[Commlist] CFP: Affecting Game Time

CALL FOR PAPERS – ‘AFFECTING GAME TIME: THEORY & PRACTICE’

*CFP DEADLINE: 7th July 2022 *

*CONFERENCE DATE: 2nd September 2022 *

All games are felt in time. Whether they are live service or archived 
emulations, interruptible mobile play or unrepeatable roguelikes, quick 
situational happenings or laborious games of death and resurrection, 
play is an investment through, in and with time. Last year was a year of 
looping games that confronted us with both the medium’s core unit of 
design and the temporal affects of lockdown (/Deathloop/, 2021; 
/Returnal/, 2021; /Loop Hero/, 2021; /Twelve Minutes/, 2021; 
/Overboard!/, 2021). However, the temporal affects games represent, 
shape and contain are diverse. When dancing with a game like /Superhot/ 
(2016) we might agree that games are brought ‘to life’ by players 
(Hanson, 2018), but conversely games are also vanishing with the closure 
of storefronts and the material and phenomenological obstacles faced by 
archivists (Newman, 2012). For Huizinga, games elapse in “free time” 
(1938: 8), but this ‘freedom’ is not universal (Chess, 2019; Gray, 
2020), and playtime is not just ‘live’, but a livelihood (Kücklich, 
2005; Taylor 2018). Temporalities may overlap, histories are multiple 
and game time can be both repetitious and ephemeral. How a game feels is 
contingent on when a game is felt, but the ‘when’ of play is slippery: 
does a game exist between moves?; how do save states, ‘let’s plays’ and 
automation alter game time?; what are the limits of emulation?; how has 
gaming nostalgia changed over time?; in what ways do games alter our 
perception of time?; how are game temporalities altered by Power and 
embodiment?

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

While Ruffino (2018) highlights game discourses’ obsession with the 
future, games rehearse and perpetuate troubling histories: Fickle 
outlines the deep historical permeation and repetition of racial 
ideology in game tropes (2019); Kocurek (2015) highlights the emergence 
of a darkly competitive masculinity in the looping arcade play of the 
1980s; and for Crogan gameplay emerges from the anticipatory paradigm of 
Cold War simulation (2011). Yet, as Patterson argues, games can also 
mobilise affective attachment through the erotics of play to protest the 
imperial spatiotemporal order of information technology (2020: 7). 
Indeed, while games may quantify and exploit our movements, players can 
also develop queer temporalities of resistance in play, such as slow 
gaming (Scully-Blaker, 2019) and speed-running (Ruberg 2019). Bold 
designs highlight the medium’s capacity to broach strange and powerful 
temporal affects: such as the radical etiolation of time in the /The 
Longing/ (2020) which takes 400days to play; games which effervesce in 
seconds (/Queers in Love at the End of the World/, 2013; /Warioware, 
Inc/, 2003); the fictive deep time of /Horizon: Zero Dawn/ (2017); 
haunting resurrections of gaming’s recent past (/Stories Untold/, 2017; 
/Paratopic/ 2018); games like /With those We love Alive/ (2014) which 
mark the body over time; and much has been written about the clockwork 
sandbox of cosmic time, musicality and ephemeral conviviality in the 
widely celebrated /The Outer Wilds/ (2019).

Building on last year’s conference Affecting Game Space, we hope to 
explore discussions surrounding the intersection of time, affect and 
play. *We invite theory and practice-based provocations and papers of 15 
minutes * on topics such as (but not limited too):

• Intersectionality, power and game time

• Transnational heterochronicity of games

• Game archiving methodology

• Afro-futurist games

• Changing game nostalgias

• Rhythmanalysis of games

• Repetition as pleasure

• Dark play and apocalypses

• The thick present of play

• Time loop games

• Melancholic play

• Slow gaming

• Retro aesthetics and hauntology

• Deep time in environmental storytelling

• Utopias in future-oriented games

• The temporal affordances of current gen SSDs

• Queer/Trans temporalities in games

• Ageing in games

• Problematising ‘flow’

• Playing with histories

• Boredom and mobile games

• Leisure time and gender in play

• Nonhuman time in games

Proposals of up to 300 words to be sent to (merlin.seller /at/ ed.ac.uk) or 
(tom.boylston /at/ ed.ac.uk). *Deadline 7th July 2022*. Please provide your 
title, an abstract concerning your work/topic, and contact details. 
Posters and video submissions are welcome. We aim to make recordings 
available with consent after the event, hosted on our cluster site. We 
particularly wish to support and include submissions from PoC, queer, 
neurodiverse and precarious scholars of all genders – please do email us 
if you have any questions regarding accessibility or the 
micro-conference more broadly.


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