National Video Games: Cultures, Industries, Communities
international conference

10–12 September 2026
University of Warsaw, Poland

The end of history was cancelled years ago, and national ideas have been on the rise ever since. Game scholars, too, have been studying the relationships between national cultures, video games and game industries for about a decade. We now have a wealth of material about the game cultures of numerous different countries across the world; there are also publications that examine the national categorization of games itself.

But we still need to know more. Many places have not been studied much yet; in particular, publications about African video games are scarce and mostly seem to concern South Africa. The anglicization of international research allows us to access some information on the countries whose languages we do not speak, but it may also prevent us from noticing the studies done in other languages. It also obfuscates national traits of games developed in the Anglosphere, especially the US, painting them as default. Meanwhile, Japanese games are often considered highly entangled with the national context, despite strong connections and mutual influences between the US and Japanese game development and player cultures.

The very concept of “national culture” is rarely questioned in relation to games: the idea that nation-states have distinct cultures of their own, which influence locally-made games, holds quite strongly. This is partially fueled by the nation-states’ direct attempts at curating “national cultural games” and including video games in the official pedagogy of national culture – which invites the question of the role video games hold in the larger framework of national cultural politics, and encourages the analysis of games together with other state-sponsored and state-approved media: national literature, theater, cinema, radio and television.

Moreover, the importance and prominence of postcolonial theory in game studies results in putting more emphasis on the power dynamics between centers and peripheries. This often leads to painting games entangled with national cultures as an attempt to promote local cultural heritage and resist imperial demands of stronger cultural actors. There is therefore little discussion of what differentiates between national, regional and ethnic cultures in games. This leads to overlooking the fact that what could be perceived as resistance from the Anglophone point of view can also fuel nationalism on a domestic level. That opens up another area of inquiry: how content which considered a charming expression of local culture can become a dangerous tool of alt-right radicals in the age of new nationalism.

As the discussion on video games and national cultures is far from over, we invite contributions scrutinizing their entanglements, including but not limited to the following:

• national game canons, national games, and national game industry histories

• video games as tools of a nation-state

• official and unofficial national cultures in video games

• national versus regional, local and ethnic cultures in video games

• theoretical perspectives and methodological tools in analyses of video games and national cultures

• non-Western national cultures in video games

• games and cultural heritage

• video games vis-à-vis national literatures, cinemas and televisions 

• video games and new nationalism

• transnational game production 

• game localization and local specificity 

• national funding schemes for video games

• national game development 

• player communities and local prejudice 

• game industries, labor, and unionization 

• national archiving and collecting initiatives 

• national policies and institutions for cataloguing, archiving, and preserving games

Submissions in the form of an abstract of 400–600 words (not including references) will undergo double-blind peer review. Please make sure the submission is anonymous and the references to your own work, if used, are included in a way that does not reveal the author’s identity (i.e., avoid saying “in my previous work [citation]”).

Important dates:

• submission deadline: 20 April 2026 

• submission acceptance: 31 May 2026 

• registration and payment: 30 June 2026 

• final program: 15 July 2026 

• conference: 10–12 September 2026 

The conference website with the submission system will open in mid-February - this call be updated with the link. For questions and queries, email the organizers at kapog@uw.edu.pl

Conference fee will be announced in mid March 2026.