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The Higher Education Video Game Alliance’s mission to support higher education in video games through information-sharing, resource development, and community engagement is underpinned by a commitment to openness and inclusion. We continue to work to foster inclusion and champion equity. HEVGA strives to increase dialogue and listening opportunities within our communities. We are committed to active intervention when members face discrimination, harassment, or other forms of exclusion.
To read entire statement, please click here.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Thursday, April 19 – The Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA), through its Diversity & Inclusion Committee, published today the following value statement on diversity & inclusion.
The Higher Education Video Game Alliance’s mission to support higher education in video games through information-sharing, resource development, and community engagement is underpinned by a commitment to openness and inclusion. We continue to work to foster inclusion and champion equity. HEVGA strives to increase dialogue and listening opportunities within our communities. We are committed to active intervention when members face discrimination, harassment, or other forms of exclusion. We will advocate for students, faculty, administrators, programs, and institutions as well as affiliates who are disadvantaged based on race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, religion, nationality, and migration status.
One of HEVGA’s primary goals is to work to expand the narrow understanding of the culture of games and game playing, recognizing the importance of access and inclusion for all. Historical and contemporary trends in games construct a limited stereotype of what defines a “gamer,” and renders invisible the nuance within communities who make and play games. Across the games industry, media, politics, academia, and game communities, this distorted and limited sense of gamer identities results in the erasure or minimization of many active participants who fail to fit the falsely assumed norm. We seek to challenge the current status quo that grants privilege and access to those from specific backgrounds by working against the exclusion of the diverse practices of gamers, game makers, and games scholars.
HEVGA values varied perspectives, approaches, and experiences. We are committed to creating a culture that welcomes and supports all people. To facilitate this, we commit to fostering inclusion by:
• Participating in conversations and public debates to advocate for the interests of our members in all their diversity, by doing our part to ensure that important moments of potential dialogue do not result in silence.
• Conducting and sharing research on the history and current context of games education to reveal enduring problems and move toward positive ends.
• Creating spaces to support and promote the games work of members from a rich diversity of backgrounds, traditions, and cultures.
• Listening to our membership through email communication with the Diversity & Inclusion Committee co-chairs, regular open meetings with the committee, and the establishment of an online community amongst the membership to help facilitate dialogue and discussion as we develop safe spaces for diversity in games and higher education.
• Acting to amplify under-represented and marginalized voices through forums, advocacy, and help with professional development.
See our committees page for a list of Diversity & Inclusion Committee members. To contact the co-chairs, email Alison Harvey and Phill Alexander.
GOTLAND, SWEDEN – April 26, 2018 – Last year, as part of the Gotland Game Conference (GGC), HEVGA co-hosted the Game Educators Summit in conjunction with Uppsala University. The Summit brought together educators from across Europe to discuss the structure of Game Educations in Europe, our unique needs within and across borders, and how to best expand HEVGA in Europe.
This year, HEVGA is continuing to grow its efforts in Europe by holding our first annual European Symposium of the Higher Education Video Game Alliance on the beautiful island of Gotland, Sweden. Uppsala University has been chosen by HEVGA as the first school to host the symposium and will co-locate it with the Gotland Game Conference to maximize cross-pollination.
The two day symposium will take place on June 7 & 8. The first day will feature presentations across a wide variety of areas such as research, game educations, pedagogy, game design, games, institutional barriers and successes, within and across borders barriers and successes, and programs or initiatives unique to Europe. Slots are available in 15 – 45 minute increments.
The second day will consist of a working meeting designed to bring together diverse institutions and individual backgrounds to take stock of where games and game educations in Europe are at now. The working meeting will explore how to create a platform that can further establish a European games community in higher education across borders. Specific topics include: how to secure funding, creating a network that connects educations, amplifying local achievements globally, and avenues for unified advocacy.
To join us for the first European Symposium of the Higher Education Video Game Alliance hosted by Uppsala University, click here.
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HEVGA announces 2018 Fellows
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – MARCH 20, 2018 – Established in 2017, The Higher Education Video Game Alliance Fellows Program recognizes senior scholars in the games domain who have made significant contribution to the field in design, theory, or research. HEVGA Fellows are elected by their peers for outstanding contributions to games-based research and design in higher education. Fellows serve as integral ambassadors for the organization and are inducted as lifetime members.
Because fellowship is achieved by election, there is no fellowship application process and nominations may only be submitted and confirmed by current Fellows. Consideration of a candidate begins with their nomination, followed by an extensive and careful vetting process that results in a final ballot of current Fellows.
In 2018, HEVGA’s Fellows inducted six new members, including one in memoriam.
2018 FELLOWS
STAFFAN BJÖRK
GOTHENBURG UNIVERSITY, SWEDEN
Staffan Björk is a full professor at the department of Computer Science and Engineering at Chalmers and Gothenburg University. He conducts research within the areas of gameplay design, pervasive games, and interaction design. A primary result of this work is the gameplay design patterns concept and the book Patterns in Game Design co-written with Jussi Holopainen. Together with Petri Lankoski he was editors for the bookGame Research Methods: An Overview. Staffan is one of the founders of DiGRA. More about Staffan.
BRENDA LAUREL
INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR
Brenda Laurel has worked in interactive media since 1976—in the computer game industry from Atari to Activision, and in research labs at Atari, Interval Research, and as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Labs. At the Banff Centre, she co-designed and produced the ground-breaking VR piece, Placeholder. She researched gender and technology at Interval and she co-founded Purple Moon—interactive media for girls—in 1996. She designed and chaired the Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design (2001-2006) and the Graduate Design Program at California College of the Arts (2006-2012). She also served as an adjunct Professor in the Games and Palayble Media Program at UC Santa Cruz (2013-2015). She is the author of several books. In 2015, she received the Trailblazer Award from Indiecade. More about Brenda.
RANDY PAUSCH
CARNEGIE MELLOW UNIVERSITY
Randy Pausch (October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was a professor of computer science, human-computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University. Randy was a virtual reality pioneer, co-founder of CMU’s Entertainment Technology Center, and creator of the Alice software project. In 2006, Randy learned he had terminal pancreatic cancer and was given 3-6 months to live. He is widely known for “The Last Lecture”, a lecture given following a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer. He co-authored a book of the same name, which became a New York Times best-seller. In May 2008, Randy was listed by Time as one of the World’s Top-100 Most Influential People. More about Randy.
ADRIENNE SHAW
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY
Adrienne Shaw is an Assistant Professor in Temple University’s Department of Media Studies and Production and School of Media and Communication graduate faculty. Her book Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture won the 2016 Outstanding Book Award from the Popular Communication Division of the International Communication Association. She also co-edited Queer Game Studies with Bonne Ruberg,Queer Technologies with Katherine Sender, andInterventions: Communication Research and Practice with D. Travers Scott. In addition, she is a founder of the LGBTQ Game Archive. More about Adrienne.
MIGUEL SICART
IT UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN
Miguel Sicart is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. He is the author ofThe Ethics of Computer Games, Beyond Choices: The Design of Ethical Gameplay, and Play Matters. Miguel teaches game and play design, and researches on the philosophy and design of digital playthings. More about Miguel.
NOAH WARDRIP-FRUIN
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA CRUZ
Noah Wardrip-Fruin is a Professor of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. With Michael Mateas he directs the Expressive Intelligence Studio, a technical and cultural research group that creates experimental games such as Prom Week, The Ice-Bound Concordance, and Bad News. With Pat Harrigan, he edited a series of books that contributed to the development of game studies: First Person, Second Person, andThird Person. He led the design of three interdisciplinary graduate programs, including the PhD in Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz, which welcomed its first students in Fall 2017. More about Noah.
Click here to read more about all HEVGA fellows.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – March 19, 2018 – The Higher Education Video Game Alliance (HEVGA) today announced the appointment of Lindsay Grace and Mirjam Eladhari to the Board of Directors. Both will serve on the Executive Committee, with Grace as Vice President and Eladahri in a non-officer role, filling vacant positions previously held by founding board members and fellows Constance Steinkuehler and Tracy Fullerton.
“Lindsay and Mirjam are two colleagues who have done phenomenal work in a wide array of areas and roles for decades combined. Their passion and commitment to furthering our community is clear and will push us forward in new directions. Lindsay and Mirjam have long been leaders in the field and are uniquely equipped to focus on several of our key goals, particularly the continued expansion of HEVGA’s footprint internationally. In 2017, we held our first international meeting on the island of Gotland in Sweden during the Gotland Game Conference (GGC) at Uppsala University. This year HEVGA will again partner with GGC and Uppsala to hold a two-day symposium co-located with the conference. Lindsay and Mirjam’s experience will be indispensable as we grow our capacity in Europe and beyond. Our initiatives, committees, and reports will benefit greatly from their knowledge as we build a rich network and community pushing the collective and interdisciplinary boundaries of our field. I respect them both deeply and truly look forward to serving alongside them,” said Andy Phelps, President.
In addition to the appointment of Grace and Eladhari, the board of directors will expand to seven members later this year. Details on the election process will be available this spring.
LINDSAY GRACE
Lindsay is an associate professor at American University and founding director of the American University Game Lab and Studio. He was the Fall 2017 Visiting Knight Chair at the University of Miami. His work has received awards and recognition from the Games for Change Festival, the Digital Diversity Network, the Association of Computing Machinery’s digital arts community, Black Enterprise and others. He has published more than 50 papers, articles and book chapters on games since 2009. His creative work has been selected for showcase internationally including New York, Paris, Sao Paolo, Singapore, Chicago, Vancouver, Istanbul, and others. He has given talks at the Game Developers Conference, SXSW, Games for Change Festival, the Online News Association, the Society for News Design, and many other industry events.Academic liason and former vice president (2015-2016) for the Global Game Jam™, Lindsay also served on the board for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) between 2013-2015.
MIRJAM ELADHARI
Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari is a game designer, researcher, and developer who entered the video game industry as a programmer in 2000. Her dissertation work (Teesside, 2010) explored characterisation and story construction in MMO’s focusing semi-autonomous avatars. Having focused on intelligent agents and story construction, her present research foci are AI based game design and story-making games. Her approach includes exploration of the game design space through experimental prototypes. She has worked as a game designer in various research projects, most recently in C2Learn. Mirjam has taught game design and related topics since 2004, and is now a senior lecturer at the department of Media Technology at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – February 26, 2018 – There is no evidence that video games cause school shootings or gun violence. As an organization whose researchers are dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, free speech, and academic freedom, we certainly would accept and amplify the results of a sound study that does––yet, after decades of research on the issue and a case before the United States Supreme Court, no such causal connection has been established. Why, then, are politicians blaming video games again? Because they need a scapegoat. This must stop.
The scientific debate over video games and violence is effectively over, and has been for years, but took a notable turn in the public forum in 2011 when the Supreme Court wrote in its 7-2 decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, “Psychological studies purporting to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively.”
Proponents of the connection in the real world often base their claims on several laboratory studies on aggression. However, any effects generated from these experiments and studies lasted for minutes and were comparable to the effects of watching cartoons, as noted by the high court, “the “effect sizes” of children’s exposure to violent video games are “about the same” as that produced by their exposure to violence on television . . . [T]he same effects have been found when children watch cartoons starring Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner, or when they play video games like Sonic the Hedgehog that are rated “E” (appropriate for all ages), or even when they “view a picture of a gun.”
Since the Supreme Court’s ruling, others have continued to refute connections between video games and violence. The American Psychological Association’s Media Psychology and Technology division’s report analyzing over two dozen studies writes that, “Scant evidence has emerged that makes any causal or correlational connection between playing violent video games and actually committing violent activities.” The Washington Post gathered data pointing out that consumption of video games does not correlate with gun violence. Journalists are well versed in the research and have written extensively on the topic in USA Today, The New York Times, Forbes, The Guardian, Fortune, BBC, and The Washington Post. All point again and again to the lack of evidence. And finally, the research of HEVGA members and others in the video game field, encompassing decades of work and thousands of peer-reviewed studies, provides overwhelming evidence that video games are vehicles for change, learning, empathy, and connectivity.
Former advisors at the White House in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, who started the effort to use games for impact at the federal level, also weighed in on this matter. Constance Steinkuehler, former HEVGA President and current professor at the University of California, Irvine, served as the first Senior Policy Analyst on games from 2011-2012 and briefed then Vice President Biden on the lack of supporting research following the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. She ran a subsequent meeting and listening session that included Biden, key White House staff, industry leaders, and top games researchers. Mark DeLoura, who served as the Senior Policy Analyst on games from 2013-2014 following Steinkuehler, wrote on Twitter, “In the previous administration we looked into this and learned that the research does not support any such correlation.” The current administration has not filled a similar or related post.
If the research debate on video games and violence has been settled in the academy and by two branches of the federal government, then why––despite the Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association ruling, the voluminous research on the positive effects of games, the work in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and even the megaphone of the popular press––are politicians still blaming video games as the cause of gun violence and shootings when it directly contradicts the overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
As Erik Kain stated in Forbes, “Shifting the focus to violent video games is just one of many strategies used to divide and distract rather than unite and problem solve.” The National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre, following Sandy Hook, blamed video games in a press conference, throwing their hat into the ring in what has now become an overused strategy for politicians and other stakeholders. The effect was loud and clear: you can still blame games, despite the recent evidence, and continue to use them as an easy scapegoat.
That is why we are issuing this statement: the core values of the university––the pursuit of knowledge, academic integrity, public and community engagement––demand it. When we observe politicians misrepresenting the facts for political purposes, scapegoating important issues, and quashing genuine public conversation, it is our responsibility to defend the truth. When we see them proposing games legislation based on unsound research in repeated attempts to avoid their own duty to directly address the core issue at hand, we must respond.
If Washington wants to enact legislation for positive change in America on the subject of gun violence, then it should do so, but it should leave video games out of the debate. They have no place there.
Proposed inclusion in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) stigmatizes billions of players worldwide, is based on little scholarly evidence, and proposes no treatment or prevention
WASHINGTON, D.C. – January 4, 2018 – It is with great dismay that during the holiday season we read about the proposal at the World Health Organization (WHO) to enact a new classification for a ‘gaming disorder’ in its International Classification of Diseases (ICD). Already, some of the popular press is reporting the proposed addition to the list of ‘mental diseases’, ‘mental health conditions’, and other similar phrasing and terminology. While WHO is careful to point out that the proposal is limited in characterizing the disorder as “recurrent” gaming behavior manifested by “impaired control over gaming,” and “escalation of gaming despite the occurrence of negative consequences”, it is nonetheless the case that an additional classification of gaming as an addictive disorder will do little to combat cases of abuse rooted in individual behavior, not symptomatic of a particular medium. Of particular concern is that classifying gaming as a disorder will broadly seek to stigmatize a pastime that billions of players enjoy without issue around the world, and will also warp continued research into the issue in ways that seek to confirm classification rather than allow for open and transparent research without bias. We do not support WHO in this classification scheme in the strongest possible terms.
While we strongly support the notion of responsible design, community engagement, and engaged citizenship on behalf of both the games community, the game development industry, and the scholarly and academic community studying both these media forms and their effects, we find very little scholarly evidence to support the classification as proposed. Instead, this effort seeks to create a distinction between engagement with this form of media and all other consumption where one may not exist (e.g., binge watching and other consumption patterns). Moreover, it confuses the context and terminology between ‘gaming’, which commonly refers to gambling, and the playing of digital video games. Perhaps most importantly, this classification proposes no prevention or treatment options.
We’ve seen this kind of scapegoating before with both games and other media forms for centuries. Prior to digital games, we saw similar claims made of chess, solitaire, pen-and-paper role-playing games, and other forms of media, entertainment, and broadcasting. In the 18th and 19th centuries, women were seen as incapable of distinguishing the fiction of novels from everyday life in attempts to maintain the status quo and gender inequities, much in the same way various demographics and market segments are today cast as microcosms of other hot topic societal ills. We’ve watched as games are repeatedly blamed in today’s world for violence, childhood obesity, failures in educational policy, and a host of other contemporary issues, despite both a lack of evidence and careful consideration of other, often far more powerful, systemic forces that contribute to societal behavior. Games are commonly referred to as ‘addictive’ despite numerous conflicting studies and a clear lack of consensus from the scientific and medical communities. Yet certain groups, and some of the press, seem intent on singling out this form of media and play as uniquely dangerous, regardless of the fact that games are enjoyed by over 2 billion gamers worldwide and have also had a positive effect on STEM education, as well as related fields in the humanities and social sciences.
To be sure, a classification may help with insurance and naming done properly can be of significant benefit, but instead of jumping to premature conclusions in ways that may be potentially damaging and could further alienate disparate parts of our societies, we first encourage everyone to continue to conduct the necessary research to study the ways that games affect our lives as a cultural and iconic form of media in this day and age. It is clear that the role of digital media in today’s world is of critical import–from our politics to how we educate the next generation. With careful, neutral study, non-biased reporting, and a critical eye towards sensationalism, we believe we can better understand the impact games have in our lives, and that includes caring for those among us whose behaviors during play may become damaging. But, in order to provide the best possible care to those truly in need, and to not cause harm through mis- or overdiagnosis, we must not needlessly stigmatize gaming as a disorder. Singling out a specific form of digital media based on the limited evidence presented to date is unwarranted, and does not advance either the care and treatment options for those in need, or our greater understanding of the role and impact of this media in matters of society and culture.