Yavuz Kerem Demirbaş

Associate Professor, Marmara University, Istanbul, Türkiye

Yavuz Kerem Demirbaş is a researcher specializing in digital games and media. Before transitioning his passion for games into an academic pursuit, he contributed to Level digital game magazine and several other prominent computer magazines with game reviews. Since 2008, he has been an active member of the Turkish chapter of DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association), currently serving as the chapter's contact person. His research interests include the ontology of digital games, gamification, and game aesthetics.  He is teaching digital games, gamification, and media technologies courses. He is organizing the Digital Games section of iLAB (Communication Research and Application Laboratory) at Marmara University. He has been a visiting researcher at both City University of New York and Utrecht University. He has authored two books on digital games: Video Game Auteur and Oyuna Yer Açın: Dijital Oyunlara Eleştirel Yaklaşımlar. In the field of media studies, he served as the editor for Hakikat, Temsil, İnşa: Medyada Gerçekliğin Krizleri. In addition to his publications on digital games and media, he also has books on digital photography and 3D printing. He is the designer of the video game Huys (2009), recognized as one of Turkey's pioneering examples of newsgames.

Mateusz Felczak

Assistant Professor, SWPS University, Warsaw, Poland

Mateusz Felczak is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Humanities, SWPS University, Warsaw, Poland. He holds a PhD in Arts Sciences from the Jagiellonian University. His research interests include cRPGs, streaming media, modding and eSports. Felczak is a member of the Digital Games Research Association, the Games Research Centre at the Jagiellonian University, and the Center for Cultural Research of Technologies at SWPS University. His previous research project, financed by the Polish National Science Centre, involved investigating large-scale eSports events in Poland and Hong Kong. He has published papers in Convergence, Game Studies and Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds, among others. Felczak’s most recent work on the history of modding in digital games based on the Dungeons & Dragons system would be published in the Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons anthology (edited by P. Sidhu, M. Carter and J.P. Zagal, The MIT Press 2024).