“Top Poster Award” for a Presentation from the Online Communication Lab

(16.06.2026) IfK researchers Felix Reer, Saïd Unger, and Thorsten Quandt were honored with a “Top Poster Award” at this year’s annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) in Cape Town. The award recognized their paper “Mapping the Field of Social Scientific Game Studies: A Computational Approach”, which was presented at the ICA’s 76th Annual Conference.

The ICA is one of the most important international professional associations in communication studies and brings together researchers from various fields of the discipline each year. This year’s conference theme was “Communication and Inequalities in Context.”

The award-winning paper was developed within the Online Communication Lab (OCL) at the Institute for Communication at the University of Münster. The OCL focuses on the forms, structures, and societal consequences of digital communication.

In the study, the research team examines the field of social science computer game research—known as “Game Studies”—using computer-assisted methods. Based on an analysis of more than 130,000 research articles, the study highlights key themes, trends, and lines of development in the field from the 1980s to the present.

The paper is part of an ongoing research project and generated significant interest at the conference. The next step is to develop the findings into a scholarly article for publication in an academic journal.

 

Citation: Reer, Felix; Unger, Saïd; Quandt, Thorsten 2026: “Mapping the Field of Social Scientific Game Studies: A Computational Approach.” 76th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association, Cape Town, June 7, 2026.

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