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Application for the DIGRA executive board

I, Annika Waern, hereby declare my interest in serving at the DIGRA executive board. I am willing to serve in any position except cashier.

If elected, my chief mission will be to further develop DIGRA as a high standard academic community which attracts a wide interest from game researchers around the globe.  In this, I believe that the DIGRA conference is central and that the academic reputation of the conference needs to be raised. DIGRA needs to offer a prestigious publication route and the conference needs to establish itself as the most important meeting place for game academics. A particular issue is that researchers from different fields expect very different procedures for submitting and accepting presentations at conferences; this issue needs to be resolved and might require innovative solutions. My concrete suggestion is to complement the conference with a DIGRA journal and develop a joint review process for the conference and journal that is sufficiently flexible to support the modes of research in  wide range of fields. In addition, it is important that DIGRA continues to ensure that the conference is similarly organised every year; a conceret suggestion is to develop a conference 'support package' including both "tips and tricks" lists, and some central resources (e.g. access to a review system).

Short C.V.

I have a background from Games research for the last five years, most notably as the coordinator of the EU project IPerG: Integrated Project of Pervasive Gaming. I head the Games research group at the Interactive Institute (Stockholm, Sweden) and I am also one of the four research leaders for the excellence center Mobile Life at Stockholm University. I hold a Ph.D. in computer and system sciences from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (2006), Sweden and I am also Docent (assistant professor) in the same subject from the same university (2007). I have served at various boards for conferences and journals for many years, and acted as reviewer for DIGRA in 2007 and 2009.

A few example publications

Waern, A. and Denward, M. (2009) On the edge of reality: Reality fiction in Sanningen om Marika. Proceedings of DIGRA 2009, to appear.

Montola, M., Stenroos J. and Waern, A. Pervasive Games: Experiences on the boundary between life and play. Focal Press, 2009.

Waern, Annika, Montola, Markus and Stenros, Jaakko. (2009) The Three-Sixty Illusion: Designing For Immersion in Pervasive Games. Proceedings of CHI'09: International Conference on Computer-Human Interaction. Boston, MA April 2009.

Bichard, John Paul and Waern Annika. Pervasive Play, Immersion and Story: designing Interference. In proceedings of DIMEA '08: the 3rd international conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts, Athens, Greece, September 2008. Pages 10-17.

Stenros, J., Montola, M., Waern, A. & Jonsson, S. (2007): Play it for Real: Sustained Seamless Life/Game Merger in Momentum. In Baba, Akira (ed.) (2007): Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Situated Play conference, september 24.-28, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan. Pages 121-129.