The European video game exists. Do we need it?

Victor Navarro-Remesal, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

This presentation discusses the idea of the “European video game” as a category separated from North American and Japanese video games, tackling it from the benefits but also dangers it presents to nationalism, identities, and democratic culture. In 2021, we edited a book titled Perspectives on the European Videogame that proposed an inquiry into the shared elements of games made in Europe, including both analyses of transnational aspects of European production and close readings of national specificities. The authors in the collection focused on European works and creators but also addressed contextual aspects within a wider sociocultural and philosophical ground. After that, we saw the need to go to the roots of our object and we are now currently working on a second volume, dedicated to historical elements. Our ongoing experience has shown us that there are benefits to using the concept, such as illuminating contextual factors that might be overlooked in a global perspective and dialogues and exchanges between regions, but also that the label risks being misapplied to construct a unified object with a fix cultural identity that separates its in-group. The European video game exists, and we need it to better understand history and cross-pollination, refusing essentialisms.

Víctor Navarro-Remesal is game scholar from Tecnocampus, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). He is the current president and a founding member of DiGRA Spain and the co-president of the History of Games conferences. His last book as an editor is ‘Perspectives on the European Videogame’ (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). His research interests include player freedom, Zen-inspired games and slow gaming, regional game studies, and game preservation. Currently, he’s one of the two Principal Investigators of the project Ludomythologies: Myths and ideology in contemporary video games.