Note: REGISTRATION DEADLINE: 24.08.2023 – 23:59
In 2008, Daniel Riha (Charles University Prague) was responsible for the expansion of Cyberhub Projects on Inter-Disciplinary.Net (ID.Net), a digital research hub created to inspire research events and projects beyond the traditional boundaries and supposedly tight focus of established academic research fields. Born from this incentive, the Cybercultures event in 2008 brought forth a great number of excellent sessions on video games, which inspired Daniel to draft the first Call for Papers for a Video Game Cultures event focusing entirely on the interdisciplinary, interactive potentials of the medium.
Soon, that interdisciplinary core concept revealed itself to be the most challenging aspect of Video Game Cultures. While Game Studies play a central role in research on the medium, Humanities and Cultural Studies approaches must not be exlusively favoured over insights from other fields, such as technical considerations on the medium. Ever since, the organisers of Video Game Culture events made this creed of mutual respect and beneficial cooperation across all academic fields their guiding principle.
While the first Video Game Cultures lacked the expected numbers, the board members – attracted by the idea of an interdisciplinary event series on video games – fought tooth and nail to keep the concept intact. The second Video Game Cultures in 2010 turned out to be a major success, paving the way for many more conferences and events to come under this banner.
Video Game Cultures had a successful run for seven years in Mansfield College, Oxford (UK), and gathered an impressive number of experts from a wide range of fields, academic as well as practical backrounds. While ID.Net was discontinued in the wake of Brexit, Video Game Cultures persists as an open-minded, inclusive, sustainable, and forward-thinking series of events for those daring to discuss video games beyond boundaries.
With its reboot at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, Video Game Cultures begins a global journey.