In November 2003 Level Up, the inaugural Digital Games Research Conference took place in Utrecht, The Netherlands. This inaugural conference was organised by the University Utrecht in collaboration with the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) and leading academic and industry partners.
The conference committee
Conference Chair
Joost Raessens holds the chair of Media Theory at Utrecht University. He has been Visiting Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (2006) and Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Riverside (2004-2005).
He is member of the Council for the Humanities (KNAW) and is on the editorial board of Games and Culture (SAGE). He was the conference chair of the first Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference Level Up in Utrecht (2003).
Raessens’ current research concerns the ‘ludification of culture,’ focusing in particular on the playful construction of identities, on applied, serious and persuasive gaming, and on the notion of play as a conceptual framework for the analysis of media use. For more information about Joost click here.
In 2003 Marinka Copier was conference manager of Level Up, she also coordinated the conference proceedings. She designed the conference program with a clear vision and overarching goal to bridge the worlds of both game research and the gaming industry in a substantive program aimed at debate, discussion and discourse. Thanks to Marinka’s involvement in the Level Up conference we were able to develop a successful conference program resulting in a profound impact on research and industry.
Jeffrey Goldstein, affiliated Researcher at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON), Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University. Research: Applied media research; media psychology; violent video games; psychology of humor; toys, play and child development. For more information about Jeffrey click