While the EAAS’ "West of the Rest" research network will be represented with a total of three panels at the the 28th Biennial Conference of AISNA Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord Americani, we are specifically looking for contributions to our panel dedicated to video games: "Videogame Wests: Playing (at) the Frontier". Since there is the opportunity to have fresh research on video game Wests published as part of this venture, we invite everyone interested to pitch a paper. Please feel free to (re)share the enclosed cfp with interested parties. The panel is coordinated by Michael Fuchs (University of Innsbruck) and Stefan "Steve" Rabitsch (University of Oslo). Pulitzer Prize-winning Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday said that the American West “is a place that has to be seen to be believed, and it may have to be believed in order to be seen.” Momaday thus acknowledged that in the West’s tripartite existence, the psycho- logical trumps the geographical and historical dimension (cf. Mogen, 1989, 18; McMurtry, 2001, 9). In other words, imagined and commodified Wests continue to loom large in the mass-mediated imaginary of the global(ized) capitalist marketplace, which deploys “the frontier as a space where history and myth coalesce to create a cohesive, exceptional, and normative nation that could be imagined as a reality” (Humphreys 2021, 21). Since 1971, when three students at Carleton College programmed The Oregon Trail, a text-based strategy videogame in which the player leads a wagon trail from Missouri to Oregon City, hundreds of videogames have used the American West as their setting, from western titles such as Outlaw (Atari, 1976), Sunset Riders (Konami, 1991), and Red Dead Redemption (Rockstar, 2010) to post-apocalyptic re-imaginations of the frontier experience in examples such as The Last of Us (Naughty Dog, 2013), Horizon Forbidden West (Guerilla Games, 2022), and Pacific Drive (Ironwood, 2024). An increasing number of titles that remediate and make playable indigenous lifeworlds are also part of the mix (e.g., When Rivers Were Trails [Indian Land Tenure Foundation and Michigan State University’s Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab, 2019]; Thunderbird Strike [Elizabeth LaPensée, 2017]; Never Alone, [E-Line Media and Upper One Games, 2014]). Drawing on, and adding to, the increasing scholarly interest in the American West and/in videogames (e.g., Olsson 2024; Razzi 2021; Schoppmeier 2022; Wills 2008; Wills 2023; Wills & Wright 2023), this proposed panel will explore how videogames have engaged with the West. Accordingly, we welcome proposals for presentations on topics such as:

• Race, class, gender, sexuality, and/or the environment in videogame westerns and/or
videogame frontier narratives
• Adapting westerns (originating in film, literature, and other media) to videogames
and/or ludifying the western formula
• Reflections and refractions of frontier narratives in videogames
• Moving west/westward expansion in videogames
• The city and/vs. the countryside and/in the videogame West
• Speculative wests in videogames
• Landscape aesthetics and gameplay in the wide-open spaces of the videogame West
• Utopias and dystopias in the videogame West
• Questioning and undermining the violence traditionally ascribed to the West in
walking simulators and other genres
• Transnational negotiations of the American West in videogames produced elsewhere
• The use of videogames as vehicles of anti-racist, de-/anticolonial education and
resistance

This panel/these panels are organized as part of the “West of the Rest” research network of the European Association for American Studies. Please do not propose presentations based on material that is already published or pending publication, as we are open to turning the panel into a publication (depending on the level of interest).

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