Call for Papers
Call for papers
In the simplest terms, a video game is an interactive electronic game with a user
interface that provides visual feedback. The phenomenon of video games, however,
is anything but simple. Their commercial, if limited, availability in the 1970s and
1980s foreshadowed the popularity that has unfolded at the beginning of the 21st
century in an ever-growing variety of genres and stories, game mechanics, visual
and artistic styles, hardware capacities, and sensory possibilities. Moreover, they are
now consumed en masse around the world and are easily accessible through
everyday devices such as cell phones, tablets, as well as gaming consoles and
computers. With this diversification and expansion, video games have become a
common ground for scholars in social sciences, humanities, and a number of other
disciplines and fields of research who are exploring a wide range of topics and social
and cultural issues, from game narratives and storytelling practices, economic
behavior of players, gaming cultures, social relations, health effects of gaming, educational possibilities of video games, to the politics of gaming, the virtual world,
as well as countless other themes.
By engaging all forms of video game research, Video Games as a Common Ground
aims to address various topics, issues, and challenges related to video games and
gaming in order to understand not only their impact, but also their potential. The
conference aims at a cross-disciplinary dialogue that will hopefully lead to new
experiences and the expansion of the academic discourse relating to this subject,
together with possible (unexpected) future collaborations. We, therefore, invite
proposals that would address any of the presented possible topics, as well as those
introducing new ones relating to the field of video games and gaming:
● Story =/vs Narrative
● Narratives of difference (nation, class, ethnicity, race, gender, disability, and
sexuality)
● New and familiar literary experiences (ambient literature, poetry games, digital
poems)
● Gamifying places (cities, monuments, parks), gamifying people, gamifying
histories
● Questions of commons and the right to play in the video game culture
● Stories about crises – Ecocriticism in video games, video games and the
anthropocene, imagining the future, crises and videogames (covid-19,
economic crisis, ecological crisis…)
● Video games and resistance (video games and social change, activism in video
games)
● Video Games in education; Institutionalization of video games in education
● Video games as affective spaces (affective investment in video games,
emotions, senses, affects and/in video games)
● Performance, play and role-playing in digital culture
● Theatre and video games
● Liminality and rituals in video games
● New ways of worldbuilding
● In-game photography, video-game camera and technoart
● Time and temporality, space and spatiality in video-game storytelling
● Folklore, folklorism and video games
● Sensing the digital environment
● New forms of emergent narratives
● Relation between players and game characters; Avatars and subjectivity
● Exploration and observant play
● Autobiographical video games and authorship in video games
● Mental health and video games (reward systems, therapeutic video games,
achievements and ladder-anxiety)
● Cartography, mobile technology and augmented reality
● Gaming cultures
We invite submissions for presentations of up to 15 minutes. Please send proposals
of no more than 300 words and a brief biographical note to videogamescommon@gmail.com .
Due to an increased interest in submitting abstracts for the conference “Video Games
as a Common Ground” in the last few days, we are pleased to extend the deadline
for the submission and the invitation to participate in the conference. We are now
accepting abstracts until July 1st, 2022. If you have already started writing your
abstract but have not managed to complete it, now is the time!
The conference is expected to be held online via Zoom platform on September 2nd,
2022. There are no fees for presenting and/or participating at the conference.
For additional information, please contact Zlatko Bukač, Jelena Kupsjak, and Emilia
Musap at videogamescommon@gmail.com
Applications should be sent in a single Word document to
videogamescommon@gmail.com. The file name should include the author’s name.
The application should include:
* an abstract (max. 300 words)
* a short biographical note including your institutional affiliation, contact information,
and major publications