The GAMEPLAYGAG videos were first edited and screened in 2008 by Manuel Garin, who currently works at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, as Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies. He has been visiting scholar at different institutions like the Tokyo University of The Arts, the University of Southern California and Columbia University, where he developed the comparative media projects “Gameplaygag: Between Silent Film and New Media” and “A Hundred Busters: Keaton Across The Arts”.

Author of the monograph “El gag visual. De Buster Keaton a Super Mario” (Cátedra, 2014), his research on cinema, art history and new media has been published in academic journals such as Screen, Feminist Media Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Communication & Society, The Sixties, CJCS, L’Atalante, HyCS or Comparative Cinema, and in books from Oxford University Press, MIT Press, Routledge, Amsterdam University Press, Palgrave, Bloomsbury, De Gruyter, Mimesis or Galaxia Gutenberg. As a cultural critic, he has written for magazines such as La Maleta de Portbou, Contrapicado, Caimán Cuadernos de Cine, or Cultura/s.

Beyond the Gameplaygag project, his current research focuses on the relations between cinema, archives and historical memory. He was the PI of the project “Football and Visual Culture under Francoism”, financed by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (PID2020-116277GA-I00) and based on the relations between sport, class, gender, and national identities in Spanish cinema and audiovisual media. Currently he is the Co-PI of the project “Visual Cultures around the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition: Image, City and Modernity” (PID2024-160703NB-I00), which studies the images and counter-images created around this contested world fair, collaborating with archival and cultural institutions towards its centennial in 2029. He is also the Co-PI of a collaborative research project of engineers and art historians, financed by the María de Maeztu program, and focused on developing AI models capable of identifying and comparing visual motifs.