Pre-Conference: Experiencing Digital Games: Use, Effects & Culture of Gaming

Plato College of Higher Education, Istanbul
23-24 October 2012

Event organized by the ECREA Temporary Working Group (TWG) on Digital Games Research
hosted by the Plato College of Higher Education

and organized in collaboration with
Turkish Chapter of the the Digital Games Research Association (DIGRA)
BUG - Game Lab, Bahçeşehir University 

> Register for the pre-conference

> Download/View the draft conference programme (pdf, 96 kb)

In the past decades, digital games have diversified into a broad range of forms each with their specific interactions and experiences: from rapid button mashing in shooter games to group chat in role-playing games, to wild dancing in party games and to actual running around in a city and engaging with the environment in location-based mobile games. Thus digital games have increasingly come to be seen as generators of experiences rather than just sources of mediated content.

Understanding digital game experience presents an important challenge for present-day communication research. Not just is there a plethora of different types of games, the very fact that an experience occurs between the player and the mediated content implies that characteristics of the user, device, (social) context and culture at large need to be taken into account. In this regard, traditional use and effects models from communication studies and media psychology have proven useful but still fall short in describing and mapping the specificities of digital gaming. Digital game-specific theories and analytical frameworks on the other hand have often had a hard time linking up with mainstream communication and media research as they are often perceived as too idiosyncratic for use beyond digital gaming.

The pre-conference Experiencing Digital Games aims to bridge this gap and open a vital discussion on the use, effects and culture of digital gaming. To enable a broad discussion on the gaming experience, different disciplinary approaches, methods and perspectives are welcomed, including production research, content analyses, effects and use research, cultural analysis, and design-oriented approaches.

The language of the pre-conference is English. Full papers should be ready at least two weeks before the pre-conference (9 October 2012), so that conference participants have the opportunity to read them. Depending on the number, quality and coherence of the submissions, a publication of a proceedings volume will be considered.

> Contact the Organizing Committee


About the TWG Digital Games Research
The Temporary Working Group (TWG) “Digital Games Research” was founded in 2011, giving European communication scholars interested in computer and video games research a dedicated home in ECREA.

> Visit the TWG Digital Games Research website

> Visit the TWG Digital Games Research Facebook group