The first round of the DiGRA Rising Star Spotlight received a strong response, with a high number of nominations reflecting the breadth and quality of emerging scholarship within the DiGRA community. Given the volume and overall strength of applications, only a limited number of scholars could be selected in this round.
Awarded as a Rising Star should be understood as recognition of particular research trajectories and contributions at this moment in time, rather than as a measure of overall merit. Many excellent applications could not be featured in this round, and not being selected should not be taken as an indication of the quality or value of a scholar’s work. Applications that were not selected will automatically be carried forward to the next round, unless applicants choose to opt out.
We now turn to the scholars awarded for this round of the DiGRA Rising Star Spotlight.
Rising Star Spotlight
Joshua Juvrud – ECR/PP Track
Joshua Juvrud, PhD is a developmental psychologist turned game researcher who brings a uniquely person-centered lens to game studies. His early work focused on social cognitive development and individual differences, examining how children come to understand others’ actions, intentions, and emotions, and why those paths differ across individuals and contexts. That developmental perspective remains deeply woven into his current research. For Juvrud, variation is not noise but signal: differences in motivation, personality, and prior experience are central to understanding how people engage with and learn from games.
At Uppsala University, Juvrud is Associate Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Game Design at Campus Gotland. His research spans digital, analogue, and hybrid game environments and is grounded in psychophysiological methods such as eye- tracking, pupillometry, galvanic skin response, and facial and vocal emotion analysis.
His recent work exemplifies both breadth and depth. In a study in IEEE Transactions on Games, Juvrud examines how novices, gamers, and musicians differ in their visual attention and strategy when learning novel arcade tasks. His paper in Scientific Reports illustrates how strategy biases, such as subtractive versus additive operations, vary by developmental and cultural context and can be studied in games. At DiGRA 2025, his work extends his developmental and social perspective to the domain of altruism, investigating how self- identified gender, personality traits, sibling dynamics, and media exposure shape prosocial sharing behaviors in children. He has also authored an article in the International Journal of Role Playing on psychophysiological methods in role-playing studies, reflecting his commitment to advancing methodological frontiers in game research.
Central to his work, Juvrud has cultivated a network of collaborations. He works with Goodbye Kansas Studio and the Swedish Defense Research Agency, and across multiple units at Uppsala University, including Psychology, Education, Informatics and Media, Gender Studies, and Women and Children’s Health. He also maintains international ties with scholars in the United States, Norway, and Bhutan.
Juvrud’s trajectory from developmental psychology through cognitive and social method innovation into games positions him as a bridge between traditions. He is able to carry psychological rigor into game-based contexts while promoting game-informed insights, and games as lived experiences, back into developmental science.
Looking ahead, Juvrud plans to expand his use of multi-modal measures, synchronizing eye, physiological, and vocal signals combined with qualitative approaches to better map emotional, social, and cognitive dynamics during play. With funding awarded from Asmodee’s Game in Lab program, he is currently designing game-based methodology in educational games for interprofessional medical education. Within the DiGRA community, he hopes to deepen collaborations across disciplines, engage with emergent debates about ethics and affect in games, and contribute to advancing methodological standards in game-based research.
Recent Research/Publications
Juvrud, J, Bink, S., Berlinksy, Z., Dolynuk, N, Richey, K., & Gurvich, C. (2024). Urban immersion as education: Motivation, engagement, and learning in city games. International Journal of Game-Based Learning.
Juvrud, J. (In press). Utilizing Psychophysiological Measures in Role-Playing Studies. International Journal of Role-Playing.
Salembier, K. & Juvrud, J. (2025). The Ludum Platform: Exploring the impact of game design on prosocial behavior in children’s digital play. Conference Proceedings of DiGRA 2025: Games at the Crossroads.
Juvrud, J., Johansson, M., Gredebäck, G., & Nyström, P. (2024). A deconstruction of expertise and performance through arcade games. IEEE Transactions on Games, 17(2), 249-256. Doi: 10.1109/TG.2024.3414664
Gredebäck, G., Astor, K., Ainamani, H., Van den Berg, L., Forssman, L., Hall, J., Juvrud, J., Kenward, B., Mhizha, S., Wangchuk, W., Nyström, P. (2025). Infant Gaze Following is Stable Across Cultures and Resilient to Family Adversities Associated with War and Climate Change. Psychological Science.
Rising Star Spotlight
Amanda Nicole Curtis – Student Track
Amanda Nicole Curtis is a doctoral researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. Her research investigates how playing video games reconfigures the ways people think, know, and make meanings in their everyday lives. Drawing on ethnographically-informed case studies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Stardew Valley, and Skyrim, her work explores the creative and reflective capacities of play – what it means to know by, with, and through games.
Amanda’s broader research interest lies at the intersection of emerging technologies (especially video games), knowledge practices, and inclusion. She asks how video games become sites of everyday learning. In her doctoral work, she is producing an epistemological framework for understanding how games are entangled with knowing in three ways: knowing by games (learning through mechanics and systems), knowing with games (co-thinking and meaning-making alongside them), and knowing through games (using play as a lens for understanding the world). This framework highlights how games invite diverse, embodied epistemic practices.
To study these entanglements, Amanda focuses on how researchers can design studies that honor players’ own ways of thinking. Across the Anglophone West and Japan, Amanda’s thesis involved 55 players and six game designers/developers. By using a range of qualitative approaches (diary studies, walkthroughs, streams, player interviews, and designer interviews), she allowed participants to engage in ways which felt most authentic to their own ways of thinking. Her approach to inclusive player diary studies was presented at the Creative Methodologies: Practical Play and Media Multiplicities symposium and will be presented at the Emerging Digital Methodologies Conference.
Beyond her thesis, Amanda has also conducted international research on in-game creative experiences, cross-cultural gameplay, and modding practices. This work has been carried out through research fellowships, including the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Tokyo, and industry research projects, where she works as a user experience researcher.
Community engagement is core to Amanda’s research practices. Currently she serves as the Community Officer for the British DiGRA chapter, is chair of the Oxford Games & Technologies group, is a Women in Games Ambassador, and mentors through Limit Break. She is excited to learn more from the broader DiGRA community and hopes to conduct and share research which empowers players from across the world.
Looking ahead, Amanda looks forward to expanding her research into new interdisciplinary collaborations across academia and industry, focusing further on how we can design and study games to foster reflexive knowing practices for a broad range of people. She hopes to build platforms and partnerships which connect international researchers, developers, and communities, exploring how inclusive methods can help us not only study play, but design more equitable futures through it.
Recent Research/Publications
Burrus, O., Curtis, A., & Herman, L. (2024). Unmasking AI: Informing authenticity decisions by labeling AI-generated content. Interactions, 31(4), 38-42. https://doi.org/10.1145/3665321