Full seminar programme published and audience registration open

Usva Friman

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

You can also find information of the seminar practicalities at: https://springseminar.org/2024-practicalities

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.

Registration form: https://forms.office.com/e/m98esqYy3x

Spring seminar 2024 paper notifications sent

Usva Friman

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.

Commentator announcement for 2024 Spring Seminar ‘Meta’

Usva Friman

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!