The Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies: An Interview with Frans Mäyrä and Usva Friman

The Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies (CoE GameCult), a joint initiative of Tampere, Turku, and Jyväskylä universities in Finland, is profiled through an interview with its director Frans Mäyrä and main research coordinator Usva Friman. The conversation traces the Centre's roots to digital culture research begun in the late 1990s, the founding of the Game Research Lab in 2002, and a Master's programme in Game Studies, which together laid the groundwork for a Centre that required roughly two decades of sustained effort. The interview frames game cultures as interconnected, situated phenomena, examined through an integrated model covering games, production, players, and societal framings.

The Centre's organisation is presented as deliberately collaborative despite its geographic spread. Local coordinators in each university feed into a central coordination team, which holds monthly online meetings and biannual face-to-face gatherings. The Centre employs about 45 researchers spanning humanities, social sciences, design research, human-computer interaction, data science, and behavioural sciences, and the interviewees emphasise that interdisciplinary collaboration is pursued selectively, with network effects allowing bridge-builders to connect distinct expertise. Support for early-career researchers includes thematic methodology sessions, funding-application guidance, peer-support groups, and mentoring.

The interview also highlights engaged research with schools, museums such as the Finnish Museum of Games, and policy bodies, alongside initiatives on inclusive game creation, public-space play, and eSports wellbeing. The Centre's open science commitments, including open access, bibliodiversity, and multilingual publishing, earned it a 2021 Open Science award in Finland, though the interviewees acknowledge constraints around privacy and open data and the need for budgeting for open access fees. Ongoing projects named include IDA, Growing Mind, and an ERC-funded reassessment of gaming disorder, with future work continuing to examine emerging game cultures and the extension of gaming into broader social life.