CALL FOR PAPERS
Conference: ‘Affecting Game Space: Theory and Practice’
Game Worlds Cluster
Centre for Data, Culture and Society
The University of Edinburgh
Online
3rd September 2021
Abstract submission deadline: 31st July 2021
From claustrophobic confines to sublime vistas, game spaces have conjured affects since the medium’s inception. Whether it be nostalgia for the remastered landscape, the vertigo of free diving in VR, or the conviviality of gathering around landmarks in Pokémon GO, affect reciprocally connects players to physical and virtual spaces. Haptics, ray tracing and photogrammetry are allowing us to ‘feel’ game worlds in new and increasingly tangible ways. As Nitsche observes: “Video game spaces stage our dreams and nightmares and they seem to get better at it every year” (2008: 2). How then do we (co-)design, feel, construct and play with affect in game spaces?
As the inaugural event of the ‘Game Worlds’ research cluster connecting theory and design at the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Data, Culture and Society, the ‘Affecting Game Space’ online conference will be built around quickfire presentations followed by breakout groups, with the potential for demo/exhibition space. We hope to welcome you to a network of like-minded academics and practitioners based at The University of Edinburgh virtually through the spatial video conferencing platform ‘Gather,’ facilitating free movement, conversation and networking.
While Roger Caillois wrote evocatively of Ilinx as a category of games predicated on “voluptuous panic” (1961: 23), in recent years scholarly interest in affect and sensation in games has gathered pace with Perron and Schröter’s edited volume Video Games and the Mind (2016), Anable’s Playing with Feelings (2018) and Keogh’s A Play of Bodies (2018). Alongside this affective turn in game studies, there has been a renewed interdisciplinary interest in atmospherics (Ash, 2012; Böhme, 2013; Griffero, 2014) – the way affects, moods and aesthetics accrete in architecture and connect bodies in space. New developments in game design and technology are facilitating new modes of game space, atmosphere and affect from the growing adoption of binaural sound (Hellblade, 2017), untethered VR (Quest 2, 2020), and virtual worlds of increasing complexity and affective intensity (Horizon: Zero Dawn, 2017; Red Dead Redemption 2, 2018; The Last of Us Part II 2020).
However, spatial affects are nothing new to cultures of play on the sports field or game board; new experiments in the fields of LARP and ‘audiogames’ do not need novel technologies to engage player minds and bodies. Nor should we claim that all areas of development are unproblematic when ludic affects appear to be entrapping bodies in new economies of attention. Perhaps the time has come to nuance or problematise loose concepts such as ‘flow’ and ‘immersion,’ as Calleja (2010), Keogh (2018) and Soderman (2021) have argued, and explore what kinds of affective space we wish to inhabit.
Building on the momentum of interest in the intersection of space, affect and play, we invite theory and practice-based provocations and papers of 10 minutes on topics such as (but not limited to):
- Urban space and alienation in play
- Boredom and mobile games
- Landscape aesthetics and open worlds
- Haptics and the multiple senses of touch
- Interface design and affective attachment
- Games staging comedy/tragedy
- Sound design and ambient horror
- Practices of dwelling in games
- Space, time and games as historical drama
- Affective level design
- Problematising/nuancing ‘flow’ and ‘immersion’
- Mood management and game environments as respite
- Environmental narratives and hauntology
- Material aesthetics in games
- Social play and anxiety
- Lighting and virtual architecture
- AR and memories of place
- Echoes and audiogames
- LARPs and emotional ‘bleed’
- Designing ‘atmosphere’
Proposals of up to 300 words to be sent to merlin.seller@ed.ac.uk or tom.boylston@ed.ac.uk. Deadline 31st July 2021. Please provide your title, an abstract concerning your work/topic, and contact details. Posters and video submissions are welcome.
Tom Boylston and Merlin Seller
Game Worlds Cluster
Centre for Data, Culture and Society
The University of Edinburgh