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…

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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).

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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.

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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.

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Jobs: Two jobs at UC Santa Cruz (and a new degree program)

UC Santa Cruz is launching a new professional MS in Games and Playable Media, pending final approvals, which will be offered through our Silicon Valley campus and will include working both with our current game faculty and with new personnel hired specifically for the program. The degree is focused on combining technical and design innovation — and on helping students build the skills and connections they need for the jobs they want. The application deadline for this year is March 15th.

More info: https://cs.soe.ucsc.edu/ms_gamesplayablemedia

UC Santa Cruz is also hiringfor this degree program:

Creative Director – We’re seeking someone who is an already acknowledged creative leader in the games field. The starting salary range is $88k-$123k and application review begins April 7th. This job includes leading the overall creative vision for the program, mentoring student projects, representing the MS program to the international game development community, and collaborating with people inside and outside UCSC.

More info:
https://jobs.ucsc.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=6624

Technical Coordinator for the Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA program. This is someone who works full time helping students and faculty do interesting projects, thinks about the future technical direction of the program (and has a budget to purchase technical items worth investigating), helps people figure out how to exhibit and distribute their work, and manages the DANM spaces in the Digital Arts Research Center (including a black box theater, a white box gallery, a rapid prototyping lab, etc). The starting salary range is $57,500-$80,500 and review of applications begins March 20th.

More info:
https://jobs.ucsc.edu/applicants/Central?quickFind=66265

CfP: Under the Mask: Perspectives on the Gamer 2013, Jun 5, University of Bedfordshire, UK

Under the Mask: Perspectives on the Gamer Conference
Wednesday 5th June 2013

Research Institute for Media, Art and Design
University of Bedfordshire
Luton Campus, Park Square
Luton
Bedfordshire, UK

Under the Mask: Perspectives on the Gamer enters its 6th year as a conference focused upon questions concerning the player, and with current debates considering the effect of gamification upon our conceptions of work and leisure, the increasing prominence of pervasive gaming, location-based gaming and ARGs, and the validity of procedurality as an analytical approach versus more player-centric models, such inquiries seem more pertinent than ever before.

Under the Mask is a conference dedicated to understanding the many facets of the player; the psychological, political, social, cultural and historical aspects of the user and their interactions with both games (analog and digital) and the wider culture.

Under the Mask is organized by the University of Bedfordshire, UK, in association with the University of Hertfordshire, UK and the Swinburne University of Technology, Australia.

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Job: Non-Tenure Track, Lecturer Faculty Position in Game Technology and Design, Northeastern University, Boston USA

Non-Tenure Track, Lecturer Faculty Position in Game Technology and Design
Joint between College of Arts, Media and Design and College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University

Northeastern University is seeking a non-tenure track faculty lecturer for an interdisciplinary position in Game Technology and Design joint within the College of Computer and Information Science and the College of Arts, Media and Design starting September 1, 2013 or January 1, 2014.

Northeastern University is in the heart of Boston and world leader in experiential learning. In the past several years, Northeastern University has made a major commitment to interdisciplinary education and research in select fields with the goal of achieving international leadership. Games and Interactive Media is selected for growth and is being developed jointly by the colleges of Arts, Media and Design and Computer and Information Science.

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CfP: Videogames and Mental Health – Special Session at the 2014 MLA Convention, 9-12 Jan, Chicago USA

Videogames and Mental Health

15-minute presentations are invited for a special session at the Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention, Chicago IL., 9-12 January 2014.

The last decade has seen the release of a number of serious videogames which attempt to explore issues related to mental health. Some people resort to Organic CBD Nugs to deal with stress, while others have to undergo resurgence recovery programs, depending on the intensity and seriousness of the situation. Games about trauma (Trauma, Spec Ops: The Line), depression (Actual Sunlight, Depression Quest, Inner Vision), Tourette’s Syndrome (Tourette’s Quest), madness (Lone Survivor, Silent Hill), and mourning or melancholia (Dear Esther, Braid) have become increasingly visible as games continue to grow into a complex, diverse, and influential medium.

Approaches to issues of mental health and games have tended to focus either on the perils of game addiction and the deleterious effects of playing violent videogames, or on games as a therapeutic tool for the mentally ill who can also try cbd flower.

Few attempts have been made to analyze how games represent mental illness through the complex interplay of game mechanics and narrative strategies, or to understand what the ethical and rhetorical consequences of such representations might be for the player. The goal of this panel is to explore this topic by bringing games and game studies into dialogue with ideas drawn from disciplines such as trauma studies, literary studies, film studies, and cultural theory, all of which have developed a variety of ways of examining issues of mental health in narrative texts. There are also studies that suggest Kratom pills can help alleviate symptoms of anxiety and depression.

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CfP: ACE 2013, Nov 13-15, Netherlands

ACE 2013, Netherlands
Location: University of Twente, the Netherlands
Date: November 13th-15th, 2013

http://www.ace2013.info/
http://www.advancesincomputerentertainment.org/

May 15th: Workshop Proposals
May 26th: Special Session Proposals
June 2nd: Papers Submission
June 23rd: Creative Showcases Submissions
June 23rd: Poster Papers Submission
July 28th: Notification
August 31st: Camera Ready Submission

The theme of ACE 2013 is Making New Knowledge・ We hope to receive many excellent papers dealing practically as well as theoretically with this theme, inspired by John Seely Brown’s lecture on Tinkering as a mode of knowledge construction・ by the fact that making games and toys is often even more fun than playing with them, and by the very hands-on creative approach with which ACE participants have always explored the boundaries of creative technology.

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Book: The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games by Jesper Juul

The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games.

This is a personal-philosophical essay on the pain of playing video games. The book combines discussion about game design (are time investment-based games unfair?), with philosophy, psychology, and an examination of games with unhappy endings. Oh, and gamification too.

The book is the first in the Playful Thinking series on MIT Press, co-edited by Geoffrey Long, William Uricchio and Jesper Juul

Website: http://www.jesperjuul.net/artoffailure/
Available in paper and ebook formats.

Official MIT Press page: http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/art-failure

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