CALL FOR PAPERS
Special Issue of GAMEVIRONMENTS
“This Time it’s for all the Marbles. Towards Social Justice in Digital Gaming”
edited by Patrick Prax
https://www.gamevironments.uni-bremen.de/
Submission deadline for abstracts: 1 February 2022
Digital games are a central element of contemporary media ecology both in terms of playing and making games, but also as an anchor point for communities and cultures. The impact games and gaming have on our societies is both hard to define and undeniable. They extend towards increased access to cultural production and creativity, allowing people to be social in isolation, and to expand the social imaginary. At the same time, they are related to exploitation and precarity, isolate people under the guise of sociability, and are connected to xenophobic and bigoted movements that threaten democratic values and civic liberties.
While these are not issues that are exclusive to game it can be argued that gaming as a culture, community, and environment warrant attention here because of their central role for contemporary culture, creative industries, and digital platforms. The gaming community has regrettably been the training ground for alt-right politics that are successfully being used globally to de-stabilize democratic discourses and it is still a central recruitment pool for said radical movements. This makes it important to investigate the environment of games and gaming for understanding the current political changes towards xenophobia, white supremacy, nationalism, and fascism where games and game communities are a puzzle piece that should not be left out of the picture. The issue does see games here as a part of contemporary political and cultural zeitgeist, but also as material media that is produced and consumed in specific socio-economic context. This means that also perspectives that center on the economic and political conditions of game production and marketing are seen as relevant to these questions. That said, games and game culture are also spaces that brim with potential for critical and inclusive work. Game workers as well as the communities around games can be the creative anchor-point, the ground zero, or the staging area for organizing towards collective action towards more respectful and equitable futures.
This special issue aims to examine the ways in which games and gaming are connected to and potentially accelerate undemocratic and bigoted movements while high-lighting projects and perspectives from games that contribute to social justice.
The special issue has been created based on the submissions to the Game Studies Temporary Working Group at the NordMedia 2021 conference. We invite diverse, critical, activist, and political work connected to games and game culture from a number of perspectives inside the ecosystem of games: designers, scholars, journalists, activists, workplace agitators, community managers, and player creators.
In this special issue, we want to extend beyond purely academic work in order to highlight steps taken towards social justice in gaming, wherever they may be found and whatever they may look like. This means that in addition to the journal’s traditional formats of peer-reviewed articles, we are also including a call for reports of practical efforts towards social justice both to share best practices and to learn from challenges and mistakes. The precise format for such reports can be discussed with the editor.
Topics for the all forms of contributions may include, but are not limited to:
- Using games for social change, both in changing discourse and practice
- Empowering facilitators of social change through games or play
- Gaming as the ecosystem for inclusion or exclusion
- Exploitation in games and gaming
- Organizing and political agitation in games and gaming
- Making visible the structures of bigotry, sexism, and white supremacy to be able to fight them
- Discrimination, toxicity
- Critical epistemologies for political resistance
- Gaming and its relation to fascism
- The military-entertainment complex and ways to resist it
- Black and indigenous-led perspectives on gaming
- Game culture and the framing of politics
- The politics of game production
- Critical Game literacy
- Political economy of game production and marketing
- Gaming and civic society
- The role of games and gaming in the rise of fascism
GUIDELINES
For all forms of contributions please submit a title and 300-word abstract to Patrick Prax (patrick.prax@speldesign.uu.se) by 1. February 2022.
Possible formats for submission include:
- regular academic articles
- reports
- interviews
- book reviews
- game reviews
- reports of practical effort
Guideline for “Reports of practical efforts”: For reports of practical efforts, please submit a short description of the effort (300 words) as well as a contextualization of where this happened. Please explain briefly what you consider to be the take-away for future actions, both in terms of what can work or what does not. The editors are prepared to discuss questions regarding anonymity.
Please include pictures and media if you have them. Keep your language clear and concise.
All articles submitted will be subject to double-blind peer-review. There is no article processing charge.
Here you find more information on submission formats and guidelines:
https://www.gamevironments.uni-bremen.de/
https://www.gamevironments.uni-bremen.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/gamevironments-style-sheet.pdf
TIMELINE
Title and abstract submission: 1. February 2022
Full text submission: 1. June 2022