What I did this past academic year (2021–2022)

In the first entry of this pseudo-series, I wrote: “So, September is here. A new academic year begins and a good way to get back to a scholarly mood is, in my experience, to go through everything one did the year before”. This still applies, so, like I did in 2019, 2020, and 2021, here’s a (somehow self-reflective) list of what I did last year.

DIGRA SPAIN

On December, we had our first national conference of DiGRA Spain (DIGRAES21) here at Tecnocampus, and I was happy to be a part of the organising committee — I was a part of the programme committee, the doctoral consortium, and some other stuff, together with a wonderful team from Tecnocampus and UJI. I’m obviously biased, but I would say it was a success, we had fun, got to meet old and new friends, national and international, and had excellent and thorough scholarly debates. I truly couldn’t be happier!

The book of abstracts (Spanish/English) can be downloaded here and there are two special issues of ToDiGRA on their way. Also, DIGRAES23 will be next April, in Madrid. Keep an eye on this and join us if you can!

LUDOGRAFÍAS

The series got two new entries during this period (well, the first one was out in April 2021, but I forgot to include it in last year’s entry), Protestas interactivas. El videojuego como medio de reivindicación política y social, by Alberto Venegas Ramos y Antonio César Moreno Cantano, and La estética de la dificultad. Teoría y motivos en el videojuego, by Mateo Terrasa Torres. We’re working on the fourth one right now.

PUBLICATIONS

· The biggest news was the publication of Perspectives on the European Videogame, co-edited with Óliver Pérez-Latorre and published by Amsterdam University Press in their Games and Play series. We worked on this for many years and the topic is one that we care about very much. We were lucky enough to have a brilliant collection of scholars for this: Torill Mortensen, Clara Fernández-vara, Alexis Blanchet, Susanna Paasonen & Veli-Matti Karhulahti, Jaroslav Svelch, James Newman, Mercè Oliva, Manuel Garin, Stefano Gualeni & Daniel Vella, Antonio José Planells de la Maza, and Nelson Zagalo.

The full prologue and introduction are available for free in pdf here. Please check them out!

· My colleagues Marçal Mora-Cantallops and Yoshihiro Hino and I published an interview with Mr Ikko Ohno, a visual artist that made a full movie with an MSX2 in 1987, in ROMChip. It’s titled “The Dream of MSX Cinema. An Interview with Ikko Ohno, Creator of The Flying Luna Clipper” and it has been a passion project for us; it took us years of work and conversations with Mr Ohno to polish it to a level that we deemed worthy of the historical importance of The Flying Luna Clipper, one of my favourite rarities in the history of cinema. I hope you enjoy it!

· Together with Beatriz Pérez-Zapata, I published the paper “‘Remain Calm and Elegant’: Dark Games, Vulnerability, and the Female Body as a Plaything in Most Beautiful Island” in L’Atalante. You can download it in English here and in Spanish here.

VISITS, TALKS, AND TRANSFERENCE

· The conference “Gêmu. Perspectivas del videojuego japonés”, in Japan Foundation, Madrid, continued with a second edition that included talks by Antonio Loriguillo, Beatriz Pérez-Zapata, and myself, as well as an interview with Hidetaka Suehiro “Swery” by Clara Fernández-Vara. As with the first round, I was the curator. My talk was titled “Modo Kowai: El terror en el videojuego japonés” and is available on YouTube here.

· I was invited to give a guest lecture at Macromedia University Munich, for their +1000 XP series, by Gerald Farca. I discussed Japanese games with ‘Gêmu-play: Playing and Analysing Japanese Games from Europe” (yes, this a recurrent topic for me lately). You can watch it on YouTube here.

· I was invited by Nelson Zagalo to the Media Innovation Circle talks at UA. I presented on internationalisation in academia with “Asymmetrical cooperative play: Doing (international) game research from the fringes”, available on YouTube here. Thanks, Nelson and Liliana!

· One more year, I was invited to give a talk at UJI — this year, I discussed Zen Modes and Slow Gaming. Thanks again, Marta Martín, Antonio Loriguillo, and Shaila García-Catalán!

· I was invited to give a talk at IndieDevDay, in Barcelona — I chose to discuss Game Studies with “¿Qué han hecho los game studies por nosotros?”. Thanks, Alexandra Samper and everyone at the IndieDevDay organisation!

· Óscar Senar invited me to Huesca comic-con, Huescomic 2021, where I gave the talk “Cómic Ludens. Diálogos entre cómic y juego”. Thanks, Óscar!

CONFERENCES

This has been a very, very productive year, with plenty of in-person conferences. Let’s see:

· Susana Tosca invited me to be a keynote speaker at the seminar East Asian Cultures in the Everyday, organized by her within the research group Audiences and Mediated Life, at RUC. My talk was “Discussing Gêmu: Japanese games in Spanish (media) lives”. Thanks, Susana!

· I was invited to be the closing keynote speaker at the IV Congreso Internacional: Imagen y Reconocimiento, part of SIMUFV 2022 (Semana de la Imagen 2022), at UFV. The main topic of the conference was the metaverse and I presented “El metaverso os hará libres: Promesas y necesidad de la libertad virtual”. Thank you, Victoria and everyone at UFV!

· I finished the year with another keynote talk, this time at Visual Storytelling: From the Mural to the Digital conference, at University of Aveiro. For a change of pace, I presented “Video Games as Animation: Inquiring Into the Ontology of Playable Images”. I had a great time and it was a perfect opportunity to explore some ideas that I have had in the back of my mind for a long time. Thanks, David Callahan!

· With Antonio José Planells, I presented “Ludomythologies: Using Mythanalysis to Analyse the Structures and Themes of Games” at the Game Analysis Perspectives (GAP) conference at ITU. This is part of our funded project Ludomythologies.

· I presented the talk “‘The Source of All Things in You: Trauma, Capitalismo y Mitos del Presente en el Videojuego Distraint 2”, with Beatriz Pérez Zapata, at the international conference Ethos Pathos Mythos, at UCM. This is also part of Ludomythologies.

· I presented two talks at VII Congreso Internacional AE-IC, at UAB: “City placement interactivo. El videojuego y los mundos virtuales como herramientas de promoción turística”, with Ignacio Bergillos, and “‘Dont’ Leave the House’: Los usos y significados ludoficcionales de la vivienda”, with Antonio José Planells and Beatriz Pérez Zapata.

· In DiGRA 2022, celebrated at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, I chaired the PhD Consortium and presented “(In)visible Walls: Borders in Video Games as Myths of the Present”, with Beatriz Pérez Zapata, and “Ludomythologies. Myths in the Present and of the Present in Contemporary Games”, with Antonio José Planells. Both talks are part of Ludomythologies.

OTHER

· I taught Teoría del juego, Cultura oriental, and Historia del Videojuego in the first edition of the Máster en diseño narrativo y estudios de videojuegos, at URCJ. Thanks, Alfonso Cuadrado!

· I’ve peer reviewed for DiGRA 2022, Artnodes, the Journal of Digital Media & Interaction, IEEE CoG2022, FDG2022, GAP, and probably somewhere else. It’s hard to keep track.

· I’ve written for Rockdelux, Manual, and probably other media. I’ve also started a segment on animation at Ràdio Cambrils. And probably something else. This was a hard list to put together. What a year!