Diversity of Play

Astrid Ensslin joined Bangor University in 2007 after receiving her PhD (summa cum laude) on electronic literature (hypertext, hypermedia and canonicity) from Heidelberg University. She has previously held Economic and Social Research Council and British Academy funded research and teaching positions at the universities of Leeds and Manchester. Her main interests are in the field of digital humanities, in particular digital culture and communication. Her current research revolves around reading digital fiction (Arts and Humanities Research Council funded) and literary gaming. Further interests include the language of videogames and gaming, language ideologies in (new) media, and studying learner language using corpus-based discourse analysis. She convenes Bangor University’s Digital Economies Cluster and is Principal Investigator of the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds.

Tanya Krzywinska started playing computer-based games on Usenet when working at Digital Equipment Corporation while doing her Masters in film. Several years later, after completing her PhD, she gave her earliest paper on horror games at one of the first ever academic conferences on games in 2000 and co-edited the first collection of essays to be devoted to the study of the relationship between games and cinema. Tanya has focused her attention mainly on games, with a particular interest in their formal properties, graphical styles and “world creation”. She is Director of the Games Academy and Professor of Digital Games at Falmouth University, as well as Editor of the journal Games and Culture and Creative Director of Round Table Game Studios. At Falmouth University, Tanya has developed the Digital Games Academy, which offers a suite of games-related BA and BSc (Hons) courses in digital game art, animation, design, music, programming and writing.

Karen Palmer is a filmmaker, artist and designer of neurogames. Karen explores new formats and aesthetic production technologies with her group, Interactive Films. She fuses film, gaming, technology, wellbeing and sport. Karen’s work has received international exposure and critical acclaim, including screenings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. She has exhibited at the V&A as part of the Digital Design Weekend (September 2014). She was also an invited speaker at the International WOW Talks series at Regent Street Apple Store as part of V&A events in conjunction with the London Design Festival. She is currently working on the development of a new piece entitled FUTURESELF.

Markus Rautzenberg is a German philosopher currently working at Freie Universität Berlin. In 2007 he received his doctoral grade in philosophy with a thesis on a theory of perturbation. Fellowships he has received include a German Research Foundation (DFG) Doctoral Scholarship at the graduate school working with the Körper-Inszenierungen (The Staging of the Body) Research Group and a DFG Postdoctoral Fellowship at the international graduate school, working with the Interart Research Group. Since 2009, he has been a member of the research staff at the Institute for Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin, and since 2011 heads his own DFG research project on non-visual aspects of iconicity. His main fields of research are media theory, picture theory, aesthetics, the relation of iconicity and knowledge, epistemology and game studies.