What follows will be familiar to you. British scholars have been consistent participants in the field of games research since its inception. There is an established tradition of game making across the nation; indeed, game development is the most widely dispersed of the UK’s creative industries beyond London. Our universities were early adopters of games into the curriculum, and we host a long-running national chapter of DiGRA – British DiGRA – that holds a remit to promote, support and develop British (digital) games research.

But hang on <record scratch> what is that? What, exactly, is British games research?

As researchers, we often gesture towards distinct national or regional games research cultures, to some extent characterised by publication in specific journals (with, for example, Game Studies having strong associations with Scandinavian game research traditions, Games and Culture a North American flavour, and GAME an alignment with Italian game studies). Researchers in Britain lack a similar venue, so how can we and do we imagine what “British games research” is? What are we about, intellectually?

Researchers have pointed to the importance of understanding games as both global (Kerr 2017) and local (Swalwell 2021), and recent years have seen increasing scholarly interest in both national and regional traditions in connection with games (e.g. Navarro-Remesal and Pérez-Latorre 2021; Švelch 2022). This has been parallelled by growing attention to the idea of regional/local games studies as well (e.g. Liboriussen and Martin 2016) but this has not yet extended to work on British game studies specifically.

If literature has addressed the idea of what a British game could be (e.g. Wade 2016; Webber 2020), we still don’t know – perhaps have not even thought about – what British games research is. This year, the British DiGRA conference seeks to answer that question. We will use this conference as an opportunity to map and take stock of current games research taking place in Britain, and/or in relation to Britishness.

The conference takes place in Birmingham, the heartland of British cultural studies, hosted by a research centre indebted to that distinctive intellectual tradition, characterised by attention to representation, ideology, identities, and the tension between the global and the local. Inspired by this critical approach, we ask: what is distinguishable, and even distinctive, about British games research? How can we talk about British games research in a way that embraces the diversity of culture in Britain? How do constructions of Britishness relate to ideas of Europeanness and to the constituent countries of the UK?

BDiGRA 2025 conference