Call for submissions for Edited Book proposal: Gaming Beyond Screens
We are currently seeking contributions to an edited collection on gestural gaming entitled Gaming Beyond Screens. In recent years there has been a surge of interest in digital games, platforms, and peripherals that employ gestural technologies. The Nintendo Wii, Rock Band, and Kinect are just some of the most popular examples in a long list of games and gaming devices that shift our attention away from the screen and towards bodies in motion. The phenomenon of gestural gaming raises a number of pressing questions for both academics and designers. For example, what are the implications of this shift in attention and how might it impact the conceptualization of interactivity and play? How can we theorize gestural gaming as an embodied, material, and social phenomenon? Where does gestural gaming intersect with other forms of physical activity, culture, and play? By treating gesture, and gestural gaming in particular, as an open-ended, generative, and multifaceted phenomenon, we aim to create a dialogue between theory and design that resists reducing gesture to any one of its many components. At the same time, we hope to provide valuable insight into the ontological and experiential space between gestural bodies and technologies.
Gaming Beyond Screens will incorporate a range of different approaches to gesture. These approaches include, but are not limited to, gesture as a material, embodied event, gesture as a socially constructed form of signification, and gesture as a personally, politically, and socially transformative act. The first instance is focused upon the material conditions and designed parameters that give rise to gestures, as well as the physical qualities of those gestures. The second primarily views gesture as emerging from the interplay of social practices, personal histories, and the cultural weight of moving bodies and technologies. The third investigates the potential of gesture to transcend or break down existing boundaries, creating moments of resistance and metamorphosis. These and other approaches may intertwine at various points throughout the collection, highlighting areas of intersection and overlap between different disciplines and fields of practice.
Below is a list of potential themes or topics of discussion:
- making space for gestural games
- gesture as ephemera
- moving and playing together
- historical bodies, gestures, and games
- you are the controller: marketing gestural games
- gestural technologies and fantasies of freedom and control
- the messiness of materiality and the corporeal
- training the body: gesture, rhythm, and routine
- the theory and design of experimental interfaces, environments, and digital games
- games as performance, performance as games
- designing for gestural excess
- bodies in flow: immersion and gesture
- touchy-feely: the affective aspects of gesture
Abstracts should be emailed to: ckjong@mta.ca. The deadline for submissions has been extended to April 19, 2013. Abstracts should be between 400-700 words in length and describe the key arguments of the proposed chapter. Notifications indicating whether your abstract has been selected for inclusion will be sent out by May 1, 2013. If your abstract is selected it will be included in the proposal for the edited collection and subsequent deadlines for review drafts and final version will be determined in negotiation with a publisher.
If you have any questions about this book or your contribution please email Carolyn Jong at ckjong@mta.ca.
Thank you for your time and we look forward to reading your submissions.
Regards,
Editors: Dr. Bart Simon, Dr. Lynn Hughes, and Carolyn Jong