S8E5: Gaming with Keung Yoon Bae, Osvaldo Cleger, and Michael Rübsamen

Michael Rübsamen is a media and communications scholar at Lund University. His research interests are primarily in popular culture from fandom to celebrity culture, wrestling and reaction media. In his quest to further explore attention, interest, engagement or immersion he has now turned to games and gaming. Being an avid (somewhat old school) gamer, he is still principally annoyed that video games is still a larger industry than board and tabletop role playing games. Contact Michael via email (michael.rubsamen@iko.lu.se).

Osvaldo Cleger is fascinated by how media shapes our understanding of bodies, identity, communication, and history. His work tries to move fluidly between literature, visual arts, and digital media, always returning to the codes that govern representation - how they emerge, shift, and sometimes fracture - as well as the societal and cultural values embedded within them. His interest in bridging humanistic traditions from the pre-modern to the contemporary is reflected in his engagement with video games such as Dante’s Inferno or historical simulations (such as Ubisoft’s), where his passion for classical literature, cultural legacy, and interactive media converges. He is equally captivated by the subtle innuendos of a Baroque poem as he is by the mechanics of a mobile game, and he longs for a future in which video games attain the sophistication and complexity of a Shakespearean tragedy or a poem by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Keung Yoon Bae is Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at the School of Modern Languages. Her research examines the relationship between media production and state governance in Korea, across different industries and eras, including 1940s imperial Japanese regulation of colonial Korean cinema and 1960s authoritarian control over Korean cinema. Her most recent works examine ownership and governance over video games and gaming culture in Korea.