The Center for Computer Games Research is located at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark and was one of the first academic departments entirely dedicated to the scholarly study of digital gaming. Originally a part of the Department of Digital Aesthetics and Communication and spun off into its own independent unit in 2003, the Center was notable at the time for its sole specialization in gaming. It has historically been a multidisciplinary unit with faculty from fields ranging from literature to sociology to computer science. It has hosted a number of key conferences over the years including Other Players (2004), the 2005 iteration of the Digital Arts and Culture conference, and the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games in 2010.
It continues to provide institutional support to the peer-reviewed journal Game Studies, which launched in 2001 (the editor-in-chief, Espen Aarseth, is former head of the Center [1] and current Professor at the ITU [2] ).
The Center played a significant role for a number of important game studies scholars and designers. In addition to being the intellectual home for the university's Masters Program in Gaming, the Center has produced a number of PhD's over the years including scholars who have gone on to do major work in the field (see below).
Researchers affiliated with the Center include (current and former):
The University of Copenhagen is a public research university in Copenhagen, Denmark. Founded in 1479, the University of Copenhagen is the second-oldest university in Scandinavia after Uppsala University, and ranks as one of the top universities in the Nordic countries and Europe.
The UCPH Department of Computer Science is a department in the Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). It is the longest established department of Computer Science in Denmark and was founded in 1970 by Turing Award winner Peter Naur. As of 2021, it employs 82 academic staff, 126 research staff and 38 support staff. It is consistently ranked the top Computer Science department in the Nordic countries, and in 2017 was placed 9th worldwide by the Academic Ranking of World Universities.
Game studies, also known as ludology, is the study of games, the act of playing them, and the players and cultures surrounding them. It is a field of cultural studies that deals with all types of games throughout history. This field of research utilizes the tactics of, at least, folkloristics and cultural heritage, sociology and psychology, while examining aspects of the design of the game, the players in the game, and the role the game plays in its society or culture. Game studies is oftentimes confused with the study of video games, but this is only one area of focus; in reality game studies encompasses all types of gaming, including sports, board games, etc.
Gonzalo Frasca is a game designer and academic researcher focusing on serious and political videogames. His blog, Ludology.org, was cited by NBC News as a popular designation for academic researchers studying video games. For many years, Frasca also co-published Watercoolergames with Ian Bogost, a blog about serious games.
Narratology is the study of narrative and narrative structure and the ways that these affect human perception. It is an anglicisation of French narratologie, coined by Tzvetan Todorov. Its theoretical lineage is traceable to Aristotle (Poetics) but modern narratology is agreed to have begun with the Russian Formalists, particularly Vladimir Propp, and Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of heteroglossia, dialogism, and the chronotope first presented in The Dialogic Imagination (1975).
Ergodic literature is a term coined by Espen J. Aarseth in his book Cybertext—Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. The term is derived from the Greek words ergon, meaning "work", and hodos, meaning "path". It is associated with the concept of cybertext and describes a cybertextual process that includes a semiotic sequence that the concepts of "reading" do not account for.
Espen J. Aarseth is a Norwegian academic specializing in the fields of video game studies and electronic literature. Aarseth completed his doctorate at the University of Bergen. He co-founded the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen, and worked there until 2003, at which time he was a full professor. He is currently a full professor and Head of Center at the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen, and principal investigator of a €2 million ERC Advanced grant for the project Making Sense of Games.
The IT University of Copenhagen is a public university and research institution in Copenhagen, Denmark. It is specialized in the multidisciplinary study of information technology within computer science, business IT and digital design.
Electronic literature or digital literature is a genre of literature encompassing works created exclusively on and for digital devices, such as computers, tablets, and mobile phones. A work of electronic literature can be defined as "a construction whose literary aesthetics emerge from computation", "work that could only exist in the space for which it was developed/written/coded—the digital space". This means that these writings cannot be easily printed, or cannot be printed at all, because elements crucial to the text are unable to be carried over onto a printed version. The digital literature world continues to innovate print's conventions all the while challenging the boundaries between digitized literature and electronic literature. Some novels are exclusive to tablets and smartphones for the simple fact that they require a touchscreen. Digital literature tends to require a user to traverse through the literature through the digital setting, making the use of the medium part of the literary exchange. Espen J. Aarseth wrote in his book Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature that "it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the textual machinery".
Children's culture includes children's cultural artifacts, children's media and literature, and the myths and discourses spun around the notion of childhood. Children's culture has been studied within academia in cultural studies, media studies, and literature departments. The interdisciplinary focus of childhood studies could also be considered in the paradigm of social theory concerning the study of children's culture.
George Paul Landow is Professor of English and Art History Emeritus at Brown University. He is a leading authority on Victorian literature, art, and culture, as well as a pioneer in criticism and theory of Electronic literature, hypertext and hypermedia. He also pioneered the use of hypertext and the web in higher education.
Jesper Juul is a Danish game designer, educator, and theorist in the field of video game studies. He is an associate professor at the Danish Design School.
Humanistic informatics is one of several names chosen for the study of the relationship between human culture and technology. The term is fairly common in Europe, but is little known in the English-speaking world, though digital humanities is in many cases roughly equivalent.
Lisbeth Klastrup is a Danish scholar of new media. Although her early research was on hypertext fiction, she is now best known for her research on virtual worlds, particularly MMOGs such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft. Klastrup focuses on real-life virtual worlds and how they are used from a social and storytelling perspective, especially concerning online gaming and worldliness. However, she is also well-recognized for her presentation of amusing anecdotes, which she then connects to larger research questions. Klastrup's discussion of her EverQuest character's "trouser quest" is an example of this. Another project, the Death Stories Project, looks into representations of death in MMOGs.
The history of video games spans a period of time between the invention of the first electronic games and today, covering many inventions and developments. Video gaming reached mainstream popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, when arcade video games, gaming consoles and home computer games were introduced to the general public. Since then, video gaming has become a popular form of entertainment and a part of modern culture in most parts of the world. The early history of video games, therefore, covers the period of time between the first interactive electronic game with an electronic display in 1947, the first true video games in the early 1950s, and the rise of early arcade video games in the 1970s. During this time there was a wide range of devices and inventions corresponding with large advances in computing technology, and the actual first video game is dependent on the definition of "video game" used.
DADIU founded in 2005 is an academy located in Copenhagen and Aalborg in Denmark that educates students in the creation of computer games. The DADIU program is a collaboration between different universities and art schools in Denmark.
Copenhagen Game Collective (CGC) is a multi-gender, multi-national, non-profit game design collective based in Copenhagen, Denmark. The collective comprises a tight network of different companies, non-commercial projects, and creative individuals.
Georgios N. Yannakakis is Director and Professor at the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta and Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Games. He is one of the leading researchers within player affective modelling and adaptive content generation for games. He is considered one of the most accomplished experts at the intersection of games and AI.
Mary Ann Buckles is widely credited as the first academic to research and speculate about the emotional and cultural impact of videogames.
Critical code studies (CCS) is an emerging academic subfield, related to software studies, digital humanities, cultural studies, computer science, human–computer interface, and the do-it-yourself maker culture. Its primary focus is on the cultural significance of computer code, without excluding or focusing solely upon the code's functional purpose. According to Mark C. Marino, it
is an approach that applies critical hermeneutics to the interpretation of computer code, program architecture, and documentation within a socio-historical context. CCS holds that lines of code are not value-neutral and can be analyzed using the theoretical approaches applied to other semiotic systems in addition to particular interpretive methods developed particularly for the discussions of programs.
Coordinates: 55°39′33″N12°35′28″E / 55.6593°N 12.5912°E