Welcome to the Inclusive Gaming Conference, 2024! We’re so excited to have you participate.
The day is broken into a series of talks, panel discussions, and interactive sessions. In the play hour, you will find a range of demos and exhibitions. There will also be a safe space throughout the day, hosted Safe in Our World.
<aside> 🌟 Agenda Overview
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<aside> 🌟 Detailed Agenda
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Join us in the morning to register, pick up your goodies, and get settled into the venue.
Location: Atrium
An introduction to the day, led by the Oxford Games & Technologies Group and Jesus College.
Location: Atrium
Dr. Poppy Wilde | Birmingham City University
Dr Poppy Wilde is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR) at Birmingham City University (BCU). She is author of Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities (Routledge 2023), and co-editor of Working Women on Screen: Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism (Palgrave 2024). Her work focuses on what it means and how it feels to be posthuman, by exploring how posthuman subjectivities are enabled and embodied. Her further publications explore videogames and critical posthumanism through issues of affectivity and intra-action, post-apocalyptic narratives, the non-human, and agentic capabilities.
Location: Atrium
What We Take With Us from personal game creation, from conception to reportage
Adam Jerrett | **University of Portsmouth
Dr Adam Jerrett is a games design and development Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. His research primarily focuses on how games can make us better people, and how that can help us make better games. In that regard, he is interested in values-conscious and personal game design as a cathartic process, which informs how he makes games. To apply this process, he recently created What We Take With Us, a pervasive wellbeing game.
Twisterland: Interactive online game world for fostering diverse personal narrative building
Plot Twisters (Jenny Liu Zhang, Jesse Parent, Young-Kyung Kim, and Hadasa Bogatean) | University of Edinburgh, University of California San Diego
A game design collective creating Twisterland, an online game world empowering personal narrative building and emotional literacy in youth.
Acts of Visioning: "Reimagining ChinaTOwn 2050" and Contending with the Critical Heritage Futures of Chinatowns in Canada through VR/AR.
Emily Putnam | PhD Candidate, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture, Carleton University
Emily Putnam is an early career curator/scholar/researcher based in Ottawa. An interdisciplinary humanities PhD candidate at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, Emily’s research areas include socially engaged and activist art, public art, processes of archiving, critical race studies, and memory studies. Her dissertation, Archival Imaginaries: A Study of Contemporary Art in Toronto looks at the city as method for untangling Canadian art from its national framework, and instead argues for local-global specificities as a way to rethink the nature of Canada using artistic and archival engagements with unearthed and often erased histories from a Canadian cultural imaginary. She is the Research Manager for a multi-year archival, digital humanities project "Mobile Subjects, Contrapuntal Modernisms" (PI: Ming Tiampo), and is the Managing Director of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton. An independent curator of contemporary art in Canada, Emily curates exhibitions that create moments of reflection on difficulties past and present. She is interested in the question of what we owe to each other, and how we build more-than-self spaces.
Location: Conference Room 2 (Ground Floor)
Queens Game Interactive HiStoryGame
Maureen Thomas | Professor emeritus, Norwegian Film School, Inland Norway University
Maureen Thomas, interactive story-architect/director, dramatist, screenwriter and dramaturg, has a special interest in medieval Scandinavian literature and cultural history, which she studied at the University of Cambridge and the Institute for Icelandic Studies, Reykjavik, Iceland. For young people, in Norway she was screenwriter on Sirin Eide’s feature-film, Aldri mer 13 (LUCAS Award for Best Film, Frankfurt International Festival; Best Film Award, Antwerp International Film Festival). She wrote additional lyrics and co-directed Alice (stage musical from Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass - composer Stephen Daltry) (voted #2 London Christmas Stage Show by Sunday Times critics & children’s panels) and wrote Lombroso, in About Face (composer Rachel Leach - Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London). The interactive HiStoryGame, Queens Game, designed to fill the gap in cultural heritage for young people and games for girls, **was supported by **the Norwegian Film Institute and implemented as a pilot demonstrator in collaboration with Snow Castle Games, Oslo (2019-2023) and the Norwegian national ‘Program for Kunstnerisk Utviklings Arbeid’ (PKU) council for advanced artistic research (Project #2029). 10-year old Queen Margrete (b. 1353) (who, in 1397, united Denmark, Norway and Sweden under one crown) comes to the Castle of Akersborg, Oslo, to join her new 23-year old husband, King Håkon VI of Norway.
Simulating a hidden population in the mobile game “My Child Lebensborn”
Elin Festøy | Dr. (PhD), personal research grant holder at The Game School, Innlandet University, Norway
Elin Festøy is a conceptual artist and creative producer exploring interactive storytelling to generate change. She finished a PhD at The Norwegian Film School, Innlandet University in 2023, exploring insights based on her work on the BAFTA award winning mobile game "My Child Lebensborn". The game was developed in collaboration with the Norwegian Lebensborn children and is part of a bigger transmedia project including a documentary film, an educational tool and the creation of the foundation "The Children Born of War Project". Festøy has a background in journalism and digital communication, including a Master of Management from BI Norwegian Business School, a Cand. Mag. in Literature from Oslo University and studies in computer science at RWTH Aachen, Germany.
X-Sheds: Modeling Emperor Kangxi’s Multisensory Experience through Historical Analysis
Yung-Fang Hsu | The Courtauld Institute of Art & University of Oxford
Yung-Fang Hsu is a DPhil candidate at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford and serves as an Associate Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She specializes in the interplay between Chinese art, drama performances, and music research during early modern China. The focus of her doctoral research project is Experiencing Festival: A Study in Cross-media and Multisensory Experiences in Qing Court Festivals. She is passionate about exploring perceptions of multi-sensory experiences in cross-media.
Before joining the University of Oxford, Yung-Fang completed her MA in Chinese History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art and earned her BA in Music Performance from Soochow University in Taiwan. She also completed internships at the National Palace Museum, Taipei and National Museum of Asian Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.