Video Game Law Resource Available, University of British Columbia

Jon Festinger Q.C. would like to let the community know that most of the materials including slides and HD videos of lectures for his University of British Columbia Faculty of Law course in Video Game Law (Law450A) are available on-line at http://blogs.ubc.ca/videogamelaw/ .The site is open and has a Creative Commons license. Anyone in the community can respond to posts and Jon would encourage them to join into any of the course discussions – only asking that they identify themselves and their academic affiliation when doing so. Jon wants in particular to thank to the UBC Centre for Teaching, Learning & Technology, the UBC Faculty of Law and The Centre for Digital Media for making the resources available so the course materials can become available in this way.

CfP: Inaugural Games and Literary Theory Conference – 31st October – 1st November 2013, Valletta, Malta

University of Malta – Institute of Digital Games and the Department of English – International Conference Series in Games and Literary Theory
Inaugural Conference

University of Malta, 31st October-1st November 2013

This inaugural event in the Digital Games and Literary Theory Conference Series follows on from a successful International Workshop held at the University of Malta last year. That event established the scope, appeal and timeliness of interdisciplinary research involving Game Studies and Literary Theory. While there are ample conference opportunities for discussion of the impact of Game Studies on other fields in the Humanities and on the amenability, in turn, of Game Studies to critique by those fields, events where the affinities with Literary Theory take centre stage are, by comparison, quite rare. This is surprising.

There are, in fact, a number of reasons why a forum for formalised exchanges across the two fields is now overdue, and why the prospect of it should be exciting and enriching for both areas. For one thing, digital games’ modalities could be seen as reconfiguring and possibly subverting conceptualities and orthodoxies integral to literary theory (such as matters concerning textuality, subjectivity, authorship, the linguistic turn, the ludic, and the very nature of fiction).

More info after the jump

Continue reading

Job: Lectureship available in Games Technology/Games Programming at Bournemouth University, UK

A Lecturer position in the area of games programming/technology has become available in the Creative Technology Group in the School of Design, Engineering & Computing at Bournemouth University, UK.

You should have a doctoral qualification or equivalent and expertise in games programming/technology is essential. You will be expected to have a strong understanding of C++ and C# programming (plus related paradigms such as object-oriented programming) and also APIs such as OpenGL or DirectX.

In addition to this, you will be expected to have familiarity with contemporary game engines such as Unreal, game modification and applied maths and physics for games development. Industry experience in the form of published game titles would be advantageous. A strong research profile in a related area, evidence of successful bids for funding and experience in supervising postgraduate students would also be desirable.

A detailed job description and person specification are available from our website together with an online application form.

http://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/jobs/dec303.html/

CfP: Springer’s Multimedia Systems Journal (MMSJ) – Special Issue on Network and Systems Support for Games

Springer’s Multimedia Systems Journal (MMSJ): Special Issue on Network and Systems Support for Games
http://netgames2012.lip6.fr/MMSJ-SI

The market for networked video games is now worth more than $1 billion in
western countries. The inherent social and community-building aspects of
networked video games are widening the sector’s influence on other
markets, making their worldwide potential growth tremendous. Virtual
economies are also exploding and becoming a growing economic force to be
reckoned with. We are already seeing evidence that virtual and real world
economies are starting to merge, where users/avatars can exchange real
goods along with virtual goods in virtual market places.

Details after the jump

Continue reading

CfP: VS-Games 2013, 11-13 September, Bournemouth University UK

VS-Games 2013

http://www.vsgames2013.org/VS-Games 2013

The fifth outing of the International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications will be hosted at Bournemouth University, UK between the 11th and the 13th of September 2013. With the conference organized in previous years at locations such as Coventry (UK), Braga (Portugal), Athens (Greece) and Genoa (Italy), it will take place, for 2013, at the state of the art Kimmeridge House building of Bournemouth University, situated at the main Talbot campus of the institution.

The development and deployment of games with a purpose beyond entertainment and with considerable connotations with more serious aims is an exciting area with immense academic but also commercial potential. This potential presents both immediate opportunities but also numerous significant challenges to the interested parties involved, as a result of the relatively recent emergence and popularity of the medium. The VS Games 2013 conference aims to address this variety of relevant contemporary challenges that the increasingly cross-disciplinary communities involved in serious games are currently facing. This will be achieved by, amongst other ways, the comprehensive dissemination of successful case studies and development practices, the sharing of theories, conceptual frameworks and methodologies and, finally, the discussion of evaluation approaches and their resulting studies.

Continue reading

CfP: Surveillance, Games and Play

Call for Papers: Surveillance, Games and Play – Theme Issue of /Surveillance & Society/

edited by: Jennifer R. Whitson and Bart Simon
submission deadline: *September 15th 2013* for publication March 2014.

The games we play on our computers, iPads, and video game consoles are watching us. They track our every online move and send data on who we are, how we play, and whom we play with back to game and virtual world publishers such as Sony and Microsoft. Two events in the summer of 2011 exemplify the need to study surveillance in games: a hacker attack against Sony’s Playstation Network compromised over 77 million user accounts including credit card numbers, while iPhone users discovered hidden code in their devices that tracked their movements and secretly sent this data back to Apple. This form of consumer surveillance that targets players has eluded critical appraisal in both the games studies and surveillance literature. The games we play are not only watching us, but are leveraging surveillance to mold us into better students, workers, and consumers, as evidenced by the growth of gamification applications that combine playful design and feedback mechanisms from games with users’ social profiles (e.g. Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn) in non-game applications explicitly geared to drive behavioural change. Accordingly, traditional surveillance activities are transformed through their combination with playful frames of reference and game-like elements.

More info after the jump

Continue reading

CfP e-virtuoses 2013 – International Scientific Symposium “Games for all purposes?

http://www.e-virtuoses.net/en/call-for-scientific-papers

International Scientific Symposium “Games for all purposes? Appropriation, Repurposing and Rejection”

On 4 and 5 June 2013 in Valenciennes, during the “e-virtuoses” scientific convention, dedicated to the use of games and play (digital or not) for utilitarian purposes, we will host a scientific symposium entitled “Games for all purposes? Appropriation, Repurposing and Rejection “.

The objects of study will include in particular:
•Serious Game : the combination of a serious intention – education, information, communication, marketing, ideology, coaching or data collection – with a game including rules and targets.
•Serious Play the combination of a serious intention – education, information, communication, marketing, ideology, coaching or data collection – with a toy.
•Serious Gaming : the process of repurposing a game via all kinds of different methods, in order to offer activities that go beyond mere entertainment and that had not been initially intended by the author of the game.
• Gamification : use of game design to gamify objects and originally non-playful contexts.

These objects challenge the notions of prevention, training, knowledge assessment, coaching, communication, data collection, etc. in various fields such as education, healthcare, marketing, safety, culture…

More after the jump

Continue reading

CfP: 4th International Conference on Serious Games Development and Applications (SGDA 2013)

Call for Papers – Fourth International Conference on Serious Games Development and Applications (SGDA 2013)

www.sgda-conf.org

It is our pleasure to announce that the Fourth International Conference on Serious Games Development and Applications (SGDA 2013) is hosted by SINTEF in Trondheim, Norway on 25-27 September 2013.

SGDA 2013 appears in the sequence of the success of SGDA 2010 at Derby, UK (its Proceedings were published as a Special Issue of the Elsevier journal Entertainment Computing), SGDA 2011 at Lisbon, Portugal, and SGDA 2012 at Bremen, Germany (Proceedings were published as SpringerLNCS 6944 and 7528).

Details after the jump

Continue reading

CfP: 3rd European Conference on Games for Health Europe, 28-29 October 2013 Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Call for Papers for the peer-reviewed track of the third European Conference on Games for Health Europe, 28-29 October 2013 Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Deadline: May 24th, 2013.

Founded in 2004, the Games for Health Project supports community, knowledge and business development efforts to use cutting-edge games and game technologies to improve health and health care.

The Games for Health Conference brings together researchers, medical professionals and game developers to share information about the impact of games, playful interaction and game technologies on health, health care and health policy. Over three days, more than 400 attendees will participate in over 60 sessions provided by an international array of 80+ speakers, cutting across a wide range of activities in health and health care. Topics include exergaming, physical therapy, disease management, emergency and urgent care (go to MyDoc Urgent Care Clinic for any emergency cases), health behavior change, biofeedback, scientific validation, rehab, epidemiology, training, cognitive health, nutrition and education.

More info after the jump

Continue reading

CfP: Edited Book Proposal: Gaming Beyond Screens

http://tag.hexagram.ca/blog/2013/03/04/cfp-for-edited-book-proposal-gaming-beyond-screens/

We are currently seeking contributions to an edited collection on gestural gaming entitled Gaming Beyond Screens. In recent years there has been a surge of interest in digital games, platforms, and peripherals that employ gestural technologies. The Nintendo Wii, Rock Band, and Kinect are just some of the most popular examples in a long list of games and gaming devices that shift our attention away from the screen and towards bodies in motion. The phenomenon of gestural gaming raises a number of pressing questions for both academics and designers. For example, what are the implications of this shift in attention and how might it impact the conceptualization of interactivity and play? How can we theorize gestural gaming as an embodied, material, and social phenomenon? Where does gestural gaming intersect with other forms of physical activity, culture, and play? By treating gesture, and gestural gaming in particular, as an open-ended, generative, and multifaceted phenomenon, we aim to create a dialogue between theory and design that resists reducing gesture to any one of its many components. At the same time, we hope to provide valuable insight into the ontological and experiential space between gestural bodies and technologies.

More after the jump

Continue reading