Our research team is now complete, including Professor Olli Sotamaa (Principal Investigator), Postdoctoral Research Fellow Usva Friman (Project Manager, Leading Researcher in the area of player community studies), Doctoral Researcher Taina Myöhänen (Leading Researcher in game industry studies), Researcher Essi Taino, Doctoral Researcher Kalle Laakso, and Professor Frans Mäyrä (Senior Adviser).
Our work has started with a meeting with our steering group members from our partner organisations (Neogames Finland, We in Games Finland, The Finnish Esports Federation (SEUL), Female Gaming Finland, and Assembly Organizing). We will also have a meeting with our academic steering group members in the near future. We seek to work closely with our steering group members throughout the project to utilise their expertise and experience working with diversity, equity, and inclusion in game cultural contexts.
This spring, our project is focused on organising workshops for representatives from Finnish game industry, game communities, event organisations, and esports organisations, starting next week . In these workshops, our first aim is to identify the most central DEI challenges as well as existing good DEI practices in Finnish game culture. Based on this, we will create new solutions for building more sustainable game culture, to be pilot tested in various real-life environments next autumn.
We are very excited to be working on this topic with our wonderful partner organisations and steering group members and are looking forward to sharing more updates about our progress in the future!