game types and different streamers. I am also interested in the career path of e-sports player in China, especially in the aspects of vocational education and professional career development. I am more than glad to have the opportunity to work as a board member in CDiGRA.

Open seat 2: Tara Fickle
Tara Fickle is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oregon, and Affiliated Faculty of the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, the New Media & Culture Certificate, the Center for the Study of Women in Society, the Center for Asian & Pacific Studies, and the Comics and Cartoon Studies and Digital Humanities minors. Fickle received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her B.A. from Wesleyan University. She works at the intersections of critical race studies and game studies. Fickle’s work has appeared in journals such asModern Fiction Studies and MELUS, as well as various public humanities portals. Her first book, “The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities,” (NYU Press, 2019), explores how games have been used to establish and combat Asian and Asian American racial stereotypes. Fickle is currently working on a digital archive and analysis of the canonical Asian American anthology, Aiiieeeee!, with additional research projects on Chinese gold farming and the racialized dimensions of esports. She also runs You on the Market (https://youonthemarket.wordpress.com/), a comprehensive website for academic job-seekers. More information can be found at tarafickle.comand Aiiieeeee.org.

Open seat 3: Olli Tapio Leino
Olli Tapio Leino is a computer game studies and philosophy of computer games scholar focusing on materiality, experience, emotion, and interpretation in computer games and playable art. He is an associate professor at School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Leino’s research has been published in Game Studies, Games & Culture, and Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, with translations appearing in Teksty Drugie (Poland) and Intexto (Brazil). Leino is a recipient of multiple Hong Kong General Research Fund (GRF) grants, and has carried out contracted research for Hong Kong Government. He has been interviewed on the topic of computer games research for Radio and Television Hong Kong, South China Morning Post, Television Broadcasts Ltd. (TVB), and BBC Radio 5.

Current Perspectives in Game Studies seminar

SeminarHeader
Public Seminar: Current Perspectives in Game Studies 16 December 2016, 10:00am – 4.30pm CMC Screening Room 1 (6/F)

Over the past few decades, computer game studies has emerged from the niches of academia into the mainstream of the study of media and culture and today its scope encompasses a number of interdisciplinary perspectives. This seminar brings to together a snapshot of six contemporary viewpoints in game studies, ranging from game hermeneutics to game ontology, and from game cultures to games and cognition.

Keynote Speaker:

Is Game Studies a good Idea? —Don’t try this at home!
Espen Aarseth
Head of Research Center for Computer Game Studies, IT University of Copenhagen
espen
Espen Aarseth is the Head of Research at the Center for Computer Games where he has worked on the aesthetics of computer games since its founding in 2003. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Game Studies, the oldest peer reviewed journal in the field of game studies. His current research concerns ideological, narrative, semiotic and ontological aspects of games and game communication, as well as topics such as game addiction, games and meaning, and also digital literature culture and aesthetics. Aarseth is the Principal Researcher of the ERC Advanced project Making Sense of Games.

Speakers:

Spatial Politics of Digital Game Distribution
Peichi Chung
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
peichi
Peichi Chung is an assistant professor in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include game industry studies, cultural policy and popular cinema in East and Southeast Asia. She has published journal articles and book chapters that compare game industry dynamics in Asia. Her current project looks into the mapping of digital distribution network for independent game developres in East Asia.

Emotion, Medium-Specificity, and Videogame Evaluation
Jonathan Frome
Lignan University
jonathan
Jonathan Frome is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at Lingnan University. He has published in journals such as Projections: A Journal for Movies and Mind, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Film Studies: An International Review, as well as in several anthologies. His research interests include video game studies, film theory, aesthetics, and emotion.

ICE+DOG=HUSKY: On Knowledge and Discovery in Computer Games
Olli Tapio Leino
City University of Hong Kong
olli
Olli Tapio Leino is Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong. His publications, in e.g. Game Studies, Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds and the Springer anthology Philosophy of Computer Games address topics pertaining to interpretation, emotion, freedom, and existence in computer games.

Can the Videogame Simulate Power?
Bjarke Liborioussen
University of Nottingham, Ningbo
bjarke
Bjarke Liboriussen is an assistant professor in digital and creative media at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. His research focuses on two main areas: games and the creative industries, and is published in journals such as Convergence, Games & Culture and Game Studies. Theoretical fuel is often drawn from the philosophy of technology.

Current perspectives in Game Studies
Paul Martin
University of Nottingham, Ningbo
paul
Paul Martin is an assistant professor in digital media and communications in the School of International Communications, UNNC. His current research areas are digital game studies and technology in the classroom. His work in the area of game studies focuses on textual analysis, expression in games, and the phenomenology of digital game play. He is also conducting research on Japanese digital games as expressions of contemporary Japanese culture.

Seminar Programme:

10:00 Opening words by Prof. Richard W. Allen, Dean of School of Creative Media
10:15 Keynote address by Espen Aarseth
11:15 Peichi Chung
12:00 Jonathan Frome
12:45 Lunch
14:00 Olli Tapio Leino
14:45 Coffee break
15:00 Bjarke Liboriussen
15:45 Paul Martin
16:30 End

Chinese DiGRA launched 电子研究协会中国分会成立

The Digital Game Research Association now has a Chinese branch. In April the inaugural event of Chinese DiGRA took place at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. This event – the ‘(Chinese) Game Studies Conference’ – attracted scholars with an interest in developing game research on Chinese games and gaming cultures from all over the Chinese-speaking world as well as from Europe and North America. The conference began with a PhD consortium led by Espen Aarseth, involving candidates working in Europe, Hong Kong and mainland China. The two day conference took in papers running the gamut of Chinese game studies, including work on the history of digital games in China, Chinese gaming cultures, and discourses around Chinese games.

The conference’s two keynotes set the tone for the development of Chinese game studies. Espen Aarseth (ITU Copenhagen) reflected on the establishment and development of game studies as an academic field, and Gino Yu (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) gave a fascinating review of the development of digital games in China.
The event marked the launch of Chinese DiGRA, an effort on the one hand to develop DiGRA as a truly international organisation and on the other to give game scholars working in and on China a research network, to support teaching and PhD development in the region, and to disseminate and promote Chinese game scholarship around the world.
We would welcome anyone who is interested to subscribe to the Chinese DiGRA mailing list, which you can do here. Our website is currently a bit bare but we are working on it and it will soon have information on getting involved in Chinese DiGRA, upcoming events, projects and other news. In the meantime please feel free to contact me with any inquiries or comments on the initiative.

电子游戏研究协会现在有中国分会了!Chinese Digra成立于2014年4月在宁波诺丁汉大学举行的“中国游戏研究会议”上(http://www.nottingham.edu.cn/en/events/2014/(chinese)-game-studies-conference-call-for-participation.aspx)。这次国际会议吸引了有志于在中国和中华文化区推广游戏研究和游戏文化研究的研究者。与会的研究者们包括港澳台和大陆学者、以及欧洲和美洲的研究者。此次会议首日为博士生论坛,由游戏研究的领军学者Espen Arseth进行指导,参会的博士生则来自欧洲、香港和中国大陆。“中国游戏研究会议”为期两天。会议主题涵盖了中国电子游戏的历史、中国游戏文化,以及围绕着中国游戏的一系列问题。

本次会议的两个主题演讲为中国游戏研究的发展奠定了极好的基调。来自哥本哈根信息技术大学的Espen Arseth教授回溯并反思了游戏研究作为一个学术领域的建立历程,香港理工大学的Gino Yu教授则讲述了中国的电子游戏发展历程。

这次会议中,秉持着使电子游戏研究协会向更国际化的方向发展的目的,为专注于中国的游戏研究者们提供更好的学术交流网络,为了向本区域的教学与博士培养提供支持,以及为了更好地向世界传播中国游戏研究界的声音,Chinese DiGRA(中国电子游戏研究协会)得以成立。

我们欢迎社会各界人士订阅Chinese DiGRA的邮件列表,请点这里。我们的网站目前内容还不丰富,但我们会逐步完善,补充Chinese DiGRA接下来的活动、项目和其他信息。有任何问题,欢迎留言。