Since the field’s beginnings, game scholars have unpicked the complex knots and entanglements of game culture and beyond, from the embodied and intimate (Apperley, 2010; Anable, 2018) to the societal and extremely public (Mortensen, 2018). This work has been undertaken to build better, fairer, and more sustainable game cultures, and, by extension, an overall better world. For many game scholars, creating positive cultural, societal, and environmental impact has been a driving force behind their work.
Over the years, game scholars have become very adept at identifying the problems inherent in game cultures. Systemic discrimination, the hostility of gaming spaces, unhealthy labour conditions, and the environmental strain of highly commercial culture are only some of the troubling game culture phenomena documented and experienced. Examined through a critical, analytical lens, game cultures can appear bleak – and there are many who experience them as such.
However, there is much more to game cultures than their problematic aspects. While often overshadowed by efforts to render problematic phenomena visible, there are nevertheless often other, brighter sides to these dark issues. There is strong, active resistance towards hostility and discrimination (Boudreau, 2022; Gray, 2020). There are developments towards increased diversity and better representation (Forni, 2020; Jørgensen & Lindtner, 2024). There is solidarity and unionisation in the game industry (Hammar, 2022) and more political and ideological ambivalence and struggle in gaming communities than perhaps assumed (Maloney et al., 2019). There are new initiatives for more sustainable game creation and play practices and for imagining better futures through games (Fizek et al., 2023). In a word, there is hope.
Set against the backdrop of current military and culture wars, late-stage capitalism, and the accelerating climate crisis, hope can seem frail. Hope is vulnerable. It is far too easily, and often falsely, dismissed as naivety and unrealistic optimism. Yet hope is the necessary catalyst for creating positive change: it is the driving force behind any fight for a better future.
In the Nordic DiGRA 2025 conference, we invite authors interested in games, play, game creation, and related phenomena, regardless of discipline, to submit their work connected to the conference theme of hope in its various forms. We invite perspectives related to, for example, participant cultures, game design and production, readings of games, gamification and game-related phenomena, and theoretical and methodological development. The topic is also a call for game scholarly self-reflection: do we risk becoming doomsayers to avoid being seen as naïve? What kind of narratives of game culture and the world are we telling and subscribing to? Are we solving, hiding, or exacerbating problems?
The list of possible topics includes but is not limited to:
- Empirical and theoretical solutions to wicked problems in game cultures: what has worked, what might work?
- Critical readings and re-framings of game cultural narratives and phenomena
- The transformative potential of new gaming technologies and tools
- Utopias and the future(s) of games and gaming
- Changing the world through game design and development
- New theoretical and methodological approaches in game research
- Meaningfulness of games and gaming
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion in game cultures
- Historical perspectives on games and gaming
- Crises and rebuilding, activism and resistance in game cultures
- The environmental, social, economic, and cultural sustainability of gaming
In addition to scientific quality, adherence to the conference theme of hope is a key criterion for paper selection.
Nordic DiGRA 2025 is organised on 26–28 May 2025 in Turku, Finland, at the University of Turku by the Finnish Society for Game Research, in collaboration with the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies.
Nordic DiGRA 2025 conference committee has assembled Inclusion and Safety regulations for the conference, which will be followed.