Regionality, History, and Game Studies
Víctor Navarro-Remesal (Barcelona), 12.00 CET, 11 December 2025
Join via Zoom (link)
This talk explores how regional perspectives shape the history, aesthetics, and narratives of video games, with a focus on Europe and Japan. While game studies has long been dominated by global or industry-centric frameworks, this talk invites audiences to reconsider video games through the lens of regionality as culturally situated, historically grounded, and locally adapted media forms. For this, the talk will take a mix of theoretical and practical approaches, drawing on the speaker’s own research on European video games and his ongoing curatorial work with the Japan Foundation in Spain, to trace how regional histories, cultural identities, and design practices have influenced the development of distinct game cultures, and how we can approach them as scholars and build a more plural and situated game history.
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Víctor Navarro-Remesal is a game scholar from TecnoCampus, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), where he teaches History of Games, Games as Cultural Industries, and Interactive Narrative. He is the current president and a founding member of DiGRA Spain and the co-president of the History of Games conferences. His upcoming book as an author is ‘Zen and Slow Games’ (MIT Press, 2026). His last books as an editor are ‘Fragmentos y microhistorias del videojuego europeo’ (Shangrila, 2024) and ‘Perspectives on the European Videogame’ (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). His research interests include player freedom, Zen-inspired games and slow gaming, regional game studies, and game preservation. Currently, he’s one of the two Principal Investigators of the project ‘Ludomythologies: Myths and ideology in contemporary video games’.
This seminar is part of the “Reclaiming Transnationalism” seminar series, co-organised by Stanisław Krawczyk (Wrocław) within the framwork of the “Young Network TransEurope” at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. For further information about the seminar and the series please contact: Stanisław Krawczyk.