DiGRAA 2023 will take place at the Australian Hearing Hub (AHH)
16 University Ave, Macquarie University (map)
Paid parking is available on campus in the South 2 and West 3 parking zones (map).
To attend online, use this Zoom link (password: 742273)
Monday February 6th
Tuesday February 7th
The DiGRA Australia 2023 National Conference will take place at Macquarie University in Sydney on 6-7 February. The conference will also be able to be attended virtually. We would love to see you there!
The conference is entirely free but registration is required. Please use this Trybooking link to register for conference attendance. Registration is important so we know numbers and dietary requirements for in-person attendance, as well as which speakers will be presenting remotely. If your mode of attendance changes in the future, please update your registration accordingly (by cancelling and re-registering) so we know what numbers to expect.
Please note too that DiGRA Australia has now implemented a formal membership system, with details available here. Membership is free for students and casual academics, and $50 for full-time academics. There is also a $500 institutional membership that covers an unlimited number of individuals connected to a paying institution (e.g., a school or a research lab). If you think your employer might be willing to support our association, perhaps ask them! I’m happy to answer any questions about that process you might have.
Note that membership is not required to simply attend the conference, but is required for presenters. It is also required to attend the AGM, vote in our elections, or to stand for a position on that board.
We look forward to seeing you at the conference in February!
We invite you to contribute to a two-day game studies conference to be held on the 6th and 7th of February, at Macquarie University. Registration is free.
Important dates
1 November 2022 – Submission deadline
6 December 2022 – Notification of submission outcomes
6–7 February 2023 – Conference
Details
The DiGRA Australia 2023 National Conference is an opportunity for academic and non-academic games researchers, critics, designers, developers and artists to share their work. We aim to provide an inclusive forum that reflects the diversity and vibrancy of game studies in Australia, and that allows newcomers and veterans alike to meet other people who are critically engaged with games, players and the culture that surrounds them.
There is no theme for this year’s conference—we want to hear about whatever you in the Australian game studies community have been working on. We welcome submissions describing research projects that are completed or still underway. We also welcome contributions from industry members. Tell us about that idea you’ve been turning over in your mind that you’d like to test out in front of an audience.
DiGRAA 2023 will be hosted at Macquarie University’s Wallumattagal Campus in Sydney. It will run as a hybrid conference, allowing both online and in-person attendance (including online presentations).
Submission process
Submissions will be based on Extended Abstracts of 400-800 words. All submissions are to be made via EasyChair.
All submissions will be reviewed by the organising committee. Submissions do not need to be anonymous.
Extended Abstract submissions
This is the standard format for submissions to the DiGRAA conference. Between 400 and 800 words (excluding references) onusing the DiGRAA template. Accepted Extended Abstracts will be presented at the conference as a 10-minute talk (live or pre-recorded video) followed by a live group question time. Accepted Extended Abstracts will be archived on the DiGRAA website.
Submission rules
To ensure as many people as possible have the opportunity to present their work, only one submission may be made per lead author, and individuals may present only one paper during the conference. There is no limit on secondary authorship.
To present at DiGRAA 2023 you will need to be a member of DiGRA Australia. Membership is optional for non-presenting authors. You do not need to be a member at the time of submission, only at the time of the conference. You do not need to be a member of DiGRA International.
Please note that as of July 2022, membership for those in full-time work with at least 12 months remaining on their contract will cost $50/year. Membership is free for all others (including students, sessional academics, etc.). Membership registration processes are currently being developed and will be available in time for conference registration.
The DiGRA Australia conference has a ‘grey list’ policy for accepted submissions that are withdrawn with no reason provided, or for which the presenter simply does not attend. Please familiarise yourself with the specifics of this policy here.
Publication
Accepted Extended Abstracts will be archived on the DiGRAA website. Video presentations (subject to permission) will be published on a dedicated YouTube channel. Aligning with DiGRAA social media policy, you will have the option not to have your video archived.
Tips for authors
We advise potential authors to review the papers from previous DiGRA Australia conferences as a guide to the expected tone and quality. Some further tips:
Conference Organising Committee
Malcolm Ryan, Macquarie University (Chair)
Mitchell McEwan, Macquarie University
Cameron Edmond, Macquarie University
Kayson Whitehouse, Macquarie University
Mark R Johnson, University of Sydney
Mahli-Ann Butt, University of Sydney
Any queries about the conference can be directed to Malcolm Ryan: malcolm.ryan@mq.edu.au.
The presentations from the DiGRA Australia 2022 Conference are now on YouTube.
Browse all the videos here, or click the embedded video below to view the playlist from the first presentation.
For a full list of the papers presented at DiGRAA2022, see the conference program. Note that some presenters elected not to share their video to YouTube.
Registration is free. The conference will be held fully online. After registering, you will receive links to the Zoom room and Discord server.
All times are in AEDT (Sydney/Melbourne/Hobart time).
All times are in AEDT (Sydney/Melbourne/Hobart time).
| Time | Event | Presenters |
|---|---|---|
| 9.30am | Opening of day 2 | |
| 10.00am | Session 6 | Gawain Lucian Lax (chair) |
| Feeling Friction: Emotion, Difficulty, and Space in Psychonauts 2 | Madeleine Mackenzie | |
| The Ambient Poetics of Neoliberalism in The Long Dark | Andrea Andiloro | |
| Rapture to Republicans: American Individualism, anti-mask discourse and parallels in Bioshock | Harriet Flitcroft | |
| 11.00am | Session 7 | Madeleine Antonellos (chair) |
| “Techno-femininity” and the World Wide Web: Locating Girls’ Early DIY Gaming Cultures | Stephanie Harkin | |
| ‘Lean In’ and ‘Lean Out’: On the Politics of Women’s Resilience and Gaming the Gender Divide | Mahli-Ann Butt | |
| 12.00pm | Social event | |
| 12.30pm | Lunch Open discussion: publishing opportunities in game studies | |
| 1.00pm | Session 8 | Harriet Flitcroft (chair) |
| Exploring Game Design Students Understanding of Marketing | Jacqueline Burgess | |
| From Tinkerers to Software Archivists: Examining the Edges of World of Warcraft Private Servers | Geoffrey Hill, Martin Gibbs, Melissa J. Rogerson | |
| Why do video game developers play—or not play—video games during leisure time? | Raman Voranau, Ruth Rentschler, Boram Lee, Sandra Barker | |
| 2.00pm | Session 9 | Premeet Sidhu (chair) |
| Teachers’ Roles and Game Designers’ Perspectives in Educational Game Design Process | Mifrah Ahmad | |
| Worlding through Speculative Digital Game Pedagogies | Alexander Bacalja | |
| Game design that creates the conditions for collaboration for neurodiverse players | Matthew Harrison, Jess Rowlings | |
| 3.00pm | Afternoon break | |
| 3.30pm | DiGRA Australia annual general meeting | |
| 4.30pm | End of day 2 |
Registration for this online conference is free. After registering, you will receive links to the conference Zoom room and Discord server.
The conference program is available here.
Link to register: https://www.trybooking.com/BXBWJ
We invite you to contribute to a two-day game studies conference to be held on the 14th and 15th of February, fully online. Registration is free.
Important dates
Details
The DiGRA Australia 2022 National Conference is an opportunity for academic and non-academic games researchers, critics, designers, developers and artists to share their work. We aim to provide an inclusive forum that reflects the diversity and vibrancy of game studies in Australia, and that allows newcomers and veterans alike to meet other people who are critically engaged with games, players and the culture that surrounds them.
There is no theme for this year’s conference—we want to hear about whatever you in the Australian game studies community have been working on. We welcome submissions describing research projects that are completed or still underway. Tell us about that idea you’ve been turning over in your mind that you’d like to test out in front of an audience.
Following the success of 2021’s online conference, DiGRAA 2022 will once again be held fully online via Zoom and Discord, with a variety of playful social events and opportunities to chat with other attendees.
Submission process
There are two options for submitting to DiGRAA 2022: Extended Abstract or Short Abstract. All submissions are to be made via EasyChair at this link.
All submissions will be reviewed by the organising committee. Submissions do not need to be anonymous.
Extended Abstract submissions
This is the standard format for submissions to the DiGRAA conference. Between 400 and 800 words (excluding references) on the DiGRAA template. Accepted Extended Abstracts will be presented at the conference as a 10-minute pre-recorded video followed by a live group question time. Accepted Extended Abstracts will be archived on the DiGRAA website.
Short Abstract submissions
This is a format to tell us about your research in brief. What are you working on? What has you stumped? Between 100 and 200 words on the DiGRAA template or in plain text. Accepted Short Abstracts will be presented at the conference as a 5-minute pre-recorded video followed by a live group question time. Accepted Short Abstracts will not be archived on the DiGRAA website.
Submission rules
To ensure as many people as possible have the opportunity to present their work, only one submission may be made per lead author, and individuals may present only one paper during the conference. There is no limit on secondary authorship.
The DiGRA Australia conference has a ‘grey list’ policy for accepted submissions that are withdrawn with no reason provided, or for which the presenter simply does not attend. Please familiarise yourself with the specifics of this policy here.
Publication
Accepted Extended Abstracts will be archived on the DiGRAA website. Video presentations (subject to permission) will be published on a dedicated YouTube channel. Aligning with DiGRAA social media policy, you will have the option not to have your video archived.
Tips for authors
We advise potential authors to review the papers from previous DiGRA Australia conferences [see here] as a guide to the expected tone and quality. Some further tips:
Conference Organising Committee
Jane Mavoa, University of Melbourne
Fraser Allison, University of Melbourne
Madeleine Antonellos, University of Melbourne
Premeet Sidhu, University of Sydney
Harriet Flitcroft, University of Sydney
Brendan Keogh, Queensland University of Technology
Erin Maclean, Griffith University
Gawain Lucian Lax, Monash University
After you register, we will send you a link to the conference Zoom sessions.
(see this in your local time: http://go.unimelb.edu.au/7wei).
DiGRA Australia National Conference 2021: How’s it going?
In 2021, the DiGRAA conference will be fully online – and of course it’s also free. We’ll still have a mix of academic presentations as well as opportunities to meet other games researchers – plus plenty of informal, playful social events as well as panels on some of the big questions that we are all facing. There’s no theme, but we do want to know how you’re getting on.
We know that for many people, 2020 has been stressful. For many of us, the DiGRAA conference in February was the last time we attended an academic conference in person, the last time we saw friends and colleagues (especially from interstate) other than over Zoom. Maybe the last thing that you want to do is write another paper or extended abstract about research that didn’t happen quite as fast or as successfully as you’d hoped. But we don’t want you to go missing! We’re making DiGRAA even more accessible this year.
There are three ways to submit to DiGRAA this year.
Tell us about your research. What are you working on, what has you stumped? 100-200 words, plain text. Abstract submissions will be reviewed by the organising committee. They will not be archived on the DiGRAA website.
Accepted Abstracts will be presented as a 5-minute pre-recorded video and a subsequent live group discussion time.
This is the way that most of us submit to DiGRAA. Up to 800 words on the DiGRAA template. Submissions should be anonymised. These will be reviewed by the organising committee and will be archived on the DiGRAA website.
Accepted Extended Abstracts will be presented as a 10-minute pre-recorded video and a subsequent live group question time.
We don’t get a lot of full paper submissions to DiGRAA. We don’t encourage them either – but we know that sometimes you need to submit somewhere. Usually it’s about travel funding, but this year it might be about meeting a milestone for your PhD. If you need to submit a full paper, please submit an anonymised paper to the “full papers” track. It will be blind peer reviewed by at least two reviewers.
Accepted Full Papers will be presented as a 10-minute pre-recorded video and a subsequent live group question time.
To ensure as many people as possible have the opportunity to present their work at the conference, only one submission may be made per lead author, and individuals may only present one paper during the conference. There is no limit on secondary authorship.
From 2020, DiGRA Australia is implementing a ‘grey list’ policy for accepted submissions that are withdrawn with no reason provided, or for which the presenter simply does not attend. Please familiarise yourself with the specifics of this policy here.
Submissions should be formatted according to the extended abstract and full paper templates.
Please submit via Easychair here.
All submissions due: Friday November 27th 2020, 5pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time. We will close Easychair after midnight on Sunday November 29th but please do not work through the weekend to prepare a submission! We have already pushed this as late as we can; there will not be an extension of this deadline.
Paper and abstract decisions: Wednesday 16th December 2020.
Video presentations due: Monday, 1st February 2021
Full Papers and Extended Abstracts will be archived on the DiGRAA website. Videos (subject to permissions) will be published in a dedicated YouTube channel. Aligning with DiGRAA social media policy, you will have the option to NOT have your video archived.
Chairs: Dr Melissa Rogerson & Associate Professor Martin Gibbs
melissa.rogerson@unimelb.edu.au / martin.gibbs@unimelb.edu.au
Acknowledgements
The DiGRA Australia 2020 National Conference has been made possible due to financial support from QUT’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the QUT Digital Media Research Centre.
Frequently Asked Questions and Other Information
Lunch at the conference will be provided. Refreshments will be provided for the morning and afternoon tea breaks.
Registration is required. Please register via this TryBooking link before Friday, January 24 2020.