Copenhagen professor gets €2m games research grant
"We need models for analyzing games"
The European Research Council (ERC) has gifted Espen Aarseth, Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, a €2 million research grant for his Making Sense of Games project.
"Just as we need models for analyzing literature and cinema, we need models for analyzing games," said Aarseth.
"We are going to develop and quality-assure some basic concepts for game analysis that can be used for instance in research and education. Today there are no large, sweeping theories drawing on a combination of different approaches and disciplines."
The project will start this November and will create four Ph.D. positions and four Post doc positions over five years.
"I am very pleased to receive this grant. The ERC Advanced Grant is the highest recognition one can hope to achieve within this type of research. ITU was visionary in focusing on games research at a very early stage when no other universities were doing anything similar, and this has had tremendous significance internationally. The grant is a recognition of game studies as an independent research field and Denmark's role in the development of the field, and it shows that ITU's vision was on the mark."