[ecrea] CFP: InVisible Culture, "Poetics of Play" Issue 30

Issue 30: “Poetics of Play”

For its thirtieth issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for 
Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that 
address the poetics and politics of video games. 20 years ago Janet H. 
Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck and Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: 
Perspectives on Ergodic Literature began a conversation to theorize the 
aesthetics of video games. Since these foundational texts, game studies 
has sustained an interrogation of political questions concerning games, 
such as issues of representation and the configuration of online game 
spaces. Video games intersect with industrial practices, embodied 
experiences, as well as visual and ludic designs, all of which have 
specific political implications. For this issue we encourage 
contributors to consider two or more of these factors together, 
exploring “how games make complex meanings across history, bodies, 
hardware, and code” (Anable 2018, xi).
This issue of InVisible Culture takes a cultural studies approach toward 
video games in that the formal aesthetics always register aspects of the 
culture that they emerge from. We think of games as an open category 
that includes a broad range of media, from mainstream AAA games to art 
installations; complex “hardcore” games as well as casual mobile apps; 
visually rich to text-based interactions—cutting across a range of 
experiences, from the banality of playing an app to the singularity of 
wearing a VR headset. We take gaming aesthetics to mean not only the 
system of visual, aural, ludic, and narrative configurations of (a) 
given game(s) but also the manipulation of these systems: modding, 
updating, streaming, etc. We are also interested in what surrounds 
games, such as to what degree games afford community building and 
collaboration between players. Possible topics of exploration include, 
but are not limited to:
		-  Games and Representation 

		-  Games and Subjectivity 

		-  Games and Affect, Multisensory Encounters with Games 

		-  Ordinariness/Everydayness of Games, Gamification of Everyday Life 

		-  Materiality/Tactility of Gaming Devices, Embodied Engagements with 
Games 

		-  Queer/Feminist Approaches to Video Games 

		-  Games and the Politics of Race, Gender, and (Dis)Ability 
 		-  DIY 
Approaches to Games and Game Making 

		-  Games and Activism 

		-  Genre studies 

		-  Platform Studies 

		-  Games and Sound 

		-  Remediation of Video Game Aesthetics 

		-  Games and/as Contemporary Art, Games in Museums/Galleries 

		-  Games in the Archive, Games as Archive 

		-  Game Communities and Fandom 

		-  Fan-made “How To” and “Let’s Play” Videos, Live Streams 

		-  Character Creation Systems and their Politics (Liberatory vs. 
Constraining) 

		-  The Economy of Games, Microtransactions, Loot crates 

Creative/Artistic Works 
Reviews 
Dialogues 

 Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines 
from the  Chicago Manual of Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to 
(invisible.culture /at/ ur.rochester.edu) by June 30th, 2018. Inquiries should 
be sent to the same address.
In addition to written materials, InVisible Culture is accepting works 
in other media (video, photography, drawing, code) that reflect upon the 
theme as it is outlined above. Please submit creative or artistic works 
along with an artist statement of no more than two pages to 
(invisible.culture /at/ ur.rochester.edu). For questions or more details 
concerning acceptable formats, go to 
http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or contact the same address.
InVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book, 
exhibition, and film reviews (600-1,000 words). For this issue we 
particularly encourage authors to submit reviews of games or other forms 
of interactive media. To submit a review proposal, go to 
http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or contact 
(invisible.culture /at/ ur.rochester.edu).  The journal also invites 
submissions to its Dialogues page, which will accommodate more immediate 
responses to the topic of the current issue. For further details, please 
contact us at (invisible.culture /at/ ur.rochester.edu) with the subject 
heading “Dialogues submission.”
* InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a 
student-run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in 
an open access format. Through peer-reviewed articles, creative works, 
and reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore 
changing themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialog 
across fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.


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