(Apologies for cross-posting) ** Welcome to CGDC & the World of Games Research ** Computer Games and Digital Cultures conference is a three-day event bringing together leading game professionals and academic research community. The conference dates are June 6-8, 2002 and conference will take place in Tampere, Finland. Conference keynotes are given by Warren Spector (Ion Storm, USA), Greg Costikyan (Unplugged Games, USA) and Eric Zimmerman (gameLab, USA). For more information, visit http://www.gamesconference.org/ The organising committee was pleasantly surprised by the amount and overall quality of submissions. The accepted proposals have been organised into eight sessions, including "Convergence and Games in New Platforms", "Meaning and Rhetoric in Games", "Games as an Audiovisual Media", "Research of Multi-User Games", "Play and Narrative in Games and Research", "Gaming Cultures", "Directions of Games Design" and "Case: EverQuest". For the full programme, see http://www.gamesconference.org/programme.html The participants will receive printed Conference Proceedings, which includes the full conference papers. A poster exhibition at the conference will introduce more works of games research and development. In addition, the first conference day will include workshops into the design, research and educational issues of games. For information on the workshop programme, see http://www.gamesconference.org/pf_workshop.html Registration The conference registration has now opened in the Computer Games and Digital Cultures conference website; see http://www.gamesconference.org/registration.html It is important to register early for the conference, as the amount of participants is limited. Also, there will be other major events in Tampere at the same time and it will most probably be hard to get accommodation after April 30. Computer Games and Digital Cultures conference is organised by the Hypermedia Laboratory of University of Tampere, in co-operation with the leading Nordic universities of the field and partners in the digital content industry. The conference continues the series of international game studies conferences opened by Computer Games and Digital Textualities in Copenhagen in 2001. Welcome to Tampere, and the world of games research! Best regards, -- Frans | Frans Mäyrä / Professor / Hypermedia Laboratory | | University of Tampere / http://www.uta.fi/hyper | | frans@iki.fi / tel 03 215 7933 / gsm 050 336 7650 |