The English and American Studies of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Debrecen organized a two-day international conference in English with the participation of 12 countries entitled Games and Language. The professional conference is the first domestic event that presented the achievements of game science from the perspective of the humanities.
The conference, which was held on October 20-21 in a hybrid – online and face-to-face – format, focused on the relationship between games and language. The speakers came from different parts of the world in virtual or personal form, most of them as representatives of European institutions, including Spain (Universidad Internacional de La Rioja and University of Alcalá), Turkey (Hacettepe University), the United Kingdom (Durham University) or Italy (IULM University), but there were also participants from the United States and Singapore.
The conference was brought about by a shortage in Hungarian academic life, as the forums and institutions of the discipline of game studies, which has been institutionalized internationally for at least twenty years – mainly referred to here as game science – are still not developed in Hungary, even though game research communities already exist in the surrounding countries
– the chief organizer of the meeting, Zsófia Orosz-Réti, assistant professor of the non-independent Department of British Culture at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Debrecen, said.
Conferences aimed at examining video games and games, in general, have already been held in Hungary before, but they primarily approached the topic from an IT, economic or philosophical point of view, and not from the perspective of culture.
The study of games – whether it is the research of video games, tabletop role-playing games, board games, or other forms of play – is fundamentally an interdisciplinary discipline, and this is also reflected in the presentations of the conference, since in addition to literature and theater studies, classical disciplinary approaches with long traditions also appeared, such as pedagogy, aesthetics, or such novel disciplines as nostalgia research or affect theory
– stated in his opening speech the co-organizer of the event, Ph.D. candidate Norbert Krek-Polyák, Ph.D. student of the Faculty of Humanities Doctoral School of Literary and Cultural Sciences.
Video games and related activities and institutions, such as YouTube or Twitch, are now an unavoidable part of digital culture, so the academic conference also created an opportunity for the University of Debrecen’s lecturers and PhDs to present the results of domestic research at the international level.
– The event is good for building relationships, and it is also a good opportunity to initiate professional discussions about further research on the topic, or even the creation of joint publications, and all this creates the basis for the continuation of the event organized with the intention of creating tradition – said Balázs Venkovits, the Director of the Faculty of HumanitiesEnglish and American Studies.
Several of the lecturers associated with the University of Debrecen are instructors of theEnglish and American Studies, who are actively involved in video game research. The institute is one of the few Hungarian professional workshops that continuously offers game studies courses to students. At the conference, several lecturers, Ph.D. students and doctoral candidates from the Department of Communication and Media Studies of UD presented their work through the Tabletop Role Playing Research Group, which is the first research organization of its kind in Hungary.ű
(unideb.hu)
