The Creative Industries Research Center: Criticism

The next meeting of the The Creative Industries Research Center (RSG) will take place on Thursday, September 4, 2025, from 8:30 AM to 10:00 AM at the CCP offices in Gróska, 3rd floor, at Bjargargata 1, 102 Reykjavik. The theme of this meeting is Criticism, and the moderator will be Erla Rún Guðmundsdóttir, director of RSG.

The event will be held in English and the presentations will be streamed online.

Hilmar Smári Finsen works at CCP as a marketing specialist. He has worked as a video game critic for Séð og Heyrt, kvikmyndir.is among other places. He also worked at Gamestöðin for 10 years, serving one year as operations and marketing manager.

For this critic panel he'll be focusing on the state of video game criticism, particularly how open review platforms, such as Metacritic and OpenCritic, and audience impact perception and sales. He will also talk about the growing effects of influencers within the video game space and how their voices impact the games and the industry.

Sigríður Jónsdóttir is a performing arts specialist at the Theatre Museum, a performing arts archive at the National and University Library of Iceland. For the past decade she has worked as a theatre critic for Fréttablaðið and Heimildin. Additionally, her publications on Icelandic performing arts have been published internationally including the European Journal of Theatre and Performance, International Theatre Institute in Japan and the International Association of Theatre Critics in Hong Kong.

Sigríður will talk about the importance of professional critics, the future of theatre criticism and the new challenges theatre critics are facing.

Eliza Reid is a bestselling writer, public speaker, gender equality advocate, cofounder of the acclaimed Iceland Writers Retreat and former first lady of Iceland. She was born and raised in Canada but has lived in Iceland for over twenty years. Eliza’s first book, Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World, was an instant bestseller in Canada and Iceland, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Pick, and translated into numerous languages. Her first novel, an Iceland-set mystery called Death on the Island (Death of a Diplomat in the UK) was an instant USA Today bestseller, an instant bestseller in Canada and Iceland, and has been optioned for television in a pre-empt deal.

Eliza will tell us about her experience and attitudes toward literary criticism and the effect it has on her work.

Following the presentations, the streaming will end and attendees are invited to participate in a discussion on the subject.

Please register your attendance (in person). Please note that seating is limited. Registration closes at 12 PM on Wednesday, September 3rd.

CCP will provide coffee and a light breakfast to attendees.