Digital Culture & Society (Dcs): Vol. 11, Issue 1/2025 - Ruins and the Contemporary

The cultural fascination with ruins is nothing new. Architects, poets and commentators like Rose Macaulay (1953), Christopher Woodward (2002) and Robert Ginsberg (2004) have extensively and critically investigated the significations of ruins in Western culture. In our lived environments, our media landscapes, and our social media feeds, we are surrounded by ruination: the ruins of war, ecological disaster, post-industrial decline, austerity, social collapse, and infrastructural decline. This issue of Digital Culture & Society addresses the complex thematic field of ruination and decay in contemporary culture.

Daniel Vella, born in 1984, teaches game studies at the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta. He read for his PhD at the IT University of Copenhagen, focusing on the development of a theory of ludic subjectivity. His research interests include the phenomenology of virtual world experience, place and architecture in games and aesthetics in digital games. He regularly publishes in journals such as Game Studies, the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research and Techne': Research in Philosophy and Technology.

Mathias Fuchs (Dr.) is an artist, musician and media scholar. He is the director of the Gamification Lab at Leuphana University in Lüneburg. He is a pioneer in the field of game art and is a leading scholar in game studies and directs a project on Gamification that is funded by the German Research Council (2018-2021).