[DiGRA UK] DiGRA UK: plans for the future

[Crawford Garry]

Dear all,
I could offer MediaCity for a meeting.
Good site, loads being added all the time, new bars & restaurants etc. Lowry, Imperial War Museum, even the Blue Peter garden.
Good transport links, metro straight from Manchester Piccadilly.
And we've got a nice building there too.
And there is now quite a collection of game researchers in the Greater Manchester area & just beyond.
By the way, if anyone's in the area on Wednesday, there is still about 20 free places left at my eSports conference at MediaCity. There will be free food & wine too. Drinks are on me!
Details here: http://www.digital.salford.ac.uk/page/esport
Best
Garry.

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Sent from Garry's iPhone

On 22 Oct 2016, at 15:00, Paolo Ruffino <contact at paoloruffino.com<mailto:contact at paoloruffino.com>> wrote:

Dear all,
Esther and I have been chatting for a while about re-starting the meetings of the DiGRA UK chapter. This is something I have also briefly discussed with some of you at the latest DiGRA-FDG conference in Dundee.

The plan, as we imagined it so far, would be to have a 1-2 days event in spring or early summer 2017, before the international DiGRA conference in Australia. We need a venue, and this is the first obstacle.

We also need to decide about the format. I have got the impression, speaking with some of you, that we want to achieve at least two things with this event. First of all, we want to preserve its informality and use it as an occasion for networking and to get to know each other, which is really important if we want to involve postgraduate students and, more generally, scholars who might be doing game research in isolation within their departments and who are unlikely to reach the international DiGRA conference.

Second, we also need to justify this event as a research leave. Thus, we need to have paper presentations and/or workshop sections, and presentations should receive meaningful feedback from the other participants.

The organisation depends, I think, on how much enthusiasm and support we gather. We could advertise the event, once we know location and date, and ask for paper and workshop proposals. These submissions could be peer-reviewed, and we'll need volunteers for that. We should probably then see how many submissions we have, and we should be flexible if we need to have more than one parallel session. I am not happy with having too many presentations at the same time, this does not need to be another big DiGRA, but your comments are welcome on this.

For the networking aspect, we could offer everyone a chance to introduce themselves with a 1 minute-1 slide session, which could work if we are less than 20-25. Otherwise, we'll have to think about something else (the solution might also just be having longer coffee breaks!).

If we are still interested and passionate about this, let's keep the ball rolling and let's get things started! I have found previous regional meetings to be very useful, and I would be sorry not to have more in the near future!

Please feel free to post your comments, ideas, suggestions, and let us know if you believe your institution could host the meeting. Thanks!

Best,

--
Dr. Paolo Ruffino
http://paoloruffino.com
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