Academic Download: Reports from Emerging Field of Indie Studies

Speakers

• Aphra Kerr
  

  Aphra Kerr

  Dr. Aphra Kerr is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at Maynooth University in Ireland. She has researched the changing nature of the games industry over the past twenty years. She was a co-investigator on the ‘Refiguring Innovation in Digital Games’ project funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (2015-2020) for which she researched gamejams, game making and diversity. Aphra’s books include Global Games: Production, Circulation and Policy in the Networked Age, Routledge, 2017. This is her first time to present at IndieCade.

• Brendan Keogh
  

  Brendan Keogh

  Dr Brendan Keogh is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, where he researches videogame development skill transferability across informal, formal, and embedded sectors. His previous research has focused on the phenomenological and textual aspects of videogame play and culture. He is the co-author of The Unity Game Engine and The Circuits of Cultural Software (with Benjamin Nicoll), and is the author of A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames and Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops The Line. He has written extensively about the cultures and development practices of videogames in for outlets such as Overland, The Conversation, Polygon, Edge, and Vice.

• Casey O'Donnell
  

  Casey O'Donnell

  A frequent submitter of games to IndieCade and long time hoper to attend. Looking forward to talking about non-digital Indie game development.
  twitch.tv/caseyodonnell

• Celia Pearce
  

  Celia Pearce

  50: Celia Pearce is an award-winning game designer, artist, curator, author, teacher, researcher, and serial instigator, and the co-founder of IndieCade. She currently holds a position as Associate Professor of Game Design at Northeastern University.

• Jesper Juul
  

  Jesper Juul

  Jesper Juul is an Associate Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design and has developed several master-level programs in game design, at the ITU of Copenhagen, at New York University Game Center, and at KADK in Copenhagen. He has published four books with MIT Press: Half-Real (2005), A Casual Revolution (2009), The Art of Failure (2013), and Handmade Pixels (2019). He is also a co-editor of the Playful Thinking Series (MIT Press). https://www.jesperjuul.net

• Paolo Ruffino
  

  Paolo Ruffino

  Paolo Ruffino is Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool, where he is teaching and researching on videogames, interactive media and digital cultures. His research is concerned with the ways in which power and control are negotiated and challenged through digital games by players, producers and theorists. He is currently investigating new forms of independent production of videogames, labour unions in the videogame industry, and nonhuman and posthuman play in the digital age. He has been awarded a PhD in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths in 2015, with a thesis on the narratives that bring about and challenge the dualism gamers-games. Previously, he has been working at the University of York, University of Lincoln, London South Bank University and the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University. He is the author of Future Gaming: Creative Interventions in Video Game Culture (MIT/Goldsmiths Press 2018), and editor of Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Technics and Politics (Routledge 2021). He has co-curated the volume Rethinking Gamification (Meson Press 2013) and co-edited journal issues of Convergence, Games and Culture, GAME The Italian Journal of Game Studies.