Call for Papers: Game Studies, Culture, Play, and Practice Area

41st Annual Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA) Conference
February 19-22, 2020
Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center
Albuquerque, New Mexico
http://www.southwestpca.org
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2019

The Game Studies, Culture, Play, and Practice Area invites papers, panels, and other proposals on games (digital and otherwise) and their study and development. Proposals are welcome from any and all scholars (including graduate students, independent scholars, and tenured, tenure-track, and emeritus faculty) and practitioners (developers, artists, archivists, and so forth). Unusual formats, technologies, and the like are encouraged.

PROPOSAL SUBMISSION

Possible topics include (but are in no way limited to):

Advertising (both in-game and out)
Archiving and artifactual preservation
ARGs
Design and development
Economic and industrial histories and studies
Educational games and their pedagogies
E-Sports and competitive gaming
Fan studies
Foreign language games and culture
Game art/game-based art (including game sound)
Game development education
Game engines and entertainment
Game genres/types
Game streaming
Games and health
Gender and sexual identity
Haptics and interface studies
Hardware/platforms
Histories of games
Industry studies
International/non-US game studies
Localization
Mobile gaming
MOGs, MMOGs, and other forms of online/networked gaming
Performance
Pornographic games
Religion and games
Representations of race and class
Representations of space and place
The rhetoric of games and game systems
Serious games
Table-top games and gaming
Technological, aesthetic, economic, and ideological convergence
Theories of play
Transmedia and games

All proposals must be submitted through the Conference Management System at http://register.southwestpca.org/southwestpca (see http://southwestpca.org/conference/faqs-and-tips/ for submission FAQs and Tips).

SWPACA offers monetary awards for the best graduate student papers in a variety of categories. Submissions of accepted, full papers are due January 1, 2020. For more information, visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/graduate-student-awards/

Registration and travel information for the conference is available at http://southwestpca.org/conference/conference-registration-information/

In addition, please check out the organization’s peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, at http://journaldialogue.org/

AREA

The Game Studies, Culture, Play, and Practice Area is international in scope and emphasizes diversity, an openness to innovative approaches and presentations, and the energetic practice of post-conference collaboration and publication. The Area was established in 2005 as a division of the Computer Culture Area, and became a standalone area in 2010. In addition to organizing conference panels, roundtables, and workshops, the Game Studies, Culture, Play, and Practice Area offers formal and informal mentoring, organizes outings, and hosts evening social events.

– Chair: Judd Ruggill (jruggill@email.arizona.edu)
– Research Coordinator: Jennifer deWinter (jdewinter@wpi.edu)
– Social Media Coordinator: Michael Anthony DeAnda (madeanda@gmail.com)
– Special Events Coordinator: Ryan Moeller (rylish.moeller@usu.edu)
– Graduate Student Mentor: Chris Hanson (cphanson@syr.edu) 

– Twitter: @GSCPP