“Decoding the Academic-Industrial-Gameplay Complex: Digital Game Practice, Research and Study in China, Taiwan and Chinese-Speaking Regions”
Call for Papers
We are pleased to announce the third Chinese DiGRA Conference, to be held at the Providence University, Taichung City, Taiwan, 1-2 July 2016.
The past decade witnessed the rise of new media and game studies. Besides the open attitude from communication and media studies to embrace games as the “ninth art”, other fields like cultural studies, history, anthropology, psychology , education and social computing also began to produce works related to understanding and analyzing online and digital games. In this theorizing process, departments once focused on information engineering or digital design came to realize that a marriage between industry, government and academia needs to be arranged to integrate knowledge and experience, and to understand the interdisciplinary nature of digital games.
The development of the digital game industry in Chinese-speaking regions has already exceeded the boundaries originally laid by Japan and the US in terms of console games, and South Korea in terms of online games. The rise of the game market of mainland China is especially evident in that it produced over 22 billion US dollars in 2015, replacing the US as the largest gaming market globally. Under the burgeoning number of Chinese-speaking players, the political, cultural and economic messages of games, especially their software and hardware features, content, form and player participation mode needs to be further explored. It is on the basis of this, that this conference defines the following sub-topics, to further the realization and imagination of digital game development in mainland China and in Chinese-speaking regions:
- The historical and social development of digital games in China, Taiwan and Chinese-speaking regions: This topic focuses on the historical development of digital games with local characteristics, and games in different genres (i.e. Wuxia, fantasy, and so forth). Research that considers the social evolution of games and the sub-cultural manifestation of player communities are also welcome.
- Representation/ cultural presentation or imagination in China, Taiwan and Chinese-speaking regions: This topic focuses on the meaning in images and the visual interaction in digital games, that is, the content and design layer of digital games, especially to understand the basis for representation and inter-textual structures through analyses of characters, scenes, objects and other visual icons in digital games.
- Global and local features of digital games in China, Taiwan and Chinese-speaking regions: This topic focuses on the transnational and trans-cultural feature of games. Besides investigating how commercial strategies from the producers interact with game content, also researchers that explore how players establish and negotiate their own cultural identities is welcome.
- Theoretical explorations of digital games in China, Taiwan and Chinese-speaking regions: This theoretical foundation or game studies research methods are valued contributions to this category, for example, the academic and educational side of games, or the inter-relation between game studies and other disciplines.
- Ongoing research of digital games related but not limited to the topics:
-Political economy of digital games
-Commercial practices of digital games
-Design philosophy of digital games
-Film studies and games
-Gamification analyses
-Community studies and motivation, experience and practices of players
-Social critique of digital games (violence, addiction, pornography)
Keynote Speakers:
- Professor Mia Consalvo (Concordia University)
- Professor Holin Lin (National Taiwan University)
Submissions:
Please send a 500-800 word extended abstract in English or Mandarin to through EasyChair no later than 20 March 2016. Notices of acceptance will be sent no later than 1 April 2016. Accepted authors will be asked to submit a final paper of 2000-3000 words two weeks before the conference. Conference paper presentations can be in English or Mandarin.
Contacts: Dr. Philip Lin <Philip@pu.edu.tw>
Organiser: http://www.masscom.pu.edu.tw/
More information: http://www.chinesedigra.org/conferences/2016conference/
