Introduction: What Game Studies Has Been, What It Could Be

Carly A. Kocurek (she/her) is Professor of Digital Humanities and Media Studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She researches the cultural history of video games with an emphasis on gender identity. Her books include Coin-Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and Brenda Laurel: Pioneering Games for Girls (Bloomsbury, 2017), and, with Matthew Thomas Payne, Ultima and Worldbuilding in the Computer Role-Playing Game (Amherst, 2024). She is researching the history and impact of the games for girls movement as part of a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Her articles have appeared in outlets including The American Journal of Play, Feminist Media Histories, Game Studies, Velvet Light Trap, and others.

Cody Mejeur (they/them) is Assistant Professor of Game Studies at University at Buffalo, SUNY. Their work uses games to theorize narrative as an embodied and playful process that constructs how we understand ourselves, our realities, and our differences. They have published on games pedagogy, gender and queerness in games, and video game narratives and player experiences, and they are currently the game director for Trans Folks Walking, a narrative game about trans experiences. They are Director of the Amatryx Gaming Lab & Studio at UB and work with the LGBTQ Video Game Archive on preserving and visualizing LGBTQ representation. They are an executive council member for the International Society for the Study of Narrative and they served as Diversity Officer for the Digital Games Research Association.

Emma Vossen (she/her) is a writer, editor, and award-winning public speaker with a PhD from the University of Waterloo. She is the co-author and co-editor of Feminism in Play (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and the former editor-in-chief of First Person Scholar.