[Commlist] CfP for Special Issue of the Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds

TIME, PLAY, AND GAMES
Call for Papers for a special Issue of the Journal of Gaming & Virtual 
Worlds
Guest Edited by Federico Alvarez Igarzábal and Chris Hanson
Deadline for Submissions: 15 May, 2024
Contact Email: (jgvwtime /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(jgvwtime /at/ gmail.com)>
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Time is a fundamental aspect of our lived experience. Everything we do 
is to some extent informed by past experiences, guided by our present 
state of mind, and geared towards achieving a particular state of 
affairs in the future—however close or far ahead it may be. If we enjoy 
a certain situation, time seems to accelerate. The opposite is true of 
boring moments, which seem to last longer than the clock indicates. And 
we structure our lives by segmenting the continuous flow of time in 
units of different magnitudes (hours, days, months), of which we keep 
track with technologies like watches and calendars.
All of this is true as well of play and games. Without time, there is no 
play. Yet time in video games can behave differently to real, physical 
time. We can fast-forward it, pause it, and reset it to undo the 
consequences of bad decisions with a few button presses. Time in games 
can be discrete (turn based) instead of continuous, and events in their 
narratives often wait for the players to arrive to a certain point in 
space to occur. Game temporality is also not homogeneous and may be 
experienced differently by individual players, or even by the same 
player in disparate circumstances.
Our encounters with games are always informed by our previous 
experiences with other games and modes of play. Our memories shape our 
present moment, helping to guide our play experience from developing 
successful strategies to shaping our expectations for particular game 
genres. We also must make time to play, carving out temporal windows in 
our daily lives to engage with games, be they persistent online worlds, 
games which reward daily gameplay, and idle or casual games, among others.
Linear media present their own temporal particularities, like sudden 
jumps in time. But they have arguably also been increasingly influenced 
by the temporality of video games, with recent years seeing more 
frequent releases of films and series with Groundhog-Day-like time 
loops, temporal reversals, time travel, circular narratives, and 
branching timelines such as multiverses remediating game temporality 
into other forms.
We invite scholars to contribute papers to a special issue of the 
Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds on the theme of “Time, Play, and Games.”
We welcome essays on wide range of approaches to the consideration of 
time in both digital and analog games, including but not limited to:

-Time loops, repetition, and circular structures
-Multiverse, time lines, time travel
-Gender and time
-Time as tripartite structure: past, present, future
-Memory and genre (e.g. generic expectations for an FPS)
-Queer temporalities
-Remediation and cross-pollination between films/television, comic 
books, and other forms
-Differing time windows in games including present-based play vs. 
future-oriented strategies
-Disability and time
-Differing modes of time perception
-Tabletop/analog RPGs long-running campaigns
-Legacy board games and games changing over time
-“Seasons" and refreshed content in AAA titles
-Spatiotemporality and relationships between space and time
-Representations of the past in “historical” games such as Total War: Rome
-Interacting with history for educational purposes such as in Assassin 
Creed’s “Discovery Tour” mode
-Ruins in games and implied histories as part of world-building
-Timelines in game franchises (e.g. The Legend of Zelda)
-Time manipulation in games such as slow motion, reversing, fast 
forwarding (e.g. SimCity)
-Time compression and dilation
-Present tense of interaction vs. past tense of narration
-Game preservation and the archive
-Esports and livestreaming
-Slow play
-Speedrunning
-Work time vs. play time

Proposals should include a 300-500 word abstract and a title, and be 
sent to (jgvwtime /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(jgvwtime /at/ gmail.com)> by 15 May, 2024. 
Accepted submissions will be asked to submit full 5,000-6,000 word 
essays by 15 September, 2024. No payment from the authors will be required.


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