UPDATE!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! As always, we are looking forward to your participation in the conference. For more information, please visit the conference website (https://conference.unizd.hr/videogamescommon/) or contact us directly at videogamescommon@gmail.com

Video Games as a Common Ground

Online Conference, September 2nd, 2022

videogamescommon@gmail.com

Department of English and Department of Ethnology and Anthropology

University of Zadar

https://conference.unizd.hr/videogamescommon/

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 by June 15th. All applicants will be notified of their submission status within two weeks of the application deadline.

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.