María Luján Oulton

Game Arts International Assembly (GAIA)

María Luján Oulton (Argentina/Spain) is a games curator, cultural producer and lecturer with a Master Degree in Communication and Cultural Creation by Walter Benjamin Foundation (thesis with honors in videogames curation).

Luján is dedicated to the promotion and divulgation of experimental and artistic videogames. She has been working over a decade bridging the art and games scene. She has been the director of Game on! El arte en juego (2009-2019) an artgames and playful media exhibit that ran in Argentina and had international popups. In 2019 she co-founded GAIA (Game Arts International Assembly) with Jim Munroe (Canada) a network + event for the gamearts ecosystem: game curators, event producers and community builders.

Luján has also experience working within the academic field as founder and co-editor of the Game Studies Journal at Universidad de Palermo (Argentina) which presents a yearly edition since 2019. She is also a member of the GameStudies group at IIEAC (Instituto de Investigación y Experimentación en Arte y Crítica).

In both areas she has always been committed to encouraging female participation in the industry. As such she is co-founder of Women in Games Argentina and currently working as their foreign ambassador in Spain.

Luján has given talks and participated in events such as TEDx Riodelaplata (Buenos Aires), Jorge Tadeo Lozano University (Bogotá), DevHourmx (Mexico City), DiGRA (Melbourne, Australia) among others. She has participated in publications such as:

[Irrompibles], Bit y Aparte, Videogames around the world, Videogames and the global south, among others.

– Videojuegos y museos. Dentro y fuera de la pantalla, en Playing Culture. El videojuego como objeto cultural, Fundación La Posta, España, 2022

– Homo Ludens. Videojuegos para entender el presente. Fundación ”la Caixa” y British Museum, España, 2021

– Aproximaciones a una arqueología de las relaciones entre arte y videojuegos. Videojuego, juego y game studies. UNA. Argentina, 2021

– The nuances of video game curation. Lessons from Argentina. Video Games and the Global South, ETC Press. United States 2019

www.luoulton.com

Social Profiles

All Sessions by María Luján Oulton

  • 1. Wed

    Young Academics Workshop

  • 12:30  - 12:55
    Sheroes in Games. Girls designing digital games: networking, training, advocacy is a two years work-in-progress project (Nov 2020 - Nov 2022) that aims to bridge the gender gap in videogames addressing the necessity of working towards a more inclusive videogame industry in three main areas: content, production and environment. For this we understand that it is mandatory to engage girls and their families before entering college in order to show them that videogames can be a career option and that their participation and voice is crucial if we want to build a better and mature industry, more diverse, egalitarian and richer in content.

    We created a community of practice (CoP) to promote the transfer and amplification of knowledge building in an open and collaborative way. To encourage knowledge sharing across different countries, we designed and built a toolkit in the format of a semantic wiki that we named: Sheroes in Games wiki. There we gathered the different aspects that are needed to be taken into account when designing educational activities for young girls and the particular need of building lobby strategies that demonstrates the impact on girls of the current state of the games industry when it comes to gender equity and women representation.

    This paper summarizes the results of this strategy that generates spaces to encourage concrete solutions based on the transfer of knowledge to eliminate gender inequality in the disciplinary field of video games, in addition to proposing possible alternatives to generate the sustainability of a CoP that provides methodologies to ensure gender equality from education.

    Sheroes is run by the Goethe-Institut in Argentina in partnership with educational institutions, Women in games associations and studios in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru as well as Venezuela ​​and it is funded by the Federal Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany. It began in April 2021 and will finish in November 2022 when it will be officially presented and opened to the public with the hope to keep growing thanks to open collaboration.
    Where
    Room 211 & via zoom




Share

María Luján Oulton