It is with deep sadness that we share the news of the passing of Grant Tavinor, who more than anyone helped establish the foundations of serious philosophical research on video games.

Grant’s work—including his two monographs (The Art of Videogames, 2009, and The Aesthetics of Virtual Reality, 2021) and many journal papers—has shaped the field and offered clarity, inspiration, and new directions for thinking about games. He also co-edited The Aesthetics of Videogames (2018), further widening the conversation he helped to begin.

Many of us first met him at the Philosophy of Computer Games conference in Oslo in 2009, where we were fortunate to secure funding to bring him all the way from New Zealand to deliver a keynote. His presence and his ideas at that meeting helped set the tone for much of what followed in the years ahead.

Grant lived for many years with serious health challenges, yet he remained a generous, thoughtful, and engaging voice in our community. He will be deeply missed—not only for his scholarship but also for the conversations, encouragement, and insight he shared so freely.

A great many of us in game philosophy and game studies owe him a debt for the discussions he fostered and the intellectual paths he opened. His absence leaves a lasting gap, but his work will continue to shape how we think about games for years to come.

You may have noticed that we have semi-regular announcement of new publications on gamephilosophy.org. I would like to encourage all members to submit posts about those of their publications that are of relevance to other game philosophers.

Such posts mean that others see what is going on in the field of game philosophy. It is also very useful to the author.  These posts get quite a lot of hits, and are an easy way to make people aware of your work. The posts are automatically posted to the Facebook page for the initiative, to a Twitter feed, and also sent out the subscribers on an email list.

We normally aim to announce recent papers, but many members haven’t announced any of their papers yet. So please make a post, even if the paper was published some while ago.

This is how you do it: When you log in to the system, you simply click on the +sign in the top bar, which under “post” gives you a form where you can enter text for the post. Describe the content of the article and add a picture, for example of the cover of the journal in question. Google also has a search option for images with open licences. The title should with a description of the document type, like “Journal Paper: “ or “Book: “. Make one post for each publication. The post will be sent to me for moderation.

Note that you can also post about events and other relevant news in the same fashion.

If you are working with issues related to the philosophy of games, you are very welcome to have a member profile. Just send me an email at j dot r dot sageng * gamephilosophy dot org. with a few words about your background. I may make a new post about this later on. I don’t really have much time to work on these sorts of things, but I do what I can.

John R. Sageng