[Ea Christina Willumsen]

Hi all,

Found this group thanks to Cody’s post on the DiGRA Students Group. Great initiative! I personally like to keep my academic engagements off social media as much as possible.

My name is Ea and I’m a PhD student at the University of Bergen in Norway. I’m a part of the Media Aesthetics Research Group and the Institute for Information Science and Media Studies, but fortunately I am not forced to build my diss around aestehtic theory; rather, it’s very game studies-centric, theoretical, some might even say FORMALIST or STRUCTURALIST, although those terms may be derogatory to some (constantly changing my mind on that, hence I attempt to avoid labels).

My dissertation is focused on the relationship between avatars and gameworlds and is rooted in a data-set consisting of analysis of 100 different titles. While this make it seem as if it’s an empirically driven project, it’s actually more of a theoretical investigation where I attempt a pragmatic approach to avatar-typologization through a bottom-up approach. I engage with a bunch of different avatar theories (Vella, Klevjer, Banks, Bayliss, Westecott, etc.), primarily to problemitize the idea of “one-definition-to-rule-them-all”. Rune Klevjer and Kristine Jørgensen are my supervisors.

I have a MA in Game Analysis from the IT University of Copenhagen, where I did my thesis on what I term Automated Avatar Actions and Character Autonomy, under the supervision of Espen Aarseth. I have a BA in Communication and Computer Science and like to occasionally dive in to the more technical aspects of games, for example how reading of source code can contribute to more formal game analyses.

I’m excited to follow the development of this forum!

[Author]

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