About the lecture

Do you consider the games you play on your phone to be real games? If someone told you they liked the genre of "walking simulator" games, would that strike you as a genre at the margins of game culture? What repercussions do the choices that games researchers make about the games they study — or ignore — have on our theories about who plays games, how they play, and why? How do all of these judgments affect how the game industry designs, makes and markets games? This talk explores these and many more questions, focusing on how definitions of what a "real game" is have changed over the years, some of the criteria we've used to make those judgments, and what the fallout might be.

About the speaker

Mia Consalvo is professor and Canada Research Chair in game studies and design at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the co-author of Real Games: What's Legitimate and What's Not in Contemporary Videogames (2019) and Players and their Pets: Gaming Communities from Beta to Sunset (2015). She is also co-editor of Sports Videogames (2013) and the Handbook of Internet Studies (2011), and is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (2007) as well as Atari to Zelda: Japan's Videogames in Global Context (2016).

Consalvo runs the mLab, a space dedicated to developing innovative methods for studying games and game players. She's a member of the Centre for Technoculture, Art & Games (TAG), she has presented her work at industry as well as academic conferences including regular presentations at the Game Developers Conference. She is the past president of the Digital Games Research Association, and has held positions at MIT, Ohio University, Chubu University in Japan and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.