[ecrea] Call for Papers: " Video game subcultures – Playing at the periphery of mainstream culture "

DEADLINE EXTENSION – Call for Papers:

" Video game subcultures – Playing at the periphery of mainstream culture "

G|A|M|E – Games as Art, Media, Entertainment –
The Italian Journal of Game Studies –
http://www.gamejournal.it/

Peer-Reviewed Monograph – out Autumn 2013
Curated by
Marco Benoit Carbone (University College London)
and Paolo Ruffino (Goldsmiths, University of London / Centre for Digital 
Cultures, Leuphana University)

NEW DEADLINE for abstracts submission: 5th May

Call for papers:

Hardly identifiable with a unique audience, video games are an ever 
growing variety of texts and practices, with diverse technological, 
aesthetic, and cultural features. They form a complex, protean, and 
stratified medium, involving different kinds of audiences. They are 
addressed to the male and female markets alike, propose forms of family 
entertainment, welcome casual gamers as well as 'hardcore' players, and 
are equivalently sold to children, teenagers and over-35s. Furthermore, 
their reception in different countries and regions (Asia, Europe, USA, 
Australia) highlights very different uses and segmentations in relation 
to audiences and other media.

However, even as “gamers” are increasingly hard to define in stratified 
and multi-faceted markets, it is not clear whether or not the production 
of games actually articulates an equally nuanced series of relations 
between “local” content and “global” recipients. This posits a question 
regarding the possibility of games to actually entail cultural 
specificity in regard to their authors and their place of origin, as 
most of them are transnational titles that apparently replicate similar 
game mechanics, regardless of their countries and agents of production.

From this standpoint, the medium of the video game is largely supported 
by global industries, proposing over-arching cultural standards for 
aesthetics and narratives.
The overall historical processes have shaped a pervasive yet apparently 
homogenized medium, whose symbols and references today are part of a 
larger visual and pop culture, embraced and celebrated by escalating 
numbers of supporters.

These aspects have implications on the ideological and political level. 
As video game culture is becoming pervasive and influential on a global 
scale, game creators and audiences have also been producing narratives 
of “independence”. Games are allegedly emerging as a medium for personal 
expression or collective engagement for addressing social causes. 
However, despite these claims that the medium may be actually a new and 
burgeoning vessel for works of social resistance, it has rarely been 
questioned exactly which forms of connivance, subversion, or deviation 
might, could or should emerge from games, or whether these practices 
would remain entrenched in the systems that produce them.

This issue of G|A|M|E aims to investigate the above issues relating to 
the audiences, the different practices, and the possible ideologies at 
work in this medium, in the contexts of the economic systems in which 
games are made and consumed.  Not only G|A|M|E encourages scholars to 
look at these forms of cultural productions by mapping their possible 
socio-cultural specificities or categorizing their relations to the 
“mainstream” industry, but it also encourages to raise questions about 
the very possibility of defining gamers as one or more subcultures.

Considering the complexity of this topic and the uncountable forms of 
experiences which could belong to it, G|A|M|E invites game scholars and 
practitioners alike. This Call accepts contributions in the form of 
papers, but short texts and visual examples are also welcome. We will 
consider proposals from game scholars as well as artists, game 
designers, hackers, journalists, players.



**Further research questions might include, but are not limited to:

– Have gamers as a subculture ever existed, and in which ways?

– Does the controversial opposition between "mainstream" and 
"subculture" hold any value for the medium of the video game?

– Is it possible to claim or demonstrate that video gaming has gone 
mainstream at some point in some context?

– How has this very idea been developed inside the journalistic and 
critical video game culture (e.g., as “hardcore” vs. “casual” games and 
gamers?)

– Is there any particular correspondence between types/genres/themes and 
particular (gaming) subcultures?

– How does the industrial process of making and marketing games address 
to different clusters of consumers?

– Is it possible to claim recognition for the medium without falling 
into apocalyptic or redemptive narratives (“all games are bad” / “good”)?

– What kind of overlap is there between the consumption of games and 
other media in terms of the audiences?

–Are games defined more by their internal logic or from the aesthetic 
and figurative aspects they carry?


Keywords
game art; indie games; online communities; arcades; age; sex; race; 
gender: minorities; hacking; modding; homebrew; abandonware; consumer 
culture; culture jamming; mainstream; subculture; underground; 
trans-nationality; resistance


New deadline for abstracts: 5th May
Notification of acceptance: 10th May


All accepted abstracts will be expected to submit a full paper by the 
19th of July
We expect to release this special issue in Autumn 2013


Proposals and questions to
(subcultures /at/ gamejournal.it)


Yours,

--
G|A|M|E Games as Art, Media, Entertainment
The Italian Journal of Game Studies
http://www.gamejournal.it/



--
Paolo Ruffino
http://paoloruffino.com

----------------
ECREA-Mailing list
----------------
This mailing list is a free service from ECREA.
---
To unsubscribe, please visit http://www.ecrea.eu/mailinglist
---
ECREA - European Communication Research and Education Association
Postal address:
ECREA
Université Libre de Bruxelles
c/o Dept. of Information and Communication Sciences
CP123, avenue F.D. Roosevelt 50, b-1050 Bruxelles, Belgium
Email: (info /at/ ecrea.eu)
URL: http://www.ecrea.eu
----------------