[Commlist] CFP: 'Affecting Game Space'

We have reframed this call somewhat from its original version, and 
extended the deadline to *August 7th*. It was suggested to us that the 
original call was not as diverse or welcoming as it could have been, and 
we are grateful for the discussion. With this in mind, we hope this 
reframing is inclusive and critical in both its outlook and citation, 
including an expanded and more rigorous framing of the intersection of 
'affect' and 'space' in games with a more diverse citational apparatus. 
Additionally we have extended the deadline to *August 7th* to afford 
more time for additional submissions and consideration of the updated 
call and wish to explicitly, rather than implicitly, welcome critically 
wide-ranging, intersectional and decolonial approaches to the topic:

CALL FOR PAPERS

Conference: ‘Affecting Game Space: Theory and Practice’

*CFP DEADLINE: 7^th August 2021*

*DATE: 3rd September 2021 *

 From claustrophobic confines to sublime vistas, game spaces have 
conjured affects since the medium’s inception. Whether it be nostalgia 
for the remastered landscape, the vertigo of free diving in VR, or the 
conviviality of gathering around landmarks in Pokémon GO, affect 
reciprocally connects players to physical and virtual spaces. Haptics, 
ray tracing and photogrammetry are allowing us to ‘feel’ game worlds in 
new and increasingly tangible ways. As Nitsche observes: “Video game 
spaces stage our dreams and nightmares and they seem to get better at it 
every year” (2008: 2). How then do we (co-)design, feel, construct and 
play with affect in game spaces?

As the inaugural event of the *‘Game Worlds’ research cluster* 
connecting theory and design at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for 
Data, Culture and Society, the *‘Affecting Game Space’* online 
conference will be built around quickfire presentations followed by 
breakout groups, with the potential for demo/exhibition space. We hope 
to welcome you to a network of like-minded academics and practitioners 
based at The University of Edinburgh virtually through the spatial video 
conferencing platform ‘Gather,’ facilitating free movement, conversation 
and networking.

While Caillois wrote evocatively of Ilinx as a category of games 
predicated on “voluptuous panic” (1961: 23), marginalising it in his 
racialised taxonomy of games, in recent years scholarly interest in 
affect and sensation in games has gathered pace with Anable’s /Playing 
with Feelings /(2018) concerning surfaces and touch, Keogh’s /A Play of 
Bodies /(2018) concerning sensation and the cyborg, and Gray’s 
/Intersectional Tech /(2020) concerning blackness and performative 
spaces/discourses of resistance. Alongside this affective turn in game 
studies, there has been a renewed interdisciplinary interest in 
atmospherics (Ash, 2012; Böhme, 2013) – the way affects, moods and 
aesthetics accrete in architecture and connect bodies in space. No space 
or atmosphere is neutral, however, nor reducible to invisible code, as 
recent work on games’ representation attests (Murray, 2017; Russworm, 
2017). New developments in game design and technology are facilitating 
new modes of game space, atmosphere and affect from the growing adoption 
of binaural sound (/Hellblade, /2017), untethered VR (/Quest 2, /2020), 
and virtual worlds of increasing diversity, complexity and affective 
intensity (/Devotion, /2019; /We Are the Caretakers, /2020; /The Last of 
Us Part II /2020).

However, spatial affects are nothing new to cultures of play on the 
sports field or game board; new experiments in the fields of LARP and 
‘audiogames’ do not need novel technologies to engage player minds and 
bodies. Nor should we claim that all areas of development are 
internationally and culturally universal (Jin, 2021) or unproblematic 
when ludic affects appear to be entrapping bodies in new economies of 
attention. Perhaps the time has come to nuance or problematise loose 
concepts such as ‘immersion’ and ‘flow’ (Chen, 2007), as Soderman (2021) 
has argued, and explore which kinds of affective space we might find 
pleasurable attachment to (Patterson, 2020), and which reinforce 
existing hierarchies (Fickle, 2019).

Building on the momentum of interest in the intersection of space, 
affect and play, *we invite theory and practice-based provocations and 
papers of 10 minutes* on topics such as (but not limited too):

  * Intersectionality, power and game space
  * Urban space and alienation in play
  * Transnational dynamics/contrasts in RTS/MOBA strategies
  * Boredom and mobile games
  * Landscape aesthetics and open worlds
  * Haptics and the multiple senses of touch
  * Interface design and affective attachment
  * Games staging comedy/tragedy
  * Queering spaces of play
  * Sound design and ambient horror
  * Practices of dwelling/kinship in games versus practices of colonisation
  * Space, time and games as historical drama
  * Gendered/Racialised/heteronormative level design
  * Problematising/nuancing ‘flow’ and ‘immersion’
  * Mood management and game environments as respite
  * Environmental narratives and hauntology
  * Material aesthetics in games
  * Social play and anxiety
  * Lighting and virtual architecture
  * AR and memories of place
  * Echoes and audiogames
  * LARPs and emotional ‘bleed’
  * Designing critical ‘atmospheres’
  * Space and the non-human

Proposals of up to 300 words to be sent to (merlin.seller /at/ ed.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(merlin.seller /at/ ed.ac.uk)> or (tom.boylston /at/ ed.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(tom.boylston /at/ ed.ac.uk)>.*Deadline 7^th August  2021*. Please 
provide your title, an abstract concerning your work/topic, and contact 
details. Posters and video submissions are welcome. We particularly wish 
to support and include submissions from BAME, queer, neurodiverse and 
precarious scholars of all genders – please do email us if you have any 
questions regarding accessibility or the microconference more broadly.

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