17 February 2017

Abertay student to promote gender diversity in games

Abertay student to promote gender diversity in games

An Abertay University PhD student who blended theatre and computer games in a ground-breaking experiment on a Forth Estuary island has now received a scholarship to attend the world’s biggest games conference.

Mona Bozdog will promote gender diversity on her trip to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco after securing a grant worth thousands of pounds from the IGDA Foundation.

She will act as a Women in Games Ambassador during the event, which runs from 27 February to 3 March and attracts 30,000 people.

The theatre maker – who made the headlines last year for her pioneering digital performance experiment on Inchcolm Island in the Forth – is currently researching the relationship between performance and video games.

It will be her first time in San Francisco and she is keen to tap into the industry expertise on offer.

Mona’s Applied Research Collaborative Studentship PhD, Connecting Performance and Play, is a partnership between Abertay University, The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, The National Theatre of Scotland and the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities.

Her research is funded by Abertay and The Scottish Funding Council through the SGSAH.

She said, 'I’m a firm believer that we all have a creative voice and we should all be able to express it. These voices show how we all perceive and engage with the world.

'The more creative voices we have, the more diverse these voices are, the more accurate and insightful our world view will become.

'Only by achieving gender parity at the creative level we can start hearing more female voices and gain access to more diverse and varied ways of looking at, engaging with, and experiencing the world.'

GDC features over 500 lectures, panels, tutorials and discussions hosted by industry experts from across the world.

In October last year, Mona and a team of international artists combined Bafta-nominated video game Dear Esther with a theatrical performance and a live orchestral arrangement of two songs from the game's soundtrack.

A live feed of the game being played was projected inside the 12th Century Inchcolm Abbey.

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