Author Archives: Mahli-Ann Butt

CfP: British DiGRA 2018 (14th – 15th June 2018), Staffordshire University, Stoke on Trent

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Call for Papers (published 19/2/2018)

British DiGRA 2018

The second annual conference of British DiGRA.

14th – 15th June 2018

Staffordshire University, Stoke on Trent

The Medium is the Game

Since 2003 and the first DiGRA convention in 2003, we have seen a huge change in the ways that Games Studies understands itself and has conveyed itself as a discipline to (and sometimes within) other critical media. This conference takes as its theme the media of the game, playfully repositioning the 2018 DiGRA theme of ‘The Game is the Message’.

We welcome submissions that move beyond digital gaming, for example submissions relating to boardgames LARP, pervasive games or other forms of analog gaming.

We actively encourage early scholars and PhD candidates, as well as more established voices.

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
  • ·         - Playfulness and the Medium of Games (Why/Not so Serious…?)
  • ·         - Building games
  • ·         - Pedagogical practice and gaming
  • ·         - Game design/development/theory – the un/holy? trinity
  • ·         - Changes in gaming culture
  • ·         - After the Storm (post gamergate theory)
  • ·         - Games production as critical medium
  • ·         - eSports theory

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 here - http://bdigra.org.uk/events

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.

Please submit work to BritishDigra@gmail.com by 31st March 2018. 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.

Acceptance of papers 14th April 2018

Selected proceedings will be published in a special edition of ToDiGRA, in second quarter 2019.

We have decided to charge a small attendance fee of £25 to cover costs. Any surplus funding will be carried over to future BDiGRA events. An eventbrite with details of this will be forthcoming.

All attendees are expected to abide by the BDiGRA Inclusivity Policy - http://bdigra.org.uk/inclusivity-policy

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Jobs: Assistant Professor, Simulation Science Games and Animation at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, Prescott, USA

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The College of Arts and Sciences at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona invites applications for a tenure track full-time Assistant Professor position in Digital Art, Animation and Games that begins Fall, 2018. The successful candidate must have a strong interest and ability to teach undergraduate students. The new hire will be part of the newly launched program in Simulation Science, Games and Animation. The program details are available at http://prescott.erau.edu/degrees/bachelor/simulation-science-games-animation/index.html Continue reading →

Developer, PhD, and Postdoc posts have been opened at Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta.

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The posts will require research on a number of projects that the Institute is working on at the moment.
For more information on the posts and how to apply: https://www.um.edu.mt/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/342847/FTorPTPhDStu,Prof,Postdoc-ENVISAGE-05.02.18.pdf
For more information on the Institute and the projects: http://www.game.edu.mt/
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CfP: Gaming and the Arts of Storytelling Symposium and Special Issue

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Gaming and the Arts of Storytelling Symposium and Special Issue CFP

Symposium (Abertay University – 9th May 2018). Keynote: Professor Espen Aarseth, Centre for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen.
Symposium deadline (500 word abstract): 5th March 2018.
Special Issue deadline (5000-8000 word article): 31st May 2018.
Continue reading →

CfP: ‘Landscapes of Digital Games’, RGS-IBG Annual Conference, Royal Geographical Society, Cardiff

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RGS-IBG Annual Conference, Royal Geographical Society, Cardiff

Tuesday 28 August – Friday 31 August 2018, Cardiff University

 

Call for papers (Deadline 4th February 2018)

Landscapes of Digital Games

 

Digital games in their various forms (video, computer, mobile, and, recently, virtual reality and ‘extended’ or ‘augmented’ reality), are increasingly understood in geographical terms. Whether in relation to territory and exploration (Bennett 2011, Garrett 2014), space and place (Martin 2011), digital games present complex worlds to be studied and theorised through geographical ways of thinking.

 

For some time now, geographers have considered the social, political, and economic spatialities of virtual landscapes (Longan 2008, Shaw and Warf 2009, Dodge 2009). Notions of landscape feature in game design and game studies (Wolf 2002, Nitsche 2008, Adams 2013). Examining games-as-landscapes may fruitfully attend to the uniquely geographical quality of games, whilst offering opportunity for reflection upon the epistemological and methodological approaches in ‘landscape studies’ when brought into contact with virtual worlds.

Continue reading →

CfP for Replaying Japan 2018 conference

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Replaying Japan 2018: The 6th International Japan Game Studies Conference

“Music, Sound and Play”

The 6th International Conference on Japan Game Studies will be held at The National Videogame Arcade, Nottingham, UK, from August 20-22.

Proposals in Japanese are most welcome! <日本語での発表要旨も受け付けます。>

This conference is organized by The National Videogame Arcade in collaboration with the Institute of East Asian Studies at Leipzig University, the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies, the University of Alberta, Leipzig University, Bath Spa University and DiGRA Japan. This conference, the sixth collaboratively organized event, focuses broadly on Japanese game culture, education, and industry. It aims to bring together a wide range of researchers and creators from many different countries to present and exchange their work.

The main theme of the conference this year will be Music, Sound and Play in Japanese Games. We invite researchers and students to submit paper proposals related to this theme. We also invite papers on other topics relating to games, game culture, videogames and education, and the Japanese game industry from the perspectives of humanities, social sciences, business, or education. We encourage poster/demonstration proposals of games or interactive projects related to these themes.

For previous approaches related to these topics, see the 2017 program: http://replaying.jp/2017schedule/

Please send anonymized abstracts of no more than 500 words in English or Japanese to: <replayingjapan@gmail.com> before 8th February 2018.

Figures, tables and references, which do not count towards the 500 words, may be included on a second page. The following information should be in the accompanying email message:

Type of submission (poster/demonstration or paper):
Title of submission:
Name of author(s):
Affiliation(s):
Address(es):
Email address(es):

Notification of acceptance will be sent out by Spring 2018.

While the language of this conference will be English, limited communication assistance will be available for those who cannot present in English.

For more information about Replaying Japan 2018, visit the conference home page (replaying.jp) or write to replayingjapan@gmail.com.

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Techniques of the Player – the observing body and organs of the senses

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Techniques of the Player – the observing body and organs of the senses

11 December 2017 – Swinburne University of Technology

Room AS404 (Applied Science building).

 

In Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Jonathan Crary traces a shift in the concept of ‘the observer’ from a stable point in geometrical space (with the camera obscura as a key trope and model) to a figure caught up in the fragmented visuality of modern media. The perceiving subject is increasingly subject to processes of quantification and normalisation: ‘there is an irreversible clouding over of the transparency of the subject-as-observer’ (1992, 70). Crafting human attention, or modulating what Buck-Morss (1992) has termed ‘a spiral of aesthetics and anaesthetics’, prefigures contemporary concerns with the ‘attention economy’.

 

Crary’s argument challenges both technophilic accounts of a drive to ever-greater verisimilitude, and modernist claims to decisively break with mimesis and realism. Instead, the entanglement of the observing body and the observation of the organs of sense engender a subject with senses that must be technically disciplined as much as enabled: ‘How is the body, including the observing body, becoming a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological?’ (1992, 2).

 

In posing the question of ‘Techniques of the Player’, this symposium will re-evaluate Crary’s question in light of contemporary media intensities: VR headsets and locative AR; found-footage and IMAX cinema; e-sports stars and anonymous gold farmers; immersive sims and casual mobile gaming.

 

Panelists: Steven Conway (Swinburne University), Leena van Deventer (RMIT University), Dan Golding (Swinburne University), Darshana Jayemanne (Abertay University), Angela Ndalianis (Swinburne University), Emma Witkowski (RMIT University).

 

Buck-Morss, S., 1992. Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered. October 62, 3.

Crary, J., 1992. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

joystick

 

12:00 Panel 1 (Three Speakers, 20 mins each)

13:10 Discussion Forum

14:00 Lunch

15:00 Panel 2 (Three Speakers, 20 mins each)

16:10 Final Discussion Forum

17:00 Drinks/Debrief

DiGRA 2018 – The Game is the Message – CFP

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The Game is the Message
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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