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Issue 30: “Poetics of Play”

For its thirtieth issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for
Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that address
the poetics and politics of video games.

20 years ago Janet H. Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck and Espen Aarseth’s
Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature began a conversation to
theorize the aesthetics of video games. Since these foundational texts,
game studies has sustained an interrogation of political questions
concerning games, such as issues of representation and the configuration of
online game spaces. Video games intersect with industrial practices,
embodied experiences, as well as visual and ludic designs, all of which
have specific political implications. For this issue we encourage
contributors to consider two or more of these factors together, exploring
“how games make complex meanings across history, bodies, hardware, and
code” (Anable 2018, xi).

This issue of InVisible Culture takes a cultural studies approach toward
video games in that the formal aesthetics always register aspects of the
culture that they emerge from. We think of games as an open category that
includes a broad range of media, from mainstream AAA games to art
installations; complex “hardcore” games as well as casual mobile apps;
visually rich to text-based interactions—cutting across a range of
experiences, from the banality of playing an app to the singularity of
wearing a VR headset. We take gaming aesthetics to mean not only the system
of visual, aural, ludic, and narrative configurations of (a) given game(s)
but also the manipulation of these systems: modding, updating, streaming,
etc. We are also interested in what surrounds games, such as to what degree
games afford community building and collaboration between players.
Possible topics of exploration include, but are not limited to:

- Games and Representation
- Games and Subjectivity
- Games and Affect, Multisensory Encounters with Games
- Ordinariness/Everydayness of Games, Gamification of
Everyday Life
- Materiality/Tactility of Gaming Devices, Embodied
Engagements with Games
- Queer/Feminist Approaches to Video Games
- Games and the Politics of Race, Gender, and (Dis)Ability

- DIY Approaches to Games and Game Making
- Games and Activism
- Genre studies
- Platform Studies
- Games and Sound
- Remediation of Video Game Aesthetics
- Games and/as Contemporary Art, Games in Museums/Galleries

- Games in the Archive, Games as Archive
- Game Communities and Fandom
- Fan-made “How To” and “Let’s Play” Videos, Live Streams
- Character Creation Systems and their Politics
(Liberatory vs. Constraining)
- The Economy of Games, Microtransactions, Loot crates
Creative/Artistic Works Reviews Dialogues

Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines from
the

Chicago Manual of Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to

invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu by June 30th, 2018. Inquiries should be
sent to the same address.

In addition to written materials, InVisible Culture is accepting works in
other media (video, photography, drawing, code) that reflect upon the theme
as it is outlined above. Please submit creative or artistic works along
with an artist statement of no more than two pages to invisible.culture@ur.
rochester.edu. For questions or more details concerning acceptable formats,
go to http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or contact the same address.

InVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book,
exhibition, and film reviews (600-1,000 words). For this issue we
particularly encourage authors to submit reviews of games or other forms of
interactive media. To submit a review proposal, go to
http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or contact invisible.culture@ur.
rochester.edu.

The journal also invites submissions to its Dialogues page, which will
accommodate more immediate responses to the topic of the current issue. For
further details, please contact us at invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu with
the subject heading “Dialogues submission.”

* InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a
student-run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in an
open access format. Through peer-reviewed articles, creative works, and
reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore changing
themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialog across
fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.
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