Dr Bettina Bódi FHEA

• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, 2024
• PhD Film and Television, University of Nottingham, 2021
• MA Anglophone Literatures and Cultures with a Specialisation in Culture and Media, University of Vienna, Austria, 2015
• BA Philology with a Specialisation in Aesthetics - Minor in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary, 2012

I joined the University of Birmingham in 2024. Prior to this, I worked at Leeds Beckett University, De Montfort University, Nottingham Trent University, and the University of Nottingham in various permanent and part-time roles for 7 years teaching and researching media and communication, game studies, cultural studies, television studies, social media studies, and visual culture and communication.

I teach on the BA Digital Media and Communications.

I’m interested in supervising postgraduate projects on video games explored within the disciplinary frameworks of game studies, media and communication, cultural studies, critical theory, philosophy, game design, platform studies, narratology, and transmedia.

My research focuses on agency and digital media, with a particular interest in how agency can be supported or constrained by the affordances of software, hardware, circumstances of production, and cultural contexts.

My work is informed by game studies, media studies, philosophy, cultural studies, and visual culture. I completed my PhD, jointly funded by the AHRC, the National Productivity Investment Fund, and The University and Nottingham, in 2021. My book Videogames and Agency (Routledge 2023), offers a new conceptual framework that helps us understand how freedom to act is discussed by game developers, and how that in turn reflects in their design principles. By doing so the book presents a unique approach to studying agency that combines game design, game studies, and game developer discourse. Besides this, I also published on designing for playfulness, narrativity in videogames, and cosy games. I am currently interested in the connection between the recent (re)emergence of cosy media aesthetics and neoliberalism.