CFP – PLAYPAUSE SYMPOSIUM 2019: IMMERSION|DISSONANCE
PLAYPAUSE are excited to announce our second symposium, Immersion|Dissonance which will be taking place at the University of Birmingham on Wednesday 22nd May 2019. See below for information about the conference and this year’s call for papers.
PLAYPAUSE 2019 SYMPOSIUM – Wednesday 22nd May 2019, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT.
For our second annual symposium, PLAY/PAUSE is looking for papers that interrogate the continuum between immersion and dissonance within videogames and virtual reality. We therefore welcome papers from any disciplinary background that relate to (but are not limited to) the following topics:
- New immersive media (Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality)
- Embodiment and virtual environments
- Glitches and breaking immersion
- Flow and gaming expertise
- Identification and social gaming
- Constructed authenticity
- Queerness and the player body
- Detail, labour and the ‘crunch’
- Boredom and negative affects
Abstracts of no more than 250 words, along with a bibliography and short bio, should be sent to playpauseuob@gmail.com by Friday 15th March 2019. We particularly welcome proposals from PGRs and early career researchers.
LANCASTER VIDEOGAME STUDIES – Call For Papers 2019
LANCASTER VIDEOGAME STUDIES
A Postgraduate Videogame Research Group
Call For Papers 2019
We are inviting papers of 20 minutes in length on any topic related to videogames and we particularly invite interdisciplinary responses. We accept proposed group panels of 3 people. Possible foci for papers may include but are in no way limited to:
- Interactions between Videogames and other forms of media (e.g. film adaptations, interactive television such as Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018), and multi-media franchises such as Marvel and Harry Potter).
- Ramifications and ongoing growth of choice-based play (e.g. alternate endings and cross-game ramifications).
- The recent surge in revived, rebooted and remade videogames (e.g. God of War (2018), Shadow of the Colossus(2018) and Spyro Reignited Trilogy (2018)).
- The creation of increasingly larger and more complex game worlds.
- Influences of literary and cinematic movements and modes on gaming (e.g. the Gothic, Horror, Film Noir, etc).
- Representation of minorities within videogames (e.g. the growth of both female and non-white protagonists, and the choice of non-hetero romance options in some games)
- Presentism within portrayals of historical periods (e.g. the Red Dead Redemption, Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty franchises).
- Non-linear or non-traditional narrative styles (e.g. the Dark SoulsTrilogy)
For more details go to their website
Please submit a title, 200-word abstract and a 50-word bionote in a single document for consideration by the 30th April 2019 to lancastergamestudies@gmail.com. Group panels please submit as one document containing all titles, abstracts, and bionotes as well as a proposed title for your panel.
Keep up with the news about the study day by following @lu_gamestudies and remember to use #LU_nextgen19 in your tweets.
British Digra 2019 Tickets are Live
The Eventbrite for bDigra2019 is now live – https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/british-digra-conference-2019-tickets-57972642735
The 2019 Conference is again being hosted at Staffordshire University, on the College Rd Campus in sunny Stoke-on-Trent, UK. The campus is incredibly close to the Stoke-on-Trent train station.
- Facebook event – https://www.facebook.com/events/340696343212899/
- Travel Info – http://www.staffs.ac.uk/about/how-to-find-us/home
Here’s the university’s suggested list of accommodation, but there are B&Bs and AirBNB’s around the place too.
| Hotel | Address and Contact Telephone Number | Proximity to the University |
| Best Western Plus, Moat House, Stoke on Trent | Etruria Hall, Festival Way, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, ST1 5BQ. 0870 225 4601 | 2.4 miles – Approx 10 minutes’ drive |
| Holiday Inn, Stoke on Trent | Clayton Road, Newcastle Under Lyme, ST5 4DL. 0871 942 9077 | 4.2 miles – Approx 15 minutes’ drive |
| Holiday Inn Express, Stoke on Trent | Stanley Matthews Way, Trentham Lakes, Stoke-on-Trent, ST4 4EG. | 3.3 miles – Approx 10 minutes’ drive |
| North Stafford Hotel | Winton Square, Station Road, Stoke-on-Trent, ST4 2AE. 0871 222 0097 | 0.4 miles – Approx 3-5 minutes’ walk |
| Premiere Inn, Trentham Gardens | Stone Road, Stoke-on-Trent, ST4 8JG. 0871 527 9050 | 4.4 miles – Approx 16 minutes’ drive |
| Quality Hotel, Hanley | 66 Trinity Street, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, ST1 5NB. 01782 202 361 | 2.1 miles – Approx 8 minutes’ drive |
| Premiere Inn, Hanley | Etruria Road, Hanley, ST1 5NH. 0871 527 9476 | 1.9 miles – Approx 10 minutes’ drive |
- General Tourist Info – https://www.visitstoke.co.uk/
Call for Papers – British Digra 2019 – 6 -7 June 2019 – Staffordshire University, Stoke on Trent
Call for Papers – British DiGRA 2019
The third annual conference of British DiGRA.
6 -7 June 2019
Staffordshire University, Stoke on Trent
The Diverging Game Mix.
We welcome submissions that move beyond digital gaming, for example submissions relating to boardgames, LARP, pervasive games or other forms of analog gaming.
As with last year, we actively encourage early scholars and PhD candidates, and wish to programme our conference to provide a welcoming environment for newer voices as well as those more established.
Once again, our theme playfully engages with that of DiGRA 2019, aiming to present a counter perspective to the work being discussed there. We may even get some sets of giant Ludo in!
Submissions should consider, but not be restricted to, the following topics in this light:
- Revisiting Games as Inter/Multidisciplinary subject
- Gaming as Media
- Representation in Games
- Licensed and Franchised Games
- Playfulness and the Medium of Games
- Design as practice
- Pedagogy and gaming
- Game design/development/theory
- Casual Games
- Changes in gaming culture
- Spectatorship and play
- Esports theory
- Underrepresented Games and Audiences
- Close readings and ‘well played’ games.
We welcome the following submission types:
Full papers, of 5000 – 7000 words, to be presented as papers in a panel session.
A template for full papers is available here: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/digra-template-2018/fdtmqscfgzpc
(with thanks to Mirjam Palosaari Eladhari, Adam Summerville and Mark Nelson for this resource)
Abstracts of 500 words, to be presented in a series of quickfire round table sessions.
Please follow the relevant areas of the template, including Abstract, Keywords and References.
Workshops to last approx half a day – to be submitted as precis of approx 500 – 1000 words underlining core objectives and aims.
Discussion panels – to be submitted as precis of approx 500 – 1000 words underlining core objectives and aims.
Paper Paramedic and Mentorship. Following on from the very successful sessions last year, we will be offering a paper paramedic session to contributors whose work we believe is not quite ready for submission. We encourage everyone to submit work, irrespective of academic level.
We are looking for reviewers! Contact us before we contact you! 😉
Please submit work to BritishDigra@gmail.com by 22nd April 2019. Papers and abstracts should be anonymised, but please make sure you identify yourself in the e-mail so that we can respond when the paper has been reviewed.
Notification of acceptance of papers 10th May 2019
Selected proceedings may be published in a special edition of ToDiGRA, in second quarter 2020.
We have decided to charge a small attendance fee of £30 and £15 for students to cover costs. Volunteers may attend for free. Any surplus funding will be carried over to future BDiGRA events.
An Eventbrite with booking details will be forthcoming.
All attendees are expected to abide by the BDiGRA Inclusivity Policy:
http://bdigra.org.uk/inclusivity-policy
Ying-Ying Law
Esther MacCallum-Stewart
Alan O’Dea
Nia Wearn
Call for Papers – Last Symposium Standing: Interdisciplinary Symposium on Survival Media
Last Symposium Standing: Interdisciplinary Symposium on Survival Media
April 30 @ 9:30 am – 5:30 pm
Since the early 2000s, a wide range of ‘survival’ media has been created, watched, played and explored. Alongside the rise in the production of survival media, this popularity is also evidenced by the prevalence of survival narratives in more traditionally established genres such as horror, disaster and thrillers. From reality TV shows like ‘Survivor’ to video games such as The Long Dark, from advertising to films such as ‘Trapped’ and ‘127 Hours’, this symposium explores what can be learnt from examining these narratives which foreground human survival. What does the popularity of survival narratives in contemporary media tell us about the realities and concerns of individual and collective survival across the world? Positioning survival media as a 21st century global phenomenon, how can we understand the challenges of our survival in the contemporary world such as climate change by exploring the landscapes and terrains imagined by survival media?
This symposium aims to engage with these questions and bring together all who are who working on survival media across the disciplines. Inviting works on survival films, reality and fictional television, literature, video games, advertising, all work will be shared in a day-long event on April 30th 2019 hosted by the Department of Film Studies, University of St Andrews. We invite conference-style papers of 20 minutes, more informal 5 minute interventions and debates, and other more experimental presentations of both academic and practice-based work. There will also be a survival media-themed activity followed by a plenary Q&A. The symposium is designed to facilitate discussion on this engaging topic, aid inter-disciplinary PG networking and provoke new questions on the notion of ‘survival’.
We invite papers (short and long) and other presentations of work on the following topics, and others:
Spaces of survival and world creation
Narratives of survival
Transnational media and survival
Survival as an inter-disciplinary topic
Aesthetics of survival
Transmedial survival
Politics and ideology of survival
The ‘surviving’ body
Gender and identity in survival
Proposals of no more than 250 words and a 50 word bio should be sent no later than February 15th 2019 to:
Cassice Last- cl225@st-andrews.ac.uk
Shruti Narayanswamy- sn52@st-andrews.ac.uk
There are a few travel bursaries available for PG students and ECRs which will be assigned by a lottery system.
This symposium is brought to you with financial support from the St Leonard’s Doctoral and Postgraduate College Community Fund, the University of St Andrews CAPOD GRADskills Innovation Grant / PG Conference Fund and the BAFTSS Event Grant Scheme.
Call for papers: Beyond the Console: Gender and Narrative Games
Beyond the Console: Gender and Narrative Games
8 / 9 February 2019, at the V&A and London South Bank University, UK
Call for Papers
The conference invites submissions from a broad range of disciplines, and is particularly interested in fostering links between research scholarship, game making, and curation. We are interested in paper proposals (including theoretical and methodological proposals, comparative studies, and case studies), as well as creative research demonstrations from scholars, art practitioners, curators and gamemakers. Possible areas for consideration might include, but are not limited to:
· ‘The personal game’: subjectivity and game authorship
· Gender (re-)activism: social media, authoring tools, crowdsourcing
· Language, gender, programming: translation, procedural narratives
· Gender through immersive live action role play (LARP) games
· Gender in interactive performance
· Radical reappraisals of game genres
· The state of ontological play: who plays who, what, where and how
The conference will include a live keynote game by Porpentine, introduced and chaired by Emily Short, hosted by the V&A Museum. The keynote speaker is the interactive artist and scholar Hannah Wood.
Proposals
Proposals (20 minute length for papers; 10 minutes for demonstrations and provocations) should include a title, an abstract of max. 300 words, and a brief biography.
The proposal deadline is 26 November 2018.
Please address proposals to: digitalstorymakingresearch@gmail.com
Conference Organiser: Dr Karlien van den Beukel, Arts and Creative Industries, London South Bank University
EUROPE AND BEYOND: BOUNDARIES, BARRIERS AND BELONGING
EUROPE AND BEYOND: BOUNDARIES, BARRIERS AND BELONGING
14th ESA Conference, 20-23 August 2019 to be held in Manchester / UK
It has a number of research streams that may be of interest to our members:
including:
RS01 – Gaming at the Boundaries: Imagining Inclusive Futures
RS07 – Platform Work: Needs, Activation and Representativeness in the Era of Digital Labour
Abstract submission deadline – 1 February 2019
For more information: https://www.europeansociology.org/about-esa-2019
British DiGRA conference 2019 – call for hosts
Following last year’s highly successful British DiGRA conference, hosted by Staffordshire University, the Board are pleased to invite interested institutions to apply to host the 2019 conference, which is expected to run sometime between late-April and June 2019.
Applicants should download and complete this form, providing all the information indicated.
- Applications should be submitted by 5pm on Friday 14th December.
- As soon as possible following the closing date, the Board will select a host from the submitted applications.
- Applications should be no longer than 3500 words, including the prescribed headings, and may include images (for example, maps or photographs of the proposed venue).
- Applicants are encouraged to review the Inclusivity Policy.
- Please submit your completed form to Matt at Matthew.Barr@glasgow.ac.uk by the closing date. Queries may be addressed to Esther (neveah@gmail.com) or Matt.
CFP – DIGRA 2019 KYOTO JAPAN – Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo Mix
DiGRA 2019
Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan
August 6-10, 2019
Call for Papers
‘Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo Mix’
Media mix (wasei-eigo, メディアミックス or ‘media mikkusu’) bears a particular meaning in Japanese popular culture originating from anime production and consumption in the 1960s. Similarly to cross-media, media convergence, and transmediality, it refers to ways of presenting, representing, and sharing content on different platforms and media allowing dynamic communication between them. Media mix is best seen as a commercial approach as it was conceived to improve advertising strategies through heavy reliance on characters. Of particular importance for media mix are Intellectual Properties that link together various media products and entertainment services across technologies and platforms from TV to toys and game arcades. Its anime origins also bring along a range of analogue formats and outlets as parts of media mix. Conventionally, digital games are seen as one of these possible outlets.
In DiGRA 2019, we invite contributors to consider the possibility of ‘ludo mix’ where games and play increasingly occupy the focal point of such a diversified distribution and consumption model. Ludo mixes may include several versions of a game or several different games together with other content thus resulting in novel media ecologies, business models, and development and consumption cultures.
More details here – http://www.digra2019.org/call-for-paper/