On Chairing a Games Research Conference

Abstract

Chairing an academic conference, especially one like DiGRA, is a great honor and a great responsibility: it grants you a fair amount of power, at least for a short amount of time. I thought I would take advantage of that power and this platform to share my personal thoughts and opinions on what it means to run an academic conference in this field. In doing so I hope to clarify some of the things that, to me at least, were opaque about the process of chairing a conference. While I knew that chairing was a lot of work, understanding what that work was, how things should be done, and why they should be done a certain way was not clear to me until I was in the middle of it all. I hope that what follows serves two purposes: (1) clarify some of what is involved in chairing a conference in hopes that others (including students and new members to the field) can better understand some of the practices of this academic community and (2) encourage reflection and discussions on our practices and how they could be improved.