[ecrea] CFP - DiGRA 2018 - The medium is the message

The Game is the Message
http://digra2018.com

July 25-28, 2018

Campus Luigi Einaudi, Università di Torino, Turin, Italy
Lungo Dora Siena, 100 A, 10153 Turin, Italy

Conference chairs: Riccardo Fassone and Matteo Bittanti

Games have long since moved out of the toy drawer, but our understanding 
of them can still benefit from seeing them in a wider context of 
mediated meaning-making. DiGRA 2018 follows Marshall McLuhan, and sees 
games as extensions of ourselves. They recalibrate our senses and 
redefine our social relationships. The environments they create are more 
conspicuous than their content. They are revealing, both of our own 
desires and of the society within which we live. Their message is their 
effect. Games change us.

To explore this change, we invite scholars, artists and industry to 
engage in discussions over the following tracks:

Platforms
Game platforms invite new textualities, new technologies and new 
networks of power relations. Game structures, their integration with and 
use of the technology, as well as the affordances and restrictions 
offered by the platforms on which they live, influence our experience of 
them.

Users
Games invite new relations between their users, and players strive for 
and achieve new modes of perception. This reconfigures our attention, 
and establishes new patterns and forms of engagement.

Meaning-making
The connection between a game and its content is often interchangeable – 
a game is clearly recognizable even if the surface fiction is changed. 
But games still produce meanings and convey messages. We ask, what are 
the modes of signification and the aesthetic devices used in games? In 
this context we particularly invite authors to look at games that claim 
to be about serious topics or deal with political and social issues.

Meta-play
The playing of the game has become content, and we invite authors to 
explore spectatorship, streaming, allied practices and hybrid media 
surrounding play and the players. How can we describe and examine the 
complex interweaving of practices found in these environments?

Context
Games are subject to material, economic and cultural constraints. This 
track invites reflection on how these contingencies as well as 
production tools, industry and business demands and player interventions 
contribute to the process of signification.

Poetics
Games are created within constraints, affordances, rules and permissions 
which give us a frame in which games generate meaning. Games have voice, 
a language, and they do speak. This is the poetics of games, and we 
invite our fellows to explore and uncover it.

General
Games tend to break out of the formats given them, and so for this track 
we invite the outstanding abstracts, papers and panels on alternative 
topics to the pre-determined tracks.


  We invite full papers, 5000 – 7000 words plus references using the 
DiGRA 2018 submission template 
(http://www.digra.org/?attachment_id=148233), extended abstracts (from 
500 words, maximum 1000, excluding references), and panel submissions 
(1000 words excluding references, with a 100 word biography of each 
participant). Full papers will be subject to a double-blind peer review. 
Extended abstracts will be blinded and peer reviewed by committees 
organised by the track chairs. Panels will be reviewed by the track 
chairs and the program chairs. General inquiries should be addressed to 
Riccardo Fassone - riccardo.fassone AT unito.it <http://unito.it>. 
Artist contributions, industry contributions, performances or 
non-standard presentations should be addressed to Matteo Bittanti  - 
matteo.bittanti AT iulm.it <http://iulm.it> .


Submission will be opened December 1st, 2017, and the final deadline for 
submission is January 31st 2018.
The URL for submissions is 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=digra2018 .

Program chairs are
Martin Gibbs, martin.gibbs AT unimelb.edu.au <http://unimelb.edu.au>, 
University of Melbourne, Australia
Torill Elvira Mortensen, toel AT itu.dk <http://itu.dk>, IT University 
of Copenhagen, Denmark


Important dates:
Submission opens: December 1st, 2017
Final submission deadline: January 31st, 2018
Results from reviews: March 1
Early registration deadline: March 15th, 2018
Reviewed and rewritten full papers final deadline: April 15th, 2018
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