[ecrea] cfp medievalism and gaming

CFP: All Your History Are Belong to Us - Medievalism and Digital Gaming

The Middle Ages remains a vibrant presence in contemporary culture, and
while cinematic medievalism has been intensively investigated in the
last decade, digital gaming has received relatively little attention
despite its widespread cultural impact. For example, the video game
market now grosses more domestically than Hollywood, and World of
Warcraft boasts more than 12 million monthly paying subscribers (25
million total units). Gaming theory too has seen its share of
innovation, and digital technologies are now a regular feature of higher
education and cultural studies. Medievalism, in its various guises, has
also been the subject of intense scrutiny in anthologies by Anke Bernau
and Bettina Bildhauer, Medieval Film (2009); Karl Fugelso, Memory and
Medievalism (2007); and David Marshall, Mass Market Medieval: Essays on
the Middle Ages in Popular Culture (2007). Further, the turn toward
speculative medievalisms, object-oriented philosophy, and Actor-Network
Theory has initiated new methodologies, raised new questions, and
offered new possibilities for understanding actor-actant networks and
overcoming the subject-object distinction, all of which enrich our
understanding of digital and historical realities and problematize
traditional understandings of subjectivity, temporality, and textuality.

A few of the more popular medievally-inflected gaming titles (and
series) include:

* Age of Empires: Age of Kings
* Diablo
* MediEvil
* Arthur: Quest for Excalibur
* Dragon Age
* Medieval Total War
* Assassin's Creed
* Dungeon Siege
* Morrowind
* Baldur's Gate
* Dynasty Warriors
* Oblivion
* Beowulf
* Elder Scrolls
* Sims Medieval * Civilization
* Fable
* Shogun Total War
* Dante's Inferno
* Jeanne d'Arc
* Stronghold
* Dark Age of Camelot
* Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader
* Warcraft & World of Warcraft

I am soliciting 500 word proposals for a volume dealing with the Middle
Ages, medievalism, and contemporary digital gaming, broadly defined.
Some possibilities include:

* Gaming and medieval texts; medieval texts and digital
textualities
* Gaming genres (Sword and sorcery/fantasy games, etc.), game
types (MMORPG, FPS, RPG, RTS, stealth, survival/horror, etc.),
single-player/cooperative/
multiplayer games * Gaming, speculative medievalisms, and counterfactual 
history
* Gaming, secret societies, arcane religions, and the
'templarization' of history (Dead Space,  Mass Effect, and others)
* Gaming, digital sociologies, and electronic epistemologies
* Gaming, object-oriented philosophy, complexity, and
Actor-Network Theory
* Gaming, digital communities, and electronic subjectivities
* Gaming, gender, sexuality, class, age; trans-developmental and
trans-temporal subjectivities
* Gaming and race and nation; digital orientalism and
postcolonialism; space-based societies
* Gaming and cross-platform media (games and/as film tie-ins)
* Gaming and pedagogy
* Gaming, discursive/symbolic violence, and ethics
* Gaming, social simulations, LARPing and LARPers (Live-Action
Role Playing & Players)
* Gaming and cheats, glitches, hacks, mods
* Gaming, the academy, medievalism, and generational divides.

Please send your proposals (and any questions) to Dan Kline, University
of Alaska, Department of English, 3211 Providence Drive, ADM 101-H,
Anchorage, AK 99508 at (afdtk /at/ uaa.alaska.edu) 
<mailto:(afdtk /at/ uaa.alaska.edu)> by May 1, 2011.

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