Emma Witkowski

Dr Emma Witkowski is the Director for Playable Media and a Lecturer in the School of Media and Communications. As the Program Manager for the Bachelor of Games Design degree, Emma teaches theoretical units on Game Cultures and Game Studies.

Emma received her PhD in Game Studies in 2012 from the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, taking a qualitative exploration of networked high performance play, considered through a lens of sociology and phenomenology, sports and game studies. She has been working in the field of computer game cultures since 2005, the same year she co-founded the Danish state and privately funded initiative Letzplay, a project aimed at increasing young women’s access to ICT’s and computer gaming knowledge.

Her current research looks at various aspects of computer game cultures, including high performance networked teamplay, esports, gender and games and serious leisure practices. She has written and presented on topics such as identity and play, livestreaming and spectatorship, Mega-LANs, running aesthetics, and the phenomenology of high-performance networked teams.

Capabilities

Esports and Mega-LANs
Teamplay, cooperation and competition
Gender and game cultures
Digital ethnography, sports sociology & networked socio-phenomenolgical research
Running aesthetics, autoethnography and locative/social media

Projects

Games livestreaming & spectatorship
Esports

Publications

• Vossen, E., Voorhees, G., Taylor, N., Adams, M., Witkowski, E. (2017). Doing/undoing gender with the girl gamer in high performance play In:  Femininity and Games, Palgrave-MacMillan. (Expected 2017)
• Hjorth, L., Horst, H., Galloway, A., and Bell, G., Witkowski, E. (2017). Networked Zombies: Running, Gender and Play with Zombies, Run! In: The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography (Expected 2017)
• Witkowski, E. (2016).Cooperative Play In: Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon
• Witkowski, E. (2015). (In press) Running with zombies: Capturing new worlds through movement and visibility practices with Zombies, Run! In: Games and Culture, , 1 – 21
• Witkowski, E. (2014). Competition and Cooperation In: The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, Routledge, New York, United States
• Witkowski, E. (2013). Running from Zombies In: Proceedings of The 9th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment: Matters of Life and Death, Melbourne, Australia, 30 September – 1 October, 2013
• Witkowski, E. (2013). Eventful masculinities: Negotiations of hegemonic sporting masculinities at LANs In: Sports Videogames, Routledge, United States
• Witkowski, E. (2012). On the digital playing field: how we ‘do sport’ with networked computer games In: Games and Culture, 7, 349 – 374
• Taylor, T.,Witkowski, E. (2010). This is how we play it: What a mega-LAN can teach us about games In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games 2010, Monterey, United States, 19-21 June 2010
• Witkowski, E., Lybaek K. (2007). Negotiating Game Cultures: Reflections on Women’s gaming experiences In: Game ’in Action conference proceedings, Gothenburg, SE, May 2007