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If Emma Vossen’s name sounds familiar, ����’s probably because she is one of the earliest members of the Games Institute (GI). She recalls the conversations in the basement of the PAS (Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology) building on campus or the Rum Runner bar in downtown Kitchener (in 2013!) with Dr. Neil Randall and other graduate students about what the GI could be. After defending her dissertation in 2018 and setting out from ��ݮ��Ƶ, she has returned to her old stomping grounds for the next stage of her career as the GI’s Research Communications Officer.����

So why here? And why now?����

To start, Dr. Vossen began her PhD in 2012 with the intent to study comics and sexuality. On the side, she was interested in games and gaming culture and chose the University of ��ݮ��Ƶ in part because of the English department’s focus on digital humanities. She had heard rumours about the beginnings of a game studies publication, , as well as the GI itself. While intrigued, during her first two years of study, Dr. Vossen was “in denial” about wanting to study games. She had been obsessed with games her whole life but never imagined she could be a game scholar.��

Before starting her PhD, Dr. Vossen crashed Dr. Randall’s game studies graduate class for a week; she even completed the readings before the class began and she was also the "eager beaver" answering all of Dr. Randall's questions. But, when it came to thinking of her future career path in the academic space, she continued to feel self-conscious about pursuing game research as a career. She had spent so much time with other gamers being treated as the token “Girl Gamer” – a role she did not enjoy – and was concerned she �徱���’t have thick-enough skin for the field. Over time, Dr. Vossen got involved with FPS as a contributor and continued her research into comics and sexuality, focusing on Alan Moore’s Lost Girls.����

It �ɲ�����’t until she was approached by the then-FPS Editor-in-Chief, Steve Wilcox, that Dr. Vossen joined the FPS editorial team as editor of FPS’s commentaries section the same week that #GamerGate began. She wanted to explore the implications of these events and saw FPS as a space where it could be discussed in a more formal capacity; shortly thereafter, FPS began publishing academic writing on #GamerGate. Dr. Vossen herself made a full commitment to studying games and games culture for her PhD and took over as Editor-in-Chief of FPS.����

Around this time the physical GI opened, and Dr. Vossen wanted to make the space as inclusive as possible for marginalized people especially queer, women, nonbinary, and trans folks. She and fellow PhD students Elise Vist and Judy Ehrentraut started the GI Janes, a gaming group for people who �徱���’t identify as cis men. This carved out a space for conversations about issues of discrimination and belonging in games, especially during the height of #GamerGate when, in 2012, the YouTube series , created by Anita Sarkeesian, went viral. For Dr. Vossen, seeing people talking openly about the same issues she had been privately thinking about for years was revolutionary and she wanted to add to what Sarkeesian was doing.��

As #GamerGate continued, the movement became extremely hostile to anyone that �徱���’t fit into the normative aspect of what women were supposed to "look like" in gaming culture; in particular, trans and non-binary people. Dr. Vossen tracked these conversations to study peoples’ experiences of marginalization in games culture and to look at what types of gender performances were allowed and what specific roles, actions, and performances were tolerated. Unfortunately, this work couldn’t be done without directly examining��

#GamerGate, which resulted in Dr. Vossen receiving a plethora of online harassment. Sometimes, she felt that all people wanted to talk to her about was #GamerGate, when the issues were much larger and older than this hostile movement. Dr. Vossen’s research and experiences would culminate in her 2018 PhD dissertation titled supervised by Dr. Randall.