The Media Innovation Circle#6 took place on November 26 with a talk by Víctor Navarro Remesal, Tecnocampus Mataró-Maresme Foundation (Spain),  followed by a participated discussion on the topic “Asymmetrical cooperative play: Doing (international) game research from the fringes”, moderated by Liliana Costa (DigiMedia/UA).

The video is already available on DigiMedia YouTube channel. Watch HERE. We invite you to subscribe the channel.

Víctor Navarro-Remesal is a media scholar specialized in games. He teaches History of Videogames and Interactive Narrative at Tecnocampus, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Game Design at UOC. He’s the author of ‘Libertad dirigida: Una gramática del análisis y diseño de videojuegos’ (Shangrila, 2016) and ‘Cine Ludens: 50 diálogos entre el juego y el cine’ (Editorial UOC, 2019), as well as the editor of ‘Pensar el juego. 25 caminos para los game studies’ (Shangrila, 2020). His research interests are player freedom, Zen-inspired games and slow gaming, gêmu, and game preservation. He is one of the founding members of DIGRA Spain. His current funded project is ‘LUDOMYTHOLOGIES: Myths and ideology in contemporary video game.

Abstract

Academia is by definition an international enterprise. The search and construction of knowledge cannot be attained by one individual alone, not by a closed community. This is specially important when dealing with games and video games, cultural objects that come from industries that were transnational from their inceptions. But this internationality can overshadow the idiosyncrasies of the local and how local spaces come together to form uneven international networks. The interest of this presentation, motivated by the foundation of the Spanish chapter of DiGRA and the coming release of the book “Perspectives on the European Videogame”, is to explore the state of game studies, or game research, as a field from this perspective: how exactly is it international? What are the ways in which we can play it as a cooperative play and how we are made to compete? How can we be aware of the asymmetries in the design of this cooperative play, and can they be played to our collective advantage? And what does it mean to be in the “fringes” (geographically, linguistically, conceptually) of game studies?