We are very happy to announce that we have now published our full seminar programme, including our social programme at: https://springseminar.org/2024-programme
Importantly, our audience registration is now open! The registration deadline is Monday 22 April, but we will have limited audience seats available, so please register as early as possible.
Submissions for our 20th spring seminar ‘Meta’ have now been reviewed and notifications sent to authors. We received 56 submissions and were able to accept 22. The submissions presented a wide range of interesting, high-quality contributions to the seminar theme. During the review process, we considered not only the overall quality and promise of the submitted abstract and its topic and approach to the seminar theme, but also each abstract in relation to other submissions to facilitate discussion and synergy between all the presentations, so that the authors will benefit from the seminar in developing their work further. Unfortunately, we do not have the opportunity to provide individual feedback on submissions in the abstract phase.
We are very excited about the wonderful programme we will be able to offer in this seminar in early May in Tampere! Please follow this page for updates regarding the full programme and registration.
We are proud to announce that this year’s seminar will play host to not two, but three expert commentators:
Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux are associate professors at the University of California, Davis where they make, play, and think about games together. Their research and teaching engage media theory and media art, game studies and game design to explore the community practices and material histories of play. Their first book, Metagaming, is about the games people play in, on, around, and through videogames—from romhacking and speedrunning to esports tournaments and alternative control. They also have been developing a small series of metagames together like Triforce, a topological transformation of The Legend of Zelda, and the Octopad, an eight-player controller for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Additionally, they are cast members of Every Game in This City, a podcast about playing well together on the Idle Thumbs Network. For more information visit https://stephanieboluk.com and https://patrick-lemieux.com.
Sebastian Deterding is a translational design researcher working on tools and methods to make psychology actionable for designers – and advance psychology with design-based research. He is most well-known for his work in games HCI and gamification. He holds a Chair in Design Engineering at the Dyson School at Imperial College London, is founding editor-in-chief of the journal ACM Games: Research and Practice, co-editor of The Gameful World (MIT Press, 2015) and Role-Playing Game Studies (Routledge, 2018), and has helped create engaging experiences touching millions of users for organisations including ABB, Amazon, BBC, BMW, Greenpeace, KLM, Novartis, Supercell, and many others.
We are so glad to be welcoming these scholars to Tampere in May and hope to be able to host many of you as well!
Work has been started on next year’s seminar. Please follow this site, as the announcement and call for the Spring Seminar 2024 is forthcoming next week.
Note that the registration period for seminar participation has now been closed. Looking forward to the seminar to start – meanwhile, please have a look at the Program, and Travel & venue pages for more information on seminar and staying in Tampere.
There is now a preliminary version of the Spring Seminar 2023 program published; you can find if from this link: https://springseminar.org/program/. Note that there can still be some changes into the program. There will be an open call for non-presenting participants into the seminar, announced a bit later.
Due to some recent requests, the deadline for Spring Seminar: Party! has been extended. The new abstract deadline is on February 3rd, 2023. We are looking forward to your submissions! See the full Call for Papers from here.
Happy New Year Everyone! It’s time to confirm the expert commentators giving feedback on the papers presented in the seminar. They are Mia Consalvo from Concordia University and Olli Sotamaa from Tampere University! Read more about the commentators.
As part of its 20th Anniversary festivities, Tampere University Game Research Lab invites scholars to an international seminar exploring the diverse connections between parties/partying and games/play. Party! is the 19th annual Tampere spring seminar, and as always, we strongly encourage submitting late-breaking results, works-in-progress, as well as submissions from early-career researchers (including graduate and PhD students). Party people, check out the Call for Papers, and come party with us in May 2023!
Meta 