Big Encounter of the Gaming Industry and Academia: Gaming from the Science Perspective
The second international conference of video game studies, titled Video games as a challenge to Academia – 50 years of the gaming industry was held on December 9 and 10 at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad. Last year’s conference was national and its purpose was to investigate the scope of Serbian researchers’ interest in gaming. However, many of our people from foreign universities and institutes answered the call too, so there was already international participation. This year, the whole thing has certainly made a huge level up.
Over 50 abstracts were sent from all corners of the world, and some presenters even came to Serbia from as far as America, Sweden, England, Italy, Turkey and Croatia. The rest joined on the second day which was fully online and in which all participants were foreigners. Last year, this conference was a great opportunity for networking, and in its international edition, it was now even more so. I was especially glad to connect with colleagues who organized the first video game conference in Zadar this year and who have no intention to stop there, which is why the organization of future meetings might be of a regional character.
Like the previous year, important names from the world of video game studies addressed us again, but live this time! The topic of the conference was largely inspired by the publication of Game Production Studies, edited by Olli Sotamaa and Jan Švelch, which is freely accessible on THIS link. It was precisely Olli Sotamaa who was the keynote speaker of the conference, and his lecture, “Game Production Studies: Moving On,” as well as the introductory and plenary speeches are all available here:
The lectures which everybody could attend (plenary lectures) were especially interesting. Attila Szantner (“Gamers for Science: How to Change the World in Small Steps”) showed how players can contribute to citizen science by playing mini-games in titles such as EVE Online and Borderlands 3. If you don’t have the time to listen to this amazing lecture, at least listen to the TRAILER in whose making even Mayim Bialik (The Big Bang Theory) helped!
In the second plenary lecture (“Strategic Foresight and Pathfinding Companies: How to anticipate and Adapt for the Future(s)”) Dražen Maravić, the founder of the Centre for Future Studies, familiarized us with an abstract field of future studies through a palpable case analysis of Nintendo as a company. If you want to find out why the average age of the top 500 companies in 2030 will be only 14.4 years, you know where to click.
The main content of the conference were, of course, the presentations of the participants. It is excruciatingly difficult to choose which ones to emphasize because there was a ton of interesting topics. Just take a look at the BOOK OF ABSTRACTS and you’ll see my point. The presenters opened some great questions, like why we love to work our butts off in video games (the so-called playbour), whether gaming holds a place in psychotherapy and what the position of reviews in media culture is. I had my hands full because two of my papers were being presented, an individual and a co-written one, so in one session I was talking about a phenomenal critical game made in our gaming industry (Golf Club: Wasteland, Demagog Studio), and in another one, my co-author was presenting our research on video game adaptation. Together we showed that video games are first and foremost a product but that they are also more than just a source of income because they have the power to essentially define the culture of our time.
The second day didn’t fall behind the first one when it comes to the quality of presentations, and the two sessions accentuated two possible relations between video games and science. In the first one, many presentations demonstrated a humanistic approach: games such as Death Stranding and Shadow of the Colossus were analyzed using humanistic tools like ecocriticism and exile studies. In the second session, the link between video games and science was highlighted through experiments and SAE Institute (Serbia, Italy) showcased an amazing project in which kids who are not yet old enough to read and write can show signs of dyslexia thought playing of video games, which can greatly help in adapting their education to their needs.
SGA also had a big role to play at this year’s conference because we moderated a closed round table titled “Perspectives and Challenges of Video Game Education in Serbia,” which gathered many academic and non-formal representatives of gaming education programs in our country, as well as multiple companies. This was the first meeting of its kind, and the idea is for them to become regular, where the next one would be a matchmaking session between academic institutions and companies, which would facilitate these two spheres opening themselves to new generations interested in video game development with joint forces, helping young people enter the world of video game development with more versatile and connected support.
There, I’ve tried to sum this up even though there are a million more things I’d like to mention since the visit to the conference was, now traditionally, very inspiring and motivating. Again, there was talk of how great it would be to start a scientific journal regarding video games, to found an institute and provide a platform for the theory and criticism of video games. Slowly but surely, a number of people who are ready to embark on such journeys are gathering, and soon we might move from words to actions. All this, of course, wouldn’t be possible if there weren’t for Manojlo Maravić, the head of the conference committee whose pioneering efforts started this whole thing. That is the reason why I want to thank him in the name of all of us who were given a space to share ideas and plan the future growth of the Serbian academic gaming community.
The conference was organized by the Academy of Arts (University of Novi Sad) in partnership with the Faculty of Philology (University of Belgrade) and the Serbian Games Association (SGA). SGA joined the organization of the conference through the Creative Tech Serbia supercluster program, whose pilot program was supported by Serbia Innovates, a project implemented by ICT Hub in Belgrade, with the support of USAID.
The conference proceedings will be published next year but we are already eagerly awaiting the next conference!