Iain Donald
iain donald

Dr Iain Donald MA(Hons), PhD, MSc, SFHEA

Lecturer

Biography

Iain Donald is a Lecturer in Design & UX at Edinburgh Napier University. Iain gained his PhD in the field of History, an MSc in Information Systems and worked in the Games Industry prior to joining academia in 2010. His recent work examines the intersection of games, digital media and history with a focus on commemoration and memorialisation. Using game design and technology to explore collective and communal memory in communities and virtual worlds.

Esteem

Advisory panels and expert committees or witness

  • Imperial War Museum: War Games Advisory Panel
  • REF2021 Output Assessor (UoA32)
  • Great War Dundee Steering Committee

 

Conference Organising Activity

  • Workshop Co-Chair: RePlaying with History: Revisiting Historical Games Studies, DiGRA 2023
  • Workshop Co-Chair: Playing With History Workshop, DiGRA/FDG 2016

 

Editorial Activity

  • Associate Editor, International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations (IJGCMS)

 

External Examining/Validations

  • External Examiner, Glasgow School of Art
  • External Examiner for PhD by Publication viva voce (Leicester University)
  • External Examiner, University of Essex
  • External Examiner, University of Hull

 

Fellowships and Awards

  • Senior Fellow (SFHEA)

 

Grant Reviewer

  • Member, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Arts & Humanities Sub-Committee
  • Member, AHRC Peer Review College
  • Member, UKRI Future Leaders Peer Review College

 

Invited Speaker

  • Guest Lecture: Public History, University of Highlands & Islands
  • Guest Lecture: Public History, University of Highlands & Islands
  • Guest Lecture: Accessible Pasts, Cardiff University
  • Visualising War & Peace: Visualisations of War in Online Gaming
  • Keynote: Games & Learning, Åbo Akademi University

 

Membership of Professional Body

  • Co-Chair, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Young Academy of Scotland
  • Member, Royal Society of Edinburgh Young Academy of Scotland
  • Member, Chartered Institite of Management

 

Public/Community Engagement

  • STEM Ambassador
  • Co-Chair, Historical Games Network
  • Great War Dundee: Steering Committee

 

Reviewing

  • Reviewer, British DiGRA
  • Reviewer, Digital Culture & Society
  • Judging Panel, GALA 2022 Serious Games Competition
  • Reviewer, Postcolonial Perspectives in Game Studies
  • Judging Panel, Serious Play Awards
  • Judging Panel, Games for Health
  • Reviewer, DiGRA

 

Visiting Positions

  • Visiting Research Fellow in Historical Games Design, Birmingham City University

 

Date


39 results

View from the (Virtual) Terraces: Football Fandom in Videogames

Presentation / Conference Contribution
Donald, I., & Reid, A. (2024, September)
View from the (Virtual) Terraces: Football Fandom in Videogames. Presented at Video Game Cultures, Birmingham City University
Other is a concept that is fundamental to sports: the other team, other player(s), other fans. Football fans share a camaraderie and can enthuse a tribalism (Mangan, 1996) tha...

Merging Fact & Fiction in War Comics: Diversity, Identity and Social Injustice

Book Chapter
Donald, I., Austin, H., & Pittner, F. Merging Fact & Fiction in War Comics: Diversity, Identity and Social Injustice. In S. Connor, & H. E. Earle (Eds.), Battle Lines Drawn: War Comics since 1914

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Donald, I., Austin, H., & Pittner, F. Merging Fact & Fiction in War Comics: Diversity, Identity and Social Injustice. In S. Connor, & H. E. Earle (Eds.), Battle Lines Drawn: War Comics since 1914
This abstract discusses how war comics portray the historical record through a theoretical and conceptual textual model - the 3A Framework (3AF) which considers the representa...

‘It’s NOT in the Game’ – Commemoration and Commerce in EA Sports FIFA Franchise

Book Chapter
Donald, I. ‘It’s NOT in the Game’ – Commemoration and Commerce in EA Sports FIFA Franchise. In The Interactive Past Re-Imagined: New Horizons of Video Games, History, and Archaeology. Sidestone Press

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Donald, I. ‘It’s NOT in the Game’ – Commemoration and Commerce in EA Sports FIFA Franchise. In The Interactive Past Re-Imagined: New Horizons of Video Games, History, and Archaeology. Sidestone Press
In 2023 witnessed a seismic shift in the world of virtual football as the licensing agreement between EA Sports and FIFA (the governing body of football) that had existed sinc...

Video Games, Historical Representation and Soft Power

Journal Article
Donald, I., Webber, N., & Wright, E. (2023)
Video Games, Historical Representation and Soft Power. Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, 15(2), 105-127. https://doi.org/10.1386/jgvw_00075_1
This article explores how historical video games have become tools for UK and Chinese ‘soft power’ or ‘public diplomacy’ and the role of historical representation in portrayin...

Playing with the dead: transmedia narratives and the Walking Dead games

Book Chapter
Donald, I., & Austin, H. J. (2023)
Playing with the dead: transmedia narratives and the Walking Dead games. In R. Yilmaz, M. N. Erdem, & F. Resuloğlu (Eds.), Research anthology on game design, development, usage, and social impact (1435-1456). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-7589-8.ch069
This chapter discusses the theory and practice of transmedia narratives within the storyworld created by Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard's comics series The Walk...

Account, accuracy, and authenticity: A framework for analysing historical narrative in games

Book Chapter
Donald, I., & Reid, A. J. (2023)
Account, accuracy, and authenticity: A framework for analysing historical narrative in games. In R. Seiwald, & E. Vollans (Eds.), (Not) In the Game: History, Paratexts, and Games (57-80). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110732924-004

Conflict, identity and commemoration: exploring veterans' voices and collective memory through virtual reality

Presentation / Conference Contribution
Donald, I., Locke, R., & Brown, G. (2022, March)
Conflict, identity and commemoration: exploring veterans' voices and collective memory through virtual reality. Paper presented at Rethinking War: A Virtual Interdisciplinary Conference
Their Memory explores how game design and immersive technology can be used to enhance existing historical research and expand conflict narratives to bring richer and more expa...

Datashare: exploring the potential of reusing data for third sector organisations to support their collaboration

Conference Proceeding
Saienko, O., De Paoli, S., & Donald, I. (2022)
Datashare: exploring the potential of reusing data for third sector organisations to support their collaboration. In I. Avellino (Ed.), ECSCW 2022: Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. https://doi.org/10.48340/ecscw2022_p10
This paper describes a Participatory design case study on how the reuse of existing data can support cooperative work of Third Sector Organisations in a local context. While m...

CumbraeCraft: a virtual environment for teaching cultural heritage to primary schoolchildren

Presentation / Conference Contribution
MacLeod, K., Reid, A. J., Donald, I., & Smith, K. (2021, September)
CumbraeCraft: a virtual environment for teaching cultural heritage to primary schoolchildren. Presented at 15th European Conference on Game Based Learning, ECGBL 2021
Game-based learning is a research area that has grown within the past two decades, with evidence of tailoring commercial-off-the-shelf gaming, developing bespoke educational g...

Their memory: exploring veteran's voices

Book Chapter
Donald, I., Houghton, E., & Scott-Brown, K. (2021)
Their memory: exploring veteran's voices. In C. E. Ariese, K. H. J. Boom, B. van den Hout, A. A. Mol, & A. Politopoulos (Eds.), Return to the interactive past : the interplay of video games and histories (31-44). Sidestone Press

Pre-Napier Funded Projects

  • Transforming Net-Zero
  • AHRC InGAME: Innovation for Games and Media Enterprise Creative Cluster
  • Their Memory: Exploring Veteran's Voices, Virtual Reality and Collective Memory

Current Post Grad projects