Call for Papers
The Playful Monster
24–25 September 2026

The monster, conventionally understood, is a figure of dread. It is meant to signal threat, invasion, disgust: something to be fled from, fought against, or kept at a safe distance. But that is only part of the story. Monsters also give pleasure. We look for them in horror games, not only to be frightened but to enjoy the encounter. We buy creature plushies and bring them into our rooms, where they become small, quiet, oddly comforting companions. We copy monstrous gestures, voices, and movements in play with friends, turning fear into performance or shared amusement. So this is one of the questions the conference wants to open up: what it means for the monster to become playful — and how we might understand those moments when play does not dispel fear, but becomes caught up with it.

The Playful Monster is a conference hosted by Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. It looks at how monsters are made playful, and how the monstrous appears in playful ways across games, media, and everyday culture. What interests us is the space where monsters and horror come into contact with games, toys, and play. We welcome contributions from people working in game studies, play studies, monster studies, horror studies, media studies, cultural studies, and related areas. But part of the interest of the conference is also in the work that happens between these fields: in asking how monsters, horror, games, toys, and play begin to come together, and what kinds of questions this makes possible.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

1. Monsters in video games, toys, plush culture, and collectibles.
2. Horror gameplay and pleasurable fear
3. Cute and comic monsters
4. Monsters, nostalgia and the affective pull of the past
5. Monstrosity across media forms
6. Material encounters with monsters
7. Where fear and pleasure meet
8. Memory studies
9. Queer theory

The conference will be hybrid, so people can take part either in Winchester or online.
We welcome proposals for individual papers of 15 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of discussion.
Abstracts of around 300 words should be submitted to: theplayfulmonster@gmail.com
Please include a short bio with your abstract, saying a little about your research background and the questions your work is concerned with.

The conference will take place on 24–25 September 2026.
The submission deadline is 31 July 2026.
Decisions will be communicated by 25 August 2026.

For those joining us in person, the conference will take place in Winchester, a small cathedral city in the south of England. The campus sits within walking distance of the city centre, with its river, cathedral, and, for those with a taste for literary geography, the house where Jane Austen spent her final years. This is not quite the reason for the conference, of course, but it may be a further reason to make the journey.

For participants based beyond the UK who wish to attend in person, we are happy to provide a letter of invitation to support a visa application.

If you would like to attend online, please let us know when you submit your abstract, and tell us what time zone you are in. We will try to take this into account when putting the programme together.