Speech

Community, alienation and the experience of networks: Maybe the real gamevironment was the friends we didn’t make along the way

Presented at Beyond Play: The Transformative Power of Digital Gaming in a Deeply Mediatized Society, Bremen, Germany, 30 September–2 October.

2 Oct 2024

A world to escape to? Digital gameworlds as otherworlds

Presented at Digitale Spiele im Wandel: Technologien – Kulturen – Geschichte(n), Bremen, Germany, 24–26 January. Extended abstract Digital games are often understood in terms of escapism, the avoidance of everyday, ‘real’ life.

26 Jan 2024

The city, according to city builders: The mythology of city-builder games

Presented at CEEGS 2023: Meaning and Making of Games, Lepizig, Germany, 19–21 October. Extended abstract City-builder games allow the player to “build your dream city” (‎SimCity BuildIt, 2023) where “you’re only limited by your imagination” (Paradox Interactive, n.

20 Oct 2023

That old school feeling: Processes of mythmaking in Old School RuneScape

Presented at the 2020 History of Games Conference: Transnational Game Histories, online, 21–24 October. Extended abstract World of Warcraft Classic (Blizzard Entertainment, 2019) drew a great deal of attention when it was released.

22 Oct 2020

Lost futures: In the presence of long-lost civilisations in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Presented at the 2018 Nordic DiGRA Conference in Bergen, Norway, 28–30 November. This presentation has since been developed into a journal article. Extended abstract The long-lost, ancient civilisation that somehow had technology that far surpasses the current level is a common trope in videogames that feature large, open worlds.

30 Nov 2018

Speedrunning: Transgressive play in digital space

Presented at the 2018 Nordic DiGRA Conference in Bergen, Norway, 28–30 November. Extended abstract In How To Do Things With Videogames, Ian Bogost argues that videogames offer “an experience of the ‘space between points’ that had been reduced or eliminated by the transportation technologies that began with the train” (2011, 49).

1 Nov 2018