Elena Esposito
Mark Andrejevic
Keynotes
Keynote by Sonia Fizek
Sonia Fizek is a games and media scholar. She holds a professorship in Media and Game Studies at the Cologne Game Lab at TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences. Fizek is also a visiting professor at the University of Lower Silesia in Wroclaw (Poland), a co-editor-in-chief of the international Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and a newly appointed DiGRA Sustainability Officer for the Digital Games Research Association. In her book Playing at a Distance (MIT Press 2022), she explores the borderlands of video game aesthetic with focus on automation, AI and posthuman forms of play. Fizek’s current research concentrates on the environmental sustainability of video games. She is a principal investigator of “Greening Games. Building Higher Education Resources for Sustainable Video Game Production, Design and Critical Game Studies” (2021-2024, https://greeningames.eu) and a scientific lead in the project “STRATEGIES. Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries” (2024-2027, https://www.strategieshorizon.eu).
Keynote by Vít Šisler
Vít Šisler is an associate professor of New Media Studies at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts’ Institute of Information Studies and Librarianship. He was a visiting Fulbright scholar at Northwestern University in Chicago. His research focuses on information and communication technologies in the Middle East, educational games and simulations, and social aspects of video games. He regularly publishes in high-impact journals (New Media & Society; Information, Communication & Society; Contemporary Educational Psychology) and was a guest speaker at several universities (Stanford; University of Pennsylvania; New York University). He is currently a senior researcher in the project Systemic Risk Institute (SYRI, LX22NPO5101). Vít Šisler is a co-founder of the award-winning Charles Games studio and was the lead game designer of the critically-acclaimed games: Attentat 1942 (Apple Design Award Nominee, 2021) and Svoboda 1945: Liberation (Grand Jury Award, IndieCade, 2022).
