Month: November 2017

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PLAY/PAUSE Symposium – 24th January 2018, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT

PLAY/PAUSE Symposium – 24th January 2018, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT

CALL FOR PAPERS:

Gaming the System: Play, Procedure and Procedurality in Videogames and Virtual Reality

Procedures are embedded ways of understanding our cultural, social and political systems; they provide fixed guidelines and rules to be followed. While procedures are seemingly fixed, procedurality, on the other hand, is a constantly evolving mechanism for ‘creating, explaining or understanding processes’ (Bogost, 2007). For our inaugural event, PLAY/PAUSE welcomes papers that will analyse procedures and procedurality in relation to videogames and Virtual Reality (VR).

Does the procedurality of videogames offer us, as programmer Brie Code argues, the tools to adapt to a twenty-first-century ‘overwhelmed with shock, with information, with change’? Or are videogames an embodiment of the controlled degrees of freedom offered to individuals under late-capitalism and neoliberalism? Does VR technology offer unprecedented immediacy and the potential to be, as Jennifer Alsever calls it, ‘the ultimate empathy machine’? Or does it further indulge a misguided impulse towards mastery of our physical environment? And what of ‘metagames’, Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux’s term for the games ‘occurring before, after, between and during games’? Are the hacks, speed-runs and fan-made mass-involvement games like Twitch Plays Pokemon (2014) a creative flourishing of the commons? Or do they simply indicate the outsourcing of labour by media industry discourses?

This symposium provides a meeting place for researchers within and outside the field of game studies, and seeks to broaden the academic consideration of videogames and VR: away from the consideration of them as niche, relatively new technologies, towards mediums that have the capacity to encourage and create academic discourses that reflect the cultures they are created in.

We welcome a broad range of proposals for 20-minute papers on the role or significance of procedurality in regards to (but not limited to) the following topics:

  • The interplay between narrative and ludic elements of videogames
  • Embodiment and modes of perception in videogames and/or VR
  • Gaming, metagaming, and fan cultures
  • Videogames and philosophy
  • Representing and playing history in videogames
  • The influence of videogames on other media, e.g. novels, films, plays, etc.

 

Abstracts of no more than 250 words, along with a bibliography and short bio, should be sent to playpauseuob@gmail.com by Friday 22nd December 2017. We particularly welcome proposals from PGRs and early career researchers.

PLAY/PAUSE is part of the Centre for Digital Cultures at Birmingham, fuelling academic discussion of Videogames and Virtual Reality.

Twitter: @PLAYPAUSE_UOB
Blog: playpauseuob@wordpress.com

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DiGRA 2018 – The Game is the Message – CFP

The Game is the Message

http://digra2018.com

July 25-28, 2018

Campus Luigi Einaudi, Università di Torino, Turin, Italy

Lungo Dora Siena, 100 A, 10153 Turin, Italy

Conference chairs: Riccardo Fassone and Matteo Bittanti

Games have long since moved out of the toy drawer, but our understanding of them can still benefit from seeing them in a wider context of mediated meaning-making. DiGRA 2018 follows Marshall McLuhan, and sees games as extensions of ourselves. They recalibrate our senses and redefine our social relationships. The environments they create are more conspicuous than their content. They are revealing, both of our own desires and of the society within which we live. Their message is their effect. Games change us.

To explore this change, we invite scholars, artists and industry to engage in discussions over the following tracks:

– Platforms

Game platforms invite new textualities, new technologies and new networks of power relations. Game structures, their integration with and use of the technology, as well as the affordances and restrictions offered by the platforms on which they live, influence our experience of them.

– Users

Games invite new relations between their users, and players strive for and achieve new modes of perception. This reconfigures our attention, and establishes new patterns and forms of engagement.

– Meaning-making

The connection between a game and its content is often interchangeable – a game is clearly recognizable even if the surface fiction is changed. But games still produce meanings and convey messages. We ask, what are the modes of signification and the aesthetic devices used in games? In this context we particularly invite authors to look at games that claim to be about serious topics or deal with political and social issues.

– Meta-play

The playing of the game has become content, and we invite authors to explore spectatorship, streaming, allied practices and hybrid media surrounding play and the players. How can we describe and examine the complex interweaving of practices found in these environments?

– Context

Games are subject to material, economic and cultural constraints. This track invites reflection on how these contingencies as well as production tools, industry and business demands and player interventions contribute to the process of signification.

– Poetics

Games are created within constraints, affordances, rules and permissions which give us a frame in which games generate meaning. Games have voice, a language, and they do speak. This is the poetics of games, and we invite our fellows to explore and uncover it.

– General

Games tend to break out of the formats given them, and so for this track we invite the outstanding abstracts, papers and panels on alternative topics to the pre-determined tracks.

We invite full papers, 5000 – 7000 words plus references using the DiGRA 2018 submission template (http://www.digra.org/?attachment_id=148233), extended abstracts (from 500 words, maximum 1000, excluding references), and panel submissions (1000 words excluding references, with a 100 word biography of each participant). Full papers will be subject to a double-blind peer review. Extended abstracts will be blinded and peer reviewed by committees organised by the track chairs. Panels will be reviewed by the track chairs and the program chairs. General inquiries should be addressed to Riccardo Fassone – riccardo.fassone AT unito.it. Artist contributions, industry contributions, performances or non-standard presentations should be addressed to Matteo Bittanti  – matteo.bittanti AT iulm.it .

Submission will be opened December 1st, 2017, and the final deadline for submission is January 31st 2018. The URL for submissions is https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=digra2018 .

Program chairs are

Martin Gibbs, martin.gibbs AT unimelb.edu.au, University of Melbourne, Australia

Torill Elvira Mortensen, toel AT itu.dk, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Important dates:

  • Submission opens: December 1st, 2017
  • Final submission deadline: January 31st, 2018
  • Results from reviews: March 1st, 2018
  • Early registration deadline: March 15th, 2018
  • Reviewed and rewritten full papers final deadline: April 15th, 2018
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British DiGRA conference 2018 – call for hosts

Following the successful first British DiGRA conference, hosted by Salford University in May this year, the British DiGRA Board are pleased to invite parties interested in hosting the next conference to apply via the form below:

https://goo.gl/forms/dcvHD16e9HNZcoy52

Applications should be submitted by 5pm on Friday 15th December, 5pm on Sunday 14th January with the conference expected to run sometime between late-April and June 2018. As soon as possible following the closing date, the Board will select a host from the submitted applications.

Queries may be addressed to Esther (neveah@gmail.com) or Matt (Matthew.Barr@glasgow.ac.uk). Applicants are encouraged to review the Inclusivity Policy: http://bdigra.org.uk/inclusivity-policy

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