STRATEGIES welcomes new researchers from Malta and Germany
The STRATEGIES project - a Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries - welcomes new researchers to our team. We are growing our expertise in games and sustainability, and supporting the next generation of researchers to make a difference.
Christian Paller is supporting the STRATEGIES team on work packages 2, 5 and 6, focussing specifically on the board game industry and on board game design for sustainablility. He will be based at the University of Malta, where he will be completing a PhD project alongside his work on STRATEGIES. Christian holds a degree in Geography and Environment from the London School of Economics and an MSc from the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta. He is currently a PhD candidate at the same institute. His research interests focus on the experiential aspects of board gaming and the potential of board games as tools for disseminating knowledge and ideas. In addition to his academic pursuits, Christian is affiliated with Mighty Boards, a prominent board game design studio in Malta.
Christian Paller, Researcher at the University of Malta
Ruth Dorothea Eggel is a cultural anthropologist and gender studies scholar who will be working at TH Köln on work package 2. Her research focuses on digital ethnography of technosocial lifeworlds and the anthropology of play and games. Inspired by feminist science and technology studies, she likes to engage in playful thinking and tinkering in her academic work. To explore the interplay of techno-logics and socio-material configurations of practice, she appreciates the micro-analytical approach of ethnography and its ability to adapt and develop customised tools for qualitative empirical inquiries. With her passion for planetary issues of ecological sustainability, she is excited to explore sustainable game development practices in the STRATEGIES project.
In her dissertation “Embodying Gaming” at the University of Bonn, Ruth analysed the semiotic-material re-configurations and the embodied enactments of digital gaming culture at gaming events in Europe. She holds MA degrees in cultural anthropology and interdisciplinary gender studies from the University of Graz. Enthusiastic about interdisciplinary research and academic exchange, she is a member of the STS research collective "RUSTLab", the "Digital Anthropology Lab" and the "Code Ethnography Collective". She has taught courses on qualitative methods and ethnography, digital anthropology, the anthropology of games, feminist and postcolonial critique, and urban anthropology at the Universities of Bonn, Graz, and Vienna.
At TH Köln, Ruth will also be joined by Isabel Grünberg, a student research assistant on Work Package 2. Isabel is a Master's student at the Cologne Game Lab. She wrote her Bachelor thesis about “Integrated AR - a critique of existing applications and a proposal for a new theoretical and practical approach to AR application for museum spaces”. Before her studies, she worked as a state licensed educator in different pedagogical facilities, such as kindergartens and a psychological clinic for children and youngsters. In her free time, Isabel leads the Gamestalente Akademie - an academy hosted by Bildung & Begabung and the Stiftung Digitale Spielekultur to educate teenagers on digital game development. Furthermore, Isabel is an active organization member at GAME:IN - a community of individuals and companies committed to combating sexism within the German games industry. Isabel advocates for inclusive representation in the gaming world and strives to be a positive role model for other FLINTA* who want to enter the gaming industry. In the STRATEGIES project, Isabel is responsible of collecting and process information on sustainability in game production & development as a research assistant.
