DiGRA 2025 Università ta’ Malta: ‘Games at the Crossroads’
Dr Bruno de Paula, Dr Alison Croasdale, and Danielle Kleinerman are lecturers on the MA Digital Media: Education and Production routes, and all conduct research around games. This post summarises their presentations delivered at the Digital Games Research Association Conference 2025, held in Valletta, Malta.
Danielle’s presentation, titled, ‘Cartographies of Play: Counter-mapping Videogame Cultures’ gave an overview and introduction to Danielle’s PhD. The doctoral project explores the relationships people have with gaming and gaming cultures outside of commonly operationalised industry-invoked binaries, such as gamer/non-gamer or the hardcore/casual player. Instead, the research sees participants interviewed as they play a videogame of their choice, to explore and discuss how they view their own relationships to videogames, gaming and its cultures. These interviews will be collated and “counter-mapped” through a critical cartography. This provides a more granular and nuanced insight at the circumstances and dynamics which may chart the way people navigate, perceive, and relate to gaming and its cultures.
Alison’s paper, ‘Now Play Nicely: An Autoethnography of Nostalgia and the Shared Spaces of Gaming,’ presented a micro-autoethnography of nostalgic gameplay memories, with a focus on the kinds of spaces videogames are played in. This work was framed through ideas around socially produced space, after Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, and how shared spaces of gameplay add additional layers to the nostalgia we might attach to memories of playing videogames with others. She described case studies of games played in both arcades and home spaces, and how these different locations inflect nostalgia.
Bruno’s paper, ‘Trajectories of Professionalization as Game Developer in 2000s Brazil: stories from Tectoy Digital/Zeebo Interactive Studios/Tectoy Studios,’ was grounded on decolonial approaches to histories of games. Bruno’s research relies on his own experience as a former game developer in Brazil, and focuses on the intercultural elements found in game production across time and space around the world. Through questionnaires and work biographies based on gamesworkers who worked alongside him in late 2000s-early 2010s Brazil, his paper discussed the relationship between the formation of gamesworkers in so-called peripheries of game production, and how the knowledges and practices that emerge in those precarious spaces navigate and become integrated into different contexts in mainstream game production and/or other analogous sectors, challenging the tired trope that innovations have an unidirectional flow (from mainstream to peripheral spaces).
The conference, which took place at the University of Malta’s beautiful campus in Valetta, gave a global overview of games research of a multitude of forms, from genre work on cosy games, football games, and horror games, to conceptual research framing new methodologies, to explorations in the history of games. A particular highlight came from the keynote delivered by Palestinian game designer Rasheed Abueideh, who discussed the challenging circumstances under which he attempts to make games reflective of his identity and heritage.