Central and Eastern European Game Studies Conference

Central and Eastern European Game Studies Conference

20-22 October 16

Meeting of international game studies researchers coupled with fascinating plenary lectures open to all tackling the present and future of video games – one of the fastest developing media, new technologies and their relationship with film, theatre, photography, literature, and art history.

Among presenters there will be key figures and powerhouses of the development of creative industries and game studies research, including Marcin Blacha, scriptwriter of The Witcher, responsible for the scripts of all the installments in the bestselling video game series, Dr. Aphra Kerr, PEGI expert, Dr. Graeme Kirkpatrick, author of influential books on video games such as Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game (2011) and Computer Games and the Social Imaginary (2013), and Prof. Mirosław Filiciak, Director of SWPS University’s Cultural Studies Faculty (Warsaw).

Marcin Blacha is a Story Director in CD Projekt RED (Poland). Previously a designer of tabletop games and a writer for gaming press, for the last ten years he has worked in the video games industry. Most centrally, he’s been responsible for the narrative for The Witcher series (The Witcher; The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings; The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt) as well as the add-ons: The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone and The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine. He is currently working on a yet-unannounced project. He has also been involved in courses educating game developers as a lecturer and conferences for game developers as a program board member. 

Prof. Miroslaw Filiciak is the Director of the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities SWPS, Warsaw (Poland), and the editor of the Polish cultural studies Open Access quarterly Kultura popularna [Popular Culture]. He is interested in the theory of media studies, media archeology, and the relations between media technologies and cultural practices.

He published one of the first Polish game studies books (Wirtualny plac zabaw, 2006) and edited one of the first Polish game studies anthologies (Światy z pikseli, 2010). In his latest book Media, wersja beta [Media, Beta Version], he analyses relations between games and other media. He has also co-edited the game studies issue of Kultura Współczesna [Contemporary Culture], focused on the insufficient presence of critical approaches in the discipline.

He has directed many research projects, including “The Circulations of Culture” (2012) and “Youth and Media” (2013). Currently he is the leader of an interdisciplinary team working on the issue of popular culture and its theoretical ramifications in Poland before World War II. He also works on the project devoted to the strategies of collecting, restoring, and simulating old technical media, using the case study of the pinball community.

Dr. Aphra Kerr has a PhD in Communication (2000) and is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Maynooth University in Ireland. Her research focuses on the production, consumption and regulation of digital games. She has worked on a number of projects exploring production, work, diversity and public policies for the games industry over the past sixteen years, most recently involving a focus on the role of community managers in online games. She is a collaborating investigator on the Canadian funded project “Refiguring Innovation in Digital Games” and a national representative on the European Cost Network “Dynamics of Virtual Work”. She is currently completing a monograph titled Making Global Games: Production, Circulation and Place in the Networked Age to be published by Routledge. She has previously written The Business and Culture of Digital Games: gamework/gameplay (Sage, 2006) and was joint associate editor of the 35 games entries in The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). She is co-vice-chair of the Communication, Technology & Policy section of the International Association for Media and Communications Research (IAMCR) and was a founding member of the international Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA). In 2015 she became an expert advisor to the Pan European Games Information System (PEGI). She has previously worked in the Netherlands, the UK and the US. More information here.

Dr. Graeme Kirkpatrick studies the intersection of art, technology and critique. He has published several books and journal articles on digital games. His Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game (2011) was recently listed by Edge magazine as one that should be in every gamer's library, while his Computer Games and the Social Imaginary (2013) was described in New Media & Society as 'one of the finest books to date on the subject of digital games'. His most recent book, The Formation of Gaming Culture (2015) is the first social history of the UK’s 1980s bedroom coder culture.

Plenary Lectures:

20 October, Thursday

18:15

Prof. Mirosław Filiciak (SWPS University, Warsaw, Poland)

Bumping Histories? Digital Games, Pinball, and the Play Culture Research

21 October, Friday

9:00

Dr. Graeme Kirkpatrick (University of Manchester, Great Britain)

Early Games Production, Gamer Subjectivation and the Containment of the Ludic Imagination

17:15

Dr. Aphra Kerr (Maynooth University, Ireland)

Global Games: Opportunities and Challenges

22 October, Saturday

9:00

Marcin Blacha (Story Director, CD Projekt RED, Poland)

Fear and Pity: Crafting Tragedy in The Witcher 3 

Plenary lectures program

The conference will be held in English. No translation will be provided.

The conference is organised by Maria Curie Sklodowska University’s Games Studies Center in partnership with the Centre for the Meeting of Cultures in Lublin. 

More info:

http://ceegs.eu

fot.  Robert Pranagal