https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3422-4697Eugen Pfister is historian and political scientist. He conducts research on the history of ideas and political history, as well as history in and of digital games. In terms of the history of ideas, he is primarily interested in digital games as sources of digitalisation in our societies and as sources of political communication and identity construction over the past half-century. He leads the SNSF- Sinergia Project “Confoederatio Ludens Swiss History of Games, Play and Game Design 1968-2000” from 2023 to 2027 at the Hochschule der Künste Bern. Previously, he led the SNSF research project ‘Horror Game Politics’ at the HKB from 2018 to 2022. He is a founding member and long-standing board member of the German-speaking ‘Working Group on Humanities and Digital Games’ (AKGWDS) and the Digital Society Initiative (DSI). Since 2015, he has been running a personal research blog called ‘Spiel-Kultur-Wissenschaft’ (spielkult.hypotheses.org) and, since 2024, the game studies podcast ‘Kritische Controller’ together with Dr Arno Görgen.
His research interests include digital history, game studies, history of ideas, political history and media history. Eugen Pfister studied history and political science at the University of Vienna and the Université de Paris IV – Sorbonne. He then studied the history of political communication in co-tutelle at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Universita degli studi di Trento. He has taught history and media studies at the University of Fribourg, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, the University of Vienna, and the University for Continuing Education in Krems. He is a reviewer for DIGRA, CEEGS, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Theodor Körner Fund.
