The PhD Consortium is a space where PhD students can present their on-going research, while getting detailed and insightful feedback from their peers and from senior colleagues. Participants share their research in advance before meeting in the room and their allocated time is used for questions and discussions. It is meant to be a friendly, participative environment the improve their projects, seek for guidance, and consolidate the strong points of their work.

This workshop will introduce TikTok as a way to engage with game culture and audiences, and guides workshop participants in playful exploration and experimentation of the highly popular short video platform.

The objective of this workshop is to describe what is known about crunch and other psychosocial risk factors related to work in game development as well as to provide information and strategies to professionals in the industry to deal with these issues.

Our workshop proposes a Remote Reality Game for DiGRA participants, half of the participants should be in Guadalajara and half of them call in from around the world. Participants are paired and become one character with two bodies: player and avatar.

In this workshop, we will use breaching experiments (Crabtree, 2004) and artistic interventions as a heuristic device (i.e., an experiential learning tool) to explore visible and invisible barriers to ludic engagement in public places near the conference venue.

Is for a synchronous, web-based virtual workshop. Based on status as contingent faculty, neither organizer can attend in-person based on limited or no travel funding. We believe this workshop could provide great value to people attending or presenting remotely as part of other talks and panels.

The goal of the workshop is to explore the design space informing contemporary immersive and mixed reality design from the perspective of folklore and analog gaming traditions, such as role-playing and journaling games. While connected to the idea of Pervasive Games, games that take place in real-world spaces (Montola), this practice is more aligned with the trend of solo role-playing games, where the play itself can be an act of reality crafting and mixing.

This workshop responds to the question: why isn’t the hegemonic RPG Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) the site of more work by writers interested in transformative and subversive play? In January 2023, Wizards of the Coast released its System Reference Document (SRD), a base collection of rules for D&D, under a CC-BY 4.0 license. The SRD, combined with two self-publishing platforms, Drivethru RPG and DM’s Guild, offers opportunities for independent writers to reach a vast audience of gamers.

In this workshop we address these problems by exploring formalism as a design philosophy (rather than a method) to help designers create unconventional games. Formalism forms an excellent framework for design, since it is specific in its focus on the ways games trigger a defamiliarizing experience, i.e., moments where games break expectations, yet broad enough to account for the design of a wide variety of analogue and digital games.

This workshop aims to draw out these interdisciplinary and inter-generational connections between game studies and Latin America, in order to understand complex world interactions among epistemological fields and the diverse ways game studies knowledge is appropriated and developed in different cultures.

From the interest to investigate about the challenges that come from working with and from video games in Latin America, we found important to know in depth the aspects that involve the worlds of work and video games.

The workshop will provide a unique opportunity for participants to engage in physical activities practised for centuries, offering a hands-on experience beyond theoretical knowledge. By actively participating in these games, individuals will be able to grasp the cultural nuances, strategic elements, and values embedded in them, fostering a more profound connection to the roots of this subcontinental culture.

Every year there are dozens of doctoral students and other early career scholars who attend the DiGRA conference for the first time. Many of them do not get much support from their home institution or department, and in this respect the DiGRA conference and the enveloping international community can play a more significant role than we sometimes think of. To better identify the central needs and the required support structures, we propose a DiGRA mentoring programme.

Participants will come to the workshop with an ongoing or upcoming project in mind and leave with an ADE plan to embed anti-racism, decolonization, and EDI into the research questions, execution of project (including methodologies and organization of the lab or team), and knowledge dissemination strategy.

This workshop invites scholars to explore the complexities and implications of the post-Anthropocene in order to expand our understanding of how digital games can engage with, and respond to, the challenges of the present moment, and the anxieties and opportunities presented by our uncertain futures. Crucially, we ask: how does thinking about the confluence of these ‘posts’ in games influence critical thinking and theory?

One of the main challenges in smart cities is to improve or adapt the behavior of citizens for good actions that impact their overall quality of life. This workshop offers a set of presentations on how different playgrounds in urban physical or digital spaces can help to create a better city. Looking at different dimensions of a city, such as education, healthcare, cybersecurity, mobility, and economy, we present in the workshops different examples and assets to help cities to become better spaces for living.

The workshop “Research Groups on Video Games in Latin America” focuses on providing a space for each research group to present their past and ongoing projects, as well as their lines of research. The main objective is to foster collaboration among different researchers, promoting the exchange of ideas and the establishment of collaborative links in the field of research. The workshop will be mainly conducted in Spanish.