Karina Moritzen has been awarded the 2025 DAAD Prize for outstanding achievements of international students. In addition to her academic research in Game Studies at the University of Oldenburg, she is involved in a number of social projects.
Karina Moritzen first came up with the idea for the topic of her doctoral thesis in April 2020, in the middle of the Covid pandemic. The communication scientist was just finishing her master's degree when she read that the American rapper star Travis Scott had performed a set in the video game Fortnite – and that 12.3 million people around the world had logged in to watch the ten-minute virtual show. Moritzen was fascinated by the fact that a concert in the gaming world could reach so many fans at the same time. “It was a groundbreaking moment for me: I realised that a completely new culture was emerging here, and I really wanted to explore it,” she says.
Moritzen comes from Brazil and is doing her doctoral thesis in the University of Oldenburg’s PhD programme Shaping the Future. In Oldenburg musicologist Professor Dr. Mario Dunkel, she found a supervisor who was as enthusiastic about her topic as she was, so in 2021 she and her husband moved from their hometown of Natal in the northeast of Brazil to Oldenburg. The prize she was awarded in mid-December is testimony to how well she has adjusted to her new life here. The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) has awarded her its prize for outstanding achievements of international students at the University of Oldenburg for her academic achievements and social engagement. Supervisor Dunkel confirms that Moritzen conducts research “at the highest international level” and is also “very involved locally” in Oldenburg.
Moritzen’s doctoral thesis about how an entirely new music scene and genre is emerging in the computer games Fortnite and Minecraft is now almost ready for submission. She is doing two PhDs at the same time: in musicology at the University of Oldenburg and in communication science at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro. This has made her project more demanding but hasn’t slowed her down. The focus of her project is “in-game concerts” like the one featuring Travis Scott. According to Moritzen’s research, the trend goes back to the text-based online role-playing games of the 1970s in which players still described musical experiences with words. Nowadays, in addition to the spectacular live shows performed by superstars, games like Minecraft have their own virtual music festivals featuring non-mainstream bands.
Surfing over the rainbow with Ariana Grande
Moritzen also investigated players’ social experiences with online concerts using ethnographic methods such as conducting interviews with participants, analysing questionnaires and attending events herself, including Ariana Grande's concert on Fortnite in 2021. In this event, fans accompanied the pop star’s virtual avatar as she flew through the sky, danced on a lake and walked through a digital city. Moritzen says it was a wonderful experience. “I wasn't a gamer when I started researching this topic. What interested me was the role of music,” she says. She has her own experiences of performing in front of an audience: in her hometown of Natal she was part of a lively music scene and made a name for herself as the lead singer of a feminist punk band.
Another aspect of her research focuses on how musicians are using games as a platform and a new way to reach out to their fans. In addition to the immersive experience, some virtual shows offer interactive elements or contain references to well-known music videos, and game worlds are often designed to match a star’s musical references. “It’s important to study these phenomena from an academic perspective because they have become an important part of our global culture,” Moritzen observes.
The field that deals with music in video games is called ludomusicology and is still a small subfield of the more established discipline, game studies. “Somewhere between 50 to 60 researchers attend the international ludomusicology conference, many of them from the UK,” Moritzen explains. But the very fact that this is a young field is what motivates her: “You can help shape its development,” she says. And that is precisely what the young scientist is doing. She is co-editing an upcoming special issue of the renowned journal Popular Music dedicated to the new music genre hyperpop, as well as co-authoring a chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Online Music Cultures with Mario Dunkel.
greater prominence for perspectives from the Global South
In addition, Moritzen is campaigning for the internationalisation of the field and greater prominence for perspectives from the Global South. She played a key role in founding the Latin American Society for Ludomusicology (ALLUM) to support colleagues from Latin America, and in 2023 she organised a ludomusicology conference in Brazil, with another one in the planning stages.
The DAAD award winner is also contributing to the expansion of her field in Oldenburg. As a member of the Oldengame research collective, which was founded in 2023 and includes other doctoral candidates from the Shaping the Future PhD programme, she is campaigning for game studies to become a subject in its own right at the university. She also played a key role in planning and organising two symposia on the topic at the Schlaues Haus Oldenburg, and has recently taught courses in both Oldenburg and at the University of Hildesheim in response to growing interest among students.
“Oldenburg has become my second home. I feel very comfortable here,” she says in fluent German. Even northern Germany’s dreary autumn weather hasn’t dampened the Brazilian’s spirits: “I don’t mind the weather – on the contrary, I love the changing seasons!" she says. She also appreciates the city’s compact size, its good cycling infrastructure and its diverse cultural offerings, from the state theatre to the Cine K cinema. She has made plenty of friends, many of whom also come from South America, and she teaches Portuguese at the adult education centre and also gives climbing lessons. When asked how she copes with this astonishing workload, she simply replies: “It’s been a busy time.”
It comes as no surprise that Moritzen’s application for a postdoc project is already in the pipeline. Her goal is to continue her research either with a Marie Curie Fellowship from the EU or in the German Research Foundation’s Walter Benjamin Programme in Oldenburg. Her new topic: how children and young people are being exploited as unpaid developers on the Roblox gaming platform.
