Professor Tanya Krzywinska

Professor of Digital Games

Tanya started playing computer-based games on Usenet when working at the Digital Equipment Corporation while doing her Masters in film. Several years later, after completing her PhD and teaching film and media, she realised that there was very little academic writing about video games and decided to remedy that. She gave her earliest paper on horror games at one of the first-ever academic conferences on games in 2000 and, soon after, edited with Geoff King the first collection of essays to be devoted to the study of the relationship between games and cinema. Since then, she has focused her attention mainly on games, with a particular interest in developing the use of games technologies and design in heritage contexts. She has also maintained her enthusiasm for the gothic and horror generally across various media.

Joining forces with Steve Jackson, a veteran of the games industry, in 2005, Tanya developed and convened a successful MA focused on videogame design, boasting 60% graduate employability in the games industry. Subsequently, a suite of BAs in Games Design were added to her portfolio of course development, most recently a single honours award in games design. She has joined Falmouth University to bring her expertise and experience to the development of a Digital Games Academy that will offer a suite of Games BA(Hons) and BSc(Hons) courses in Digital Game Art, Animation, Design, Music, Programming and Writing in 2014. She supervises PhD students on the Games Doctoral programme.

Over the course of her career, Tanya has had published many articles and books on screen-based and interactive media fiction. She became president of the Digital Games Research Association in 2006 and has been the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Games and Culture, published by Sage https://journals.sagepub.com/home/gac. The journal has an impact factor of 1.574 and a 5-year impact factor of 1.685. She is also an artist with a studio at Krowji, Redruth. www.tanyakrzywinska.com

External websites

My website

Email	tanya.krzywinska@falmouth.ac.uk
Telephone	01326 259357 (ext 59357)

Qualifications

Year	Qualification	Awarding body
2012	MA Authorial Illustration (distinction)	Falmouth University
1996	PhD	University of North London
1992	MA Modern Drama & Film	Polytechnic of North London
1988	BA (Hons) Modern European Literature and Film & Drama (2:1)	Reading University

Honours and awards

Year	Description
2009	MA Digital Games Theory & Design Dr Krzywinska developed for Brunel University was short-listed for Times Higher Innovation in Teaching in the Arts 2009.
2015	DiGRA Distinguished Scholar award
2017	Winner of the Staff Excellence Award in the Outstanding Innovation or Research Category
2020	Elected as Higher Education Video Game Alliance Fellow

Membership of external committees

Digital Games Research Association
International Gothic Association
Editor-in-Chief of journal Games and Culture (Sage)

Research Interests

Research interests and expertise

Tanya's research interests are largely within the domains of digital games, transmediality and immersion, mixed and augmented reality in terms of content and experience. She has be working with museums and heritage providers, co-designing apps and experiences focused on interpreting their collections in new ways. She is particularly interested in visual storytelling in games and virtual spaces, and virtual modes of creative and artistic expression. She is concerned with how digital assets can come together to make compelling experiences for audiences, users and players. She has a wealth of expertise in applying critical theory to games and other media, and has a strong research interest in fantasy, horror and the gothic more generally, as well as gender and representations.

Research topics

Games Theory & Design
Augmented and Mixed Reality
games and virtual spaces as modes of artistic expression; Dark Economies; visual languages and visual storytelling in digital contexts; Monsters.

Research Outputs

Publications and research outputs

Article

Krzywinska, Tanya

, Phillips, Tim

, Parker, Alcwyn

and Scott, Michael

(2020) From Immersion’s Bleeding Edge to the Augmented Telegrapher: A Method for Creating Mixed Reality Games for Museum and Heritage Contexts. ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 13 (4). ISSN 1556-4673

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2019) “Everything is True”: Urban Gothic meets the Chthulucene in Multiplayer Online Game, The Secret World. Item availability may be restricted.

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2016) Dangerous Agencies: Norns, Games and Aesthetics of Emergence. Dangerous Women Project, no volume number. ISSN no Issn

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2016) Dangerous Agencies: Norns, Games and Aesthetics of Emergence. Dangerous Women Project, no volume number. ISSN no Issn

Perez Ferrer, Blanca, Colton, Simon, Powley, Edward

, Krzywinska, Tanya

, Geelhoed, Erik

and Cook, Michael (2016) Gamika: Art Based Game Design. Art/Games, Beginnings (1). pp. 18-24.

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2015) The Gamification of Gothic Coordinates. Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural, 1 (1). pp. 58-78. ISSN 2397 8791

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2015) Gaming Horror’s horror: Representation, Regulation and Affect in Horror Videogames. Journal of Visual Culture, The Design and Componentry of Horror (14(3)). pp. 293-297. ISSN 14704129

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2014) Conspiracy Hermeneutics: The Secret World as Weird Tale. Well Played: a journal on video games, value and meaning, 3 (2). pp. 123-143. ISSN 2164-344X

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2006) Blood Scythes, Festivals, Quests and Backstories: World Creation and Rhetorics of Myth in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture, 1 (4). pp. 383-396. ISSN 1555-4139

Book Section

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2021) Curses, Rites and Questionable Offerings. In: Global Folk Horror. University Press, unknown. ISBN not allocated as yet (Submitted) Item availability may be restricted.

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2018) Playing the Intercorporeal: Frankenstein's Legacy for Games. In: Global Frankenstein. Studies in Global Science Fiction . Palgrave Macmillian UK, London, pp. 283-300. ISBN 9783319781419 Item availability may be restricted.

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2017) Gothic American Gaming. In: Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 229-242. ISBN https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316337998

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2016) Formations of Player Agency and Gender in Gothic Video Games. In: Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion. Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic . Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh University, pp. 214-227. ISBN 9780748699124 Item availability may be restricted.

Krzywinska, Tanya

and Brown, Douglas

(2015) Games, Gamers and Posthumanism. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television. Palgrave Handbooks . Palgrave Macmillan, London, UK, pp. 192-201. ISBN 9781349577019 Item availability may be restricted.

Krzywinska, Tanya

and Brown, Douglas

(2015) Games, Gamers and Posthumanism. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillian UK, London, pp. 192-201. ISBN 9781137430328 (online) 9781349577019 (print)

Krzywinska, Tanya

and Brown, Douglas

(2015) Online Games and Genre. In: International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society. John Wiley & Sons/Blackwell, Oxford. ISBN 978-1-118-29074-3 Item availability may be restricted.

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2014) Digital Games and the American Gothic: Investigating Gothic Game Grammar. In: A companion to American Gothic. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 503-516. ISBN 9780470671870 Item availability may be restricted.

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2013) Transmedial Aesthetics: Where form and content meet - Film and Videogames. In: Content and Representation. International Companions to Media Studies . Blackwell-Wiley, Oxford, UK. ISBN 978-1405193566

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2012) The Strange Case of the Misappearance of Sex in Videogames. In: Computer Games and New Media Cultures: A Handbook of Digital Games Studies. Springer, Heidelberg, Germany. ISBN 978-94-007-2777-9

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2009) Movie-games and Game-movies: Towards an aesthetics of transmediality. In: Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies. Routledge/AFI, New York, USA. ISBN 978-0415962629

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2008) Arachne v. Minerva: The Spinning out of long narrative in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and World of Warcraft. In: Third Person: authoring and exploring vast narratives. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. ISBN 9780262232630

Conference or Workshop Item

Scott, Michael James

, Parker, Alcwyn

, Powley, Edward

, Saunders, Rob, Lee, Jenny, Herring, Phoebe, Brown, Douglas

and Krzywinska, Tanya

(2018) Towards an Interaction Blueprint for Mixed Reality Experiences in GLAM Spaces: The Augmented Telegrapher at Porthcurno Museum. In: Proceedings of the 32nd BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference, 2-6 July, 2018, Belfast, NI.

Book

Krzywinska, Tanya

and Heholt, Ruth

(2021) Gothic Kernow. Anthem Studies in Gothic Literature . Anthem Press, London. ISBN 9781785279065 (In Press) Item availability may be restricted.

Krzywinska, Tanya

, MacCallum-Stewart, Esther and Parsler, Justin, eds. (2011) Ring Bearers: The Lord of the Rings Online as Intertextual Narrative. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK. ISBN 978-0719082924

Krzywinska, Tanya

and Atkins, Barry, eds. (2007) Videogame, Player, Text. Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK. ISBN 978-0-7190-7400-4

Krzywinska, Tanya

and King, Geoff (2005) Tomb Raiders and Space Invaders: Video Games in the 21st Century. I B Tauris, unknown. ISBN 978-1850438144

Krzywinska, Tanya

and King, Geoff, eds. (2002) ScreenPlay: cinema/videogames/interfaces. Wallflower Press, unknown. ISBN 190336423X Item not available from this repository.

Krzywinska, Tanya

and King, Geoff (2000) Science Fiction Cinema: From Outerspace to Cyberspace. Wallflower Press, unknown. ISBN 978-1903364031

Krzywinska, Tanya

(2000) A Skin for Dancing In: Witchcraft, Possession and Voodoo in Film. Flicks Books, unknown. ISBN 978-0275976552

Project

Geelhoed, Erik

and Krzywinska, Tanya

(2017) Games Research Opportunities and Research Excellence in Cornwall and the EU (project): GRO / ERA. [Project] (Unpublished) Item not available from this repository.

Events

Year	Description
2009	DiGRA Conference 2009

Externally funded research grants information

Year starting	Year ending	Project title	Funder	Currency	Value	Collaborators	HESA Category
2003	No data	Tomb Raiders project	AHRC	No data	No data	No data	1 DIUS Research Councils
2017	2018	The Augmented Telegrapher: Mixed reality in a Museum context	AHRC	No data	No data	Ed Powley, Michael Scott, Alcwyn Parker	1 DIUS Research Councils
2013	2019	ERA Games Research Project	EU	No data	No data	No data	6 EU government bodies
2018	2019	The Augmented Telegrapher_Follow-in	AHRC	No data	No data	Porthcurno Telegraph Museums; Cornwall Museums Partnership	1 DIUS Research Councils
2018	No data	SWCTN	UKRI	No data	No data	UWE, Bath Spa, Plymouth Uni, Kaleider, Watershed	1 DIUS Research Councils
2019	No data	wAVE	Coastal Communities	No data	No data	CMP	4 UK central government bodies/local authorities, health & hospital authorities

Research Students

Current research students

Jack Hackett (Falmouth University)
Justin Parsler (Brunel University)
Rory Summerley (Falmouth University)
Steph Comley (Falmouth University)

Previous student supervision

Supervised 7 PhD students to completion as first supervisor at Brunel.

Indicative (shortened) titles of PhDs supervised and currently supervised:

Heroic Quest: A comparative study on the relationship between Old Norse and Old English heroic literature and Western Role-Playing Videogames
Move Fast, Think Slow: Videogaming and the Embodied Experience of Time
Sexuality, Addiction and the Wonderful World of Walt Disney
Suspension and Disbelief in VideoGames
Space as a means of Expression in Videogames
Taxonomies of Agency in Digital Games
Glitching, Cheating, Trolling: Transgression in Digital Games
The Besieged Ego in the Horror Film
Girls and Women as consumers of games

Number of research students supervised to completion

Research degrees examined

External Examiner for six PhDs at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University, Waikato University NZ, Adelaide University Aus, two at Portsmouth University, University of West of England, and an MPhil at Birkbeck University. Internal Examiner for seven PhDs and two MPhils.

Number of research degree examinations

Teaching

Areas of teaching

Digital Games; Film & Media Studies; Popular & Visual Culture

Business Engagement

Consultancy and facility services

Feb 2010-March 2011: Commissioned by UK Council for Internet Child Safety to write advisory document for UK Government policymakers informing them about contemporary videogames.

Professional engagement

Engagement with professional associations and societies

Editorial Board member for the following journals:
Horror Studies; Game Studies; Eudalmos; Games and Culture; Games and Simulation Journal of Virtual Worlds; Intensities; GAME
Research Association work
Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Executive Board Member (elected June 2005). www.digra.org President DiGRA, 2006-2010.
Host organiser DiGRA Biannual conference, 2009.
Member of Human-Computer Interaction Research Group (Brunel University) http://hcdi.brunel.ac.uk
Member of International Gothic Research Association.

Professional esteem indicators

Year	Description
No data	Invited speaker, Contemporary Fiction Seminar, Institute of English Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, February 2013. Invited speaker. Film Studies programme Falmouth University College. June 2010 & June 2011 Keynote International Gothic Association, Lancaster University, July 2009 Keynote Digital Arts, University of Falmouth, September 2009 Keynote Gaming After Dark, University of Montreal, Canada June 2009 Digital Cultures, University of Magdeburg, Germany, March 2009; Future and Reality of Gaming, University of Vienna, October 2008. Invited speaker ‘Horror and Videogames’ Institute of Education, London November 2007. Invited speaker AURORA Animation Festival Norwich, November 2007. Keynote speaker: ‘Games, Meaning and Methodology’ Knowledge Lab, London, January 26th 2007. Keynote speaker: ‘Witchcraft and Paganism in the Media’ Harvard University, Boston, US. June 2006. Keynote speaker: ‘Technology and Identity’ Buckinghamshire and Chilterns University College. May 2006. Keynote speaker: ‘Bring Your own Sub‐text: Social Life, Human Experience and the World of Joss Whedon’ Huddersfield University, June 2005. Invited Speaker: New Femininities: Third seminar ‘consuming new femininities’ University of East London. July 2005. Invited Speaker: DiGRA biannual conference, Vancouver, Canada ‘British Game Studies: A snapshot’ for international panel of speakers each outlining contemporary game studies at national level, June 2005. Invited Speaker: Playful Subjects Symposium, UWE, May 2005. Invited Speaker: ‘Animating the Game World: Textures of Reality’ NFT/Royal College of Art/British Animation Awards Animation Festival, Feb 2005

Year

Description

No data

Invited speaker, Contemporary Fiction Seminar, Institute of English Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, February 2013.
Invited speaker. Film Studies programme Falmouth University College. June 2010 & June 2011
Keynote International Gothic Association, Lancaster University, July 2009
Keynote Digital Arts, University of Falmouth, September 2009
Keynote Gaming After Dark, University of Montreal, Canada June 2009
Digital Cultures, University of Magdeburg, Germany, March 2009;
Future and Reality of Gaming, University of Vienna, October 2008.
Invited speaker ‘Horror and Videogames’ Institute of Education, London November 2007.
Invited speaker AURORA Animation Festival Norwich, November 2007.
Keynote speaker: ‘Games, Meaning and Methodology’ Knowledge Lab, London, January 26th 2007.
Keynote speaker: ‘Witchcraft and Paganism in the Media’ Harvard University, Boston, US. June 2006.
Keynote speaker: ‘Technology and Identity’ Buckinghamshire and Chilterns University College. May 2006.
Keynote speaker: ‘Bring Your own Sub‐text: Social Life, Human Experience and the World of Joss Whedon’
Huddersfield University, June 2005.
Invited Speaker: New Femininities: Third seminar ‘consuming new femininities’ University of East London. July
2005.
Invited Speaker: DiGRA biannual conference, Vancouver, Canada ‘British Game Studies: A snapshot’ for international panel of speakers each outlining contemporary game studies at national level, June 2005.
Invited Speaker: Playful Subjects Symposium, UWE, May 2005.
Invited Speaker: ‘Animating the Game World: Textures of Reality’ NFT/Royal College of Art/British Animation Awards Animation Festival, Feb 2005

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