[Commlist] CFP Video Game Cultures 2025: Gaming Landscapes

*Video Game Cultures 2025: Gaming Landscapes*

**

*10-12 September 2025 / Department of Theory of Art and Artworks, 
Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Prague (CZ)*

https://videogamecultures.org/2025-call-for-papers/ 
<https://videogamecultures.org/2025-call-for-papers/>

In response to many different threads emerging from our most recent 
Video Game Cultures conferences in Klagenfurt (2023) and Birmingham 
(2024), the theme for this year’s conference is Environmental 
Storytelling. Incorporating all permutations of the concept, this 
includes varying gaming landscapes, utopian and dystopian virtual 
environments, unseen, unimaginable and unwanted virtual spaces and 
places. We also seek to explore how the current and upcoming climate 
crisis is reflected in gaming environments’ spaces and places.

We seek proposals for papers exploring all possible forms of virtual 
worlds in games and virtual environments. What do they promise, how do 
they function, and what are their aesthetic points of reference? More 
importantly, with recent developments in AI procedures in Text to 3D or 
Text to Animation, how might these gaming spaces be constructed in the 
future, and what is the role of the human designer in this process?

Video Game Cultures 2025 will investigate how video game cultures, 
technologies, practices, communities, paratexts and genres develop 
within the framework of five thematic tracks. As digital games encompass 
an expanding range of highly complex and variant phenomena, this often 
leads to an overlap of issues across themes. In response to the 
diversity of these digital experiences, we are inviting participants of 
all backgrounds to submit proposals to this traditionally 
interdisciplinary event.

Participants are encouraged to think broadly within and across thematic 
tracks, and submissions can address topics and questions relevant to 
games such as, but not limited to:

  * *Environmental Storytelling:* Space and place in game design and
    gameplay. Non-linear and non-Euclidean spaces. Large-scale games and
    simulations. The rise of computer games bigger than planet Earth.
    Space engines.
  * *Eutopia and Sci-fi:* Citizen science. Brave new worlds. Stars and
    Sci-fi sims. Alternative physics designs. Looking for the way out of
    environmental apocalypse. The future of (artificial) life. Escapism.
    Uncanny worlds.
  * *Dystopia and Apocalypse:* Horror scenarios. Apocalypse as practice.
    Living in dystopia. Diving into the future of evil. Dark inside but
    cute looking. Spaces and places of the past. Lost places and their
    vital memory. Environmental collapse.
  * *Spaces for Healthy Emotions:* Well-being places. Virtual
    3rd places. Building virtual memorials. Sites of mourning. AR and VR
    Simulations of post-mortem being. Gameplay models beyond video game
    studies. Game space and healthcare applications. Alternative lives.
    Game spaces and the sublime.
  * *AI and Hardware for Space:* AI-led inventions and interventions in
    game design, the impact of Text to 3D and Text to Animation AI on
    designer productivity. Histories of procedurally generated spaces.
    AI produced experimental environments. A bright future for
    independent developers? Control, input devices and movement. XR, AR
    and Virtual/Mixed Reality devices and gaming cultures. The future of
    immersion and embodiment.

We welcome contributions to these areas that consider video games as 
text and/or experience, that approach the areas from the designer’s 
perspective, and/or that consider cultures of video gaming.

This call encourages submission of proposals for academic papers, short 
workshops, practitioner-based activities, best practice showcases, 
how-to sessions, live demonstrations, performances, and pre-formed 
panels. We particularly welcome short film screenings, photographic 
essays, installations, interactive talks, and alternative presentation 
styles that encourage engagement.

*What to send:*

300-word abstracts, proposals and other forms of contribution and 
100-word bio notes should be submitted by Monday 5 May 2025. All 
submissions will be minimally double reviewed, under anonymous (blind) 
conditions, by a global panel drawn from members of the Project Team and 
the Video Game Cultures Advisory Board. In practice, by the time a 
proposal is accepted, typically it will have been triple and quadruple 
reviewed.

You will be notified of the panel’s decision on or by Friday 20 June 2025.

All abstracts must be submitted to: (daniel.riha /at/ fhs.cuni.cz) 
<mailto:(daniel.riha /at/ fhs.cuni.cz)>

*Ethos*

This event is designed to be an inclusive academic research and 
publishing project. It aims to bring people together from different 
areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which 
are innovative and exciting.

We believe it is a mark of personal courtesy to and professional respect 
for your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full 
duration of the conference and participate in all presentations. The 
main intention of Video Game Cultures 2025 is to create a personal, 
in-presence experience for its participants and to facilitate community 
building. Please consider this carefully when submitting an abstract for 
presentation.

All papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in 
English. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed 
hardcopy volume.


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