[ecrea] Call for Papers: The Velvet Light Trap #81 - Power, Freedom, and Control in Gaming

CFP: The Velvet Light Trap #81: Power, Freedom, and Control in Gaming

Game studies is no longer an ‘emerging’ field and video games can no 
longer be considered a ‘new’ or niche medium. The commercial video game 
industry is now over 40 years old and games are an increasingly 
intrinsic part of the symbolic terrain of culture. The continued 
economic growth of the global video game industry is well documented and 
staggering, and this is reflected in the growing body of academic work 
that engages with the multifaceted ways that games are designed, 
created, received, and played. In recent years, scholars have 
productively moved away from the hotly contested theoretical divisions 
between ludology and narratology that defined early game studies. Yet, 
at the same time, games scholarship continues to privilege digital 
gaming, in the process often sidelining or excluding from academic 
discussions the vibrant range of game design paradigms and player 
practices in non-digital gaming, such as board games, card games, and 
role-playing games. This issue of The Velvet Light Trap considers the 
place of gaming within media studies and the potential value of 
utilizing a cultural studies framework for understanding issues of 
power, freedom, and control in game studies.
As the game industry has matured alongside information and 
communications technologies, methods of production and industry lore 
have become normalized as the scope and diversity of games being 
produced becomes ever more richly nuanced. Triple-A franchises, such as 
Grand Theft Auto, Fallout, and Madden NFL, are gaming blockbusters, with 
production teams of hundreds, production budgets of millions, and 
revenue in the billions. The success of the mainstream industry combined 
with digital distribution has also opened up niches for thriving 
independent and underground game scenes, where titles as varied as 
Undertale, Depression Quest, The Stanley Parable, and Papers, Please, 
have interrogated the act of play itself while expanding conceptions of 
what forms and functions games can take.
The increasing complexity of the globally networked gaming industry 
demands scholarly engagement from a variety of perspectives. The 
scholarly turn to games and gaming is producing a groundswell of work 
that parses the disparate yet often interrelated patterns of more 
micro-level historicity and phenomena, such as game aesthetics and 
narrative engagement; player identity and communities; emergent cultures 
and practices the circumscribed agency of designers; and issues of local 
production, histories, and archives. Scholarship on analog formats like 
role-playing games and board games have foregrounded the importance of 
looking beyond the digital, highlighting the economic and cultural 
contexts of a broader range of gaming and play practices.
This issue of The Velvet Light Trap seeks to build upon this body of 
research and further consider how games reproduce popular ideas about 
identity, including issues of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, 
nationality, religion, ability, etc., through characters, gaming worlds, 
play, design, and performance. Which voices, perspectives, and 
sensibilities are privileged in gaming culture, and how can the gaming 
industry become more inclusive and self-reflective about the practices 
it engages in and choices it makes? How are communities traditionally 
marginalized in the gaming economy asserting greater agency? How are 
issues of power, freedom, and play negotiated, challenged, or 
reinscribed in the various games and gaming practices marking today’s 
increasingly expansive media and cultural landscape?
Other possible areas of inquiry in digital and analog gaming include but 
are not limited to: ● Theories of play ● Gaming pedagogy ● 
Archive/Collection ● Game design (development & production); designer 
agency ● Labor, locality, and the global commercial market ● Global 
gaming (Non-U.S. products or cultures) ● Marketing and distribution ● 
Games as ancillary merchandise ● Games as parts of transmedia franchises 
● Metagaming and paratextual engagement ● Adaptation (game to film/TV; 
film/TV to game) ● Gamer culture and identity ● Gender and #Gamergate 
<https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/gamergate?source=note> ● Celebrity ● 
Digital access and class privilege ● Ludic cartographies ● Mobile apps ● 
Virtual Reality ● Mods & Freeware
Submission Guidelines
Submissions should be between 8,000 and 10,000 words, formatted in 
Chicago Style. Please submit an electronic copy of the paper, along with 
a separate one-page abstract, both saved as a Microsoft Word file. 
Remove any identifying information so that the submission is suitable 
for anonymous review. Quotations not in English should be accompanied by 
translations. Send electronic manuscripts and/or any questions to 
(vltcfp /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(vltcfp /at/ gmail.com)> by January 15th, 2017.
About the Journal
TVLT is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal of film, television, and new 
media. The journal draws on a variety of theoretical and historiographic 
approaches from the humanities and social sciences and welcomes any 
effort that will help foster the ongoing processes of evaluation and 
negotiation in media history and criticism. While TVLT maintains its 
traditional commitment to the study of American film, it also expands 
its scope to television and other media, to adjacent institutions, and 
to other nations' media. The journal encourages both approaches and 
objects of study that have been neglected or excluded in past scholarship.
Graduate students at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the 
University of Texas at Austin coordinate issues in alternation, and each 
issue is devoted to a particular theme. VLT's Editorial Advisory Board 
includes such notable scholars as Charles Acland, Richard Allen, Ben 
Aslinger, Caetlin Benson-Allott, Mark Betz, Corey Creekmur, Michael 
Curtin, Kay Dickinson, Bambi Haggins, Scott Higgins, Mary Celeste 
Kearney, Jon Kraszewski, Lucas Hilderbrand Roberta Pearson, Nicholas 
Sammond, Jacob Smith, Jonathan Sterne, Cristina Venegas. VLT's graduate 
student editors are assisted by their local faculty advisors: Mary 
Beltrán, Ben Brewster, Jonathan Gray, Michele Hilmes, Lea Jacobs, Derek 
Johnson, Vance Kepley, Shanti Kumar, Charles Ramírez Berg, Thomas 
Schatz, and Janet Staiger.
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