What I did this past academic year (2018–2019)

So, September is here. A new academic year begins and a good way to get back to a scholarly mood is, in my experience, to go through everything one did the year before. 2018–19 was hectic, with lots of things coming together and many happy collaborations. Here’s a brief summary:

PUBLICATIONS

· My new book finally came out. Its title is Cine Ludens. 50 diálogos entre el juego y el cine (“50 dialogues between play and cinema”). It’s part of a collection called Filmografías esenciales (UOC Editorial) in which every piece explores a topic (a genre, an artistic movement, an idea) through an introductory essay and the analysis of a selection of 50 movies. In my case, I decided to focus on play in the widest sense possible, including videogames, boardgames, toys, playful cultures, theme parks, mindgame films, creative games such as cadavre exquis, detective stories, time loops, and more, by writing abouth films such as Momo, Sleuth, The Game, Westworld, Wreck-It Ralph, Toy Story, or Air Doll. It’s been pretty well received so far, and I’d love to translate it into English someday (and expand the selection to 64 movies, while I’m at it).

· My paper Ser todo, ser nada: La subjetividad en el videojuego más allá del avatar (“Being everything, being nothing: Subjectivity in videogames beyond avatars”) was published in Tropelías. Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada.

· The book Transgression in Games and Play, edited by Kristine Jørgensen and Faltin Karlsen, was published by MIT Press. It includes a chapter by Torill Mortensen and me entitled Asynchronous Transgressions: Suffering, Relief, and Invasions in Nintendo’s Miiverse and StreetPass.

· Together with my colleagues Jan Gonzalo and Antonio Planells, I was a guest editor at the Catalan Journal of Communication and Cultural Studies for their special issue Game Studies today. Our editorial was entitled Game studies today: In and beyond digital culture.

· In that same issue, I published my paper Gender, sex and romance in role playing video games: Dragon’s Dogma, Fable III and Dragon Age: Inquisition, an updated version of a conference talk I presented at the Media (in)visibility: Gender and sexual diversity in European popular media culture event organized by ECREA at URV in 2015.

CONFERENCES AND VISITS

· I was invited to the workshop National Identities and the Youth in East Asia: Popular Culture, Political Mobilisation, and Digital Spaces at the Université libre de Bruxelles, in Belgium, with a talk entitled Mangêmunime. Media mix, player identities, and performing Japaneseness in videogames.

· Together with Espen Aarseth, I coauthored a presentation for the CEEGS 2018 conference entitled Zen in the Art of Gaming. (And here are a few notes I wrote about the conference, in Spanish.)

· In the same conference, I coauthored a presentation with Gerald Farca and Alexander Lehner under the title Regenerative Play and the Experience of the Sublime in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

· I visited my colleague Susana Tosca at RUC (Denmark) for one week in November. We worked on some stuff that’ll hopefully be out some day soon.

· My colleague Marçal Mora Cantallops participated in the workshop Beyond playable games: The role of the player in the writing of game history at FDG’18, in Malmö, presenting our project on the preservation of “failed games” with a talk entitled Fandoms of Flopdom and Museums of Failure: Seeking value in “bad”, unreleased, “flopped”, and unlicensed video games.

· Beatriz Pérez-Zapata and me presented the talk First-person Refugee Games: Playing the Stories of Asylum Seekers in the workshop Democracies with a Human Face: Writers, Moviemakers, and Migration at the ISSEI 2019 Conference.

· I was invited to the seminar Los horizontes del videojuego at UJI. My talk was entitled Media Mix. Jugadores y la interpretación de la japonesidad en los videojuegos, and together with Antonio Planells I participated in the round table Retos de la narrativa en los videojuegos.

· I participated in the seminar Austerity Imaginaries in Contemporary Popular Culture at UPF. It was the closing act of the research project HEDECRI (Héroes de la crisis. Narrativa y discurso social en la cultura popular contemporànea), of which I’ve been part for the past few years.

· I taught the class Crítica lúdica. Periodismo especializado en videojuegos at URV, within the Periodisme i crítica cultural course taught by my colleague Enrique Canovaca.

· I taught two seminars for teachers: Storytelling for teachers, at ESADE, and Gamificación y escape rooms educativas at my own centre, CESAG.

OTHER

· My research over the past years has been officially recognised by the Spanish Agency that evaluates research quality with the acknowledgement of a research sexennium (a six-year period of good research performance).

· I’ve organised three Game Studies seminars at my centre, CESAG. You can find more info in their posters below: