History@Play lecture with Victor Navarro-Remesal & Beatriz Pérez Zapata, TecnoCampus Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain.
This double lecture explores how regional perspectives shape the history, aesthetics, and narratives of video games, with a focus on Europe and Japan. While game studies has long been dominated by global or industry-centric frameworks, this event invites audiences to reconsider video games through the lens of regionality as culturally situated, historically grounded, and locally adapted media forms.
Victor Navarro-Remesal, drawing on his extensive research on European video games and his ongoing curatorial work with the Japan Foundation in Spain, traces how regional histories, cultural identities, and design practices have influenced the development of distinct game cultures.
Beatriz Pérez Zapata shifts the focus to adaptation, examining how literature is reimagined in games within specific national contexts. Through the lens of Spanish adaptations of canonical literature in the 1980s and the Japanese case of Ihatovo Monogatari, based on the writings of Kenji Miyazawa, she investigates what it means to translate not just narratives, but sensibilities and literary heritage into interactive forms.
Together, the lectures offer a rich picture of video games as regional cultural artefacts, shaped by local histories, national traditions, and transmedia dialogues, while inviting discussion on how to build a more plural and situated game history.
About the speakers
Víctor Navarro-Remesal is a game scholar from Tecnocampus, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), where he teaches History of Games, Games as Cultural Industries, and Interactive Narrative. He is the current president and a founding member of DiGRA Spain and the co-president of the History of Games conferences. His upcoming book as an author is ‘Zen and Slow Games’ (MIT Press, 2026). His last books as an editor are ‘Fragmentos y microhistorias del videojuego europeo’ (Shangrila, 2024) and ‘Perspectives on the European Videogame’ (Amsterdam University Press, 2021). His research interests include player freedom, Zen-inspired games and slow gaming, regional game studies, and game preservation. Currently, he’s one of the two Principal Investigators of the project Ludomythologies: Myths and ideology in contemporary video games.
Beatriz Pérez Zapata is lecturer of English and History of Videogames at TecnoCampus, Pompeu Fabra University. She obtained her PhD in English Studies from the University of Zaragoza. She is the author of Zadie Smith and Postcolonial Trauma: Decolonising Trauma, Decolonising Selves (Routledge 2021). She is the author of numerous articles on trauma and postcolonialism, postcolonial videogames, and the representation of refugees in media and literature. Her research interests are trauma, diaspora, the history of games, and the interconnections between games and literature. She is one of the founding members of DiGRA Spain and a member of the research project Ludomythologies: Myths and ideology in contemporary video games.