Call For Papers: Books and Journals


Extended: Call for Abstracts “The Game Boy” Special Issue of the MultiPlay Journal

Deadline for Abstracts: 29th April 2024

“There is something truly magical about handheld consoles, something their fuller featured console cousins have never quite been able to match. Perhaps dedicated handheld consoles are satisfying because they’re designed, from the chipset up, to be self-sufficient, without the distractions of ancillary hardware. They don’t require an additional controller, an attached RF or HDMI cable, a CRT or a flatscreen to carry you off to your chosen gaming nirvana. They sit in your hands with a subtle balance between hardware and software, and like witchcraft, convert a mundane bus journey into something transcendental.”
(Saltalamacchia, 2022, p.5)

MultiPlay is launching their new, peer reviewed journal with a special issue on the Game Boy. This inaugural issue of our journal will look back on the popular handheld console, its legacy, and interrogate the cultural impact of its games that can still be felt in today’s games industry.

Nintendo released the Game Boy in 1989, and already held a significant advantage over other companies when it came to handheld devices due to the popularity of their Game & Watch series – portable devices that allowed gamers to play singular titles. While the Game Boy wasn’t the most technically advanced system of its time, it didn’t need to be; it’s singular vision of bringing a wealth of portable games to gamers was enough to ensure its overwhelming popularity (Parker, 2022, p.11).

Since its launch, more than 118 million units of the Game Boy series of consoles have been sold worldwide. Nintendo has continued its focus on portable consoles with subsequent hardware like the Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo icons Mario and Pikachu have only grown in popularity.

The editors are therefore seeking abstracts to compile a special issue of the journal focused on the cultural and technical impact and iconography of the Game Boy. Topics that may be considered include, but are not limited to:

  • Discussions of the technological capabilities, capacity, and limitations of the Game Boy
  • Emulation, preservation, and the Game Boy
  • The influence of handheld gaming devices on culture
  • The nostalgia market
  • Refurbishing Game Boys and their place in the present
  • Game Boys as past and present tools for photography
  • The influence of Game Boy on game genres

As MultiPlay is an interdisciplinary games studies network, submissions from differing backgrounds and perspectives are encouraged. Abstracts should be between 300-500 words, excluding references (which should be provided in Harvard format). All abstracts require accompanying author biographies of 100 words. Both must be sent in Word or PDF format to networkmultiplay@gmail.com by 29th April 2024 with the heading ‘Game Boy’.

Authors of accepted abstracts will be contacted by the end of March 2024 and invited to submit full paper contributions (in the region of 6000-8000 words) by 22 July 2024. All articles will be peer reviewed, and successful manuscripts will be published as Open Access articles on a dedicated journal website in Q4 2024. There are no fees payable for publication.

If you have any further questions please email networkmultiplay@gmail.com

Guest editors:

Stephanie Farnsworth (Lecturer in Media and Communications – University of Sunderland) , Lisa Meek (PhD Researcher in Games Culture – University of Sunderland), Greg Mc Guinness (PhD Candidate at the Institute of Education, UCL), and Adam Jerrett (Lecturer in Games Development – University of Portsmouth).

References

Parker, L. 2022, A Handheld History: A Celebration of Portable Gaming, Saltalamacchia, B. eds., Lost in
Cult: London, p.11

Saltalamacchia, B. 2022, A Handheld History: A Celebration of Portable Gaming, Lost in Cult: London, p.5

Reopening Call for Chapter Abstracts: Liberate Me Plenty – The Queer and Now of Digital Gaming

After completing a round of successful chapter submissions and reviews, MultiPlay is re-opening the CFP for its queer gaming book Liberate Me Plenty: The Queer and Now of Digital Gaming.

LMP is an anthology series developed through the works of early-career academics that aims to shine a spotlight on novel developments in the intersectional field of queer videogame research.  Queerness, both as an identity and as a form of action, constantly challenges the boundaries set on how we understand our social world.  This is particularly evident in research based around queerness and videogames where boundaries between right and wrong forms of play, player and game, and even the human and non-human, are challenged through the intersection of physical and digital space.  The anthology series will look to highlight developing work in this field of research, asking us to consider our own embodiment from the moment we even think about picking up a controller.

We are currently accepting abstract submissions for chapters that compliment those that have already been accepted.  This includes, but is not limited to, works that focus on:

  • queer and emerging identities in games;
  • non-normative gameplay;
  • queer(ing) agency and the player;
  • asexual/agender representations and modes of play; and,
  • qualitative studies of play.

Queerness is a fluid concept that continuously looks to push back against definition.  Liberate Me Plenty is an anthology of thoughts around queerness and digital gaming that, through altering moments of consensus, tension and contradiction, will contribute to ideas around what it means to play games queerly.

If you wish to contribute, please send a 300 word abstract and a 100 word bio to networkmultiplay@gmail.com with the subject line “LMP Abstract Submission”.

Deadline for submissions: Monday 27th May 2024

Call for Abstracts: Video Game Monsters Edited Collection

MultiPlay is delighted to announce that we are working on a new edited collection – Video Game Monsters: A Compendium

Monsters have been the foundation of the video game industry. They’ve been the bosses to beat, the enemies to avoid, the NPCs we’ve sometimes forged unlikely bonds with. Monsters are the true avatar of video games, and there has been an increase of work and attention in this area, such as Player v.s Monster (Svelch, 2023). MultiPlay feels the time is right for a special collection examining monsters in all of their video game forms, creating a thorough compendium of the monstrous history of video games. As Martin points out, video games studies has barely began to reckon with monsters (2023, np)

MultiPlay is currently seeking abstracts for chapters for this collection. As ever, we have a list of prompts below but please feel free to send all your monstrous ideas to us.

Ideas for your consideration:

  • What makes a monster (boss)?
  • Monsters: friends, foe, the future of video games?
  • The overlooked werewolf
  • The avatar-player monster
  • The evolving history of video game monsters
  • Modern monsters
  • Monstrous borders and environments
  • Arcade monsters
  • Bowser as a cultural icon

Please send 200 word abstracts and 100 word author bios to networkmultiplay@gmail.com by 5th of July 2024.

References

Martin, P. (2023) ‘Review: Player vs. Monster: The Making and Breaking of Video Game Monstrosity’, in Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research, vol. 23, no. 3, December, [Online] Available from: https://gamestudies.org/2303/articles/martin_review_svelch [Accessed 5th January 2024]

Švelch, J. (2023) Player Vs. Monster: The Making and Breaking of Video Game Monstrosity. Cambridge: The MIT Press.  

Call for abstracts for Book Chapters: Git Gud’ and Other Stories: The Influence of Open Culture on Game Experiences

Edited by Kevin Veale and Adam Jerrett

Cultures and discourses surrounding games can have an outsized impact on how people experience them. In Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman discuss different forms of culture as ways of understanding how games relate to their broader context:

For the purposes of game design, we understand ‘culture’ to refer to what exists outside the magic circle of the game, the environment or context within which a game takes place. (Salen and Zimmerman 2004, 508)

They describe open cultural contexts as being where “The exchange of meaning between a game and its surrounding cultural context can change and transform both the game and its environment,” (Salen and Zimmerman 2004, 538). Mia Consalvo has explored the role of videogame paratexts – including both official material and fan works such as guides and wikis can become more central to the experience of videogames than the videogames themselves, and that videogame paratexts serve “pedagogical functions” (Consalvo 2007, 22). Souvik Mukherjee argues that games can be understood as assemblages, which cannot be properly understood without considering them as multifaceted, richly-fractal entities, deeply informed by the cultures and communities surrounding them.

As assemblages, they are games, stories, political and economic platforms, simulations and fitness trainers among other things; moreover, they also plug into all these aspects as well as to the human player and to the machine (literally) in an intrinsic relationship. The Grand Theft Auto walkthrough (…) can be said to plug into the GTA assemblage, which includes the entire series of games, the individual gameplays of the players, the cheat-codes, the geography of the American cities in which the games take place, the design elements and much more. It would be difficult to leave any of these separate elements out of any critique or appreciation of GTA V or GTA: San Andreas because of the multiplicity of narratives and related play experiences they bring together. (Mukherjee 2015, 17)

The discourses found within complexly-overlapping games communities have a significant influence on the assemblages that game texts become part of.  Games themselves set expectations for how players ‘should’ engage with them within their experiences, a process known as embodied literacies (Keogh 2018, 91) – expectations of the genre, format and content that can be carried between games and inform a player’s ludoliteracy (Davidson 2011).  As a result of this process, games often assume that a ‘new player’ is not entirely new to the medium, which frames assumptions around what they need to be taught as they play.

Discourses within game communities and cultures inform both how ludoliteracies develop, are framed, and understood. It examines how game preferences are formed, and why certain games may be more valued than others (Keogh 2018, 79). 

“Git Gud” is one such phrase that exemplifies this evolving culture. It has been popularised within game communities and cultures, and is often used to valorise and defend difficult challenges – potentially ones that are intimidatingly difficult to overcome. Dark Souls (Miyazaki and From Software 2011) provides an example of how “Git Gud” and the discourses surrounding it as an idea can shape the experience of gameplay.  The first boss appears when the player’s character will not have a functional weapon, making attacking it almost futile, and there are cues to suggest the player should avoid fighting it as this stage and instead run past.  However, players who have been lead to expect an appropriately ruinously difficult challenge based on “Git Gud” discourse may miss (or misunderstand) the cues to avoid it, assume that the futility of fighting the boss is not a hint to try a different approach, and instead simply conclude the game is too difficult for them.

In this case, the evolving assemblage of culture and discussion surrounding Dark Souls can give a different impression and expectation to players than what games seek to do in isolation. Noah Caldwell-Gervais (Noah Caldwell-Gervais 2022) produced an extensive video essay exploring his own encounters with exactly the same problem.  He expected not to be able to succeed when playing because of not being “the correct kind” of player with the “right kind of skills.”  However, instead he found that Dark Souls offered a surprising number of tools designed to reveal alternate paths for how players might respond to its challenges and modify their experience of play – including by managing the level of challenge they desired.

Another assemblage which formed around Dark Souls, framing how it is experienced, is that players created a “meta” by examining its systems and determining which classes were easier to play than others, what builds might be most optimal and how to maximise various kinds of enjoyment. Dark Souls was no longer simply a collection of rules or an individual play experience. Now, playing Dark Souls can be driven by the culture that surrounds it.

The discourses found within complexly-overlapping games community have a significant influence on the assemblages that game texts become part of, setting expectations for how the experience is ‘intended’ to function.  This paratextual influence is powerful enough that it can subvert design features of the games themselves.

This volume will explore the outsized influence of community discourses on how games are experienced. This book invites chapter proposals that grapple with multifaceted ways that communities develop, discuss, read, and inform games and the cultures which form around them.

We can see these kinds of tensions in situations such as where game communities declare that using particular weapons, tools or abilities are “cheap,” “cheesy” or even “cheating,” despite their deliberate inclusion by game designers, or where these same designers, who include tools for mitigating or shaping the difficulty of an experience, are assumed to have ‘caved,’ abandoning their ‘true intentions.’

Themes may include, but are not limited to, the following:

·               Conflict between ‘official’ design as visible in affordances, features, weapons and tools built into games, versus the ‘proper’ experience as defined in discourse

·               Appealing to an imagined directorial/auteurial control as a mechanism for legitimising or delegitimising styles of play

·               ‘Cheating’ and ‘Fairness’ as a community construction in single-player and multiplayer games

·               Difficulty vs accessibility discourse

·               ‘Pay to win’ design as ‘officially endorsed cheating’

·               The evolution and mutation of ‘metas’ in competitive games

·               The voices who are ‘allowed’ to be a part of games discourse, and those who are ‘not’

·               What genres of games are more likely to be policed/gatekept by their communities for what is ‘proper’ play, what games and play styles ‘count,’ and why

·               The broader role of culture in informing game(s) assemblages and how they are read/experienced

·               The role of influencers, Let’s Play-ers, guide creators and wiki editors in shaping discourse within game assemblages.

·               The way that discourses of accepted play translate through platform specific fan cultures: how does the model on Discord differ from Reddit, etc, and how do the histories and affordances of those platforms determine it?

·               How games and communities afford ethnographic studies in research and experience

·               What individual play experiences look like, and how this contrasts to communal experiences or “optimal” experiences

·               The role of ‘metas’ in both reflecting and shaping how games are understood by the communities which form around them.

·               The communities and cultures surrounding non-digital games (e.g., board games and pervasive games)

·               Communities of game design, development, and criticism

·               The creation, influence, and use of platforms (e.g., Discord, Twitch, Youtube) in game communities

·               Communities and culture in games education

·               Formation and dynamics of ‘taste’ in games communities and cultures

Proposals should include the contributor’s/author’s name, a brief biography, and an abstract of a maximum of 400 words (not counting citations). The editors will notify authors if their abstract is accepted, at which point the authors will eventually submit a chapter between 4000-6000 words in length, excluding references.

Please send proposals to gitgud.multiplay@gmail.com

Project Timeline:

·        Deadline for abstracts: March 31st 2024

·        Notices of acceptance expected early May 2024

·        Chapter submission due August 5th 2024.

·        Estimated publication mid 2025.

Bibliography:

Consalvo, Mia. 2007. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Davidson, Drew. 2011. “The Performance of Gameplay: Developing a Ludoliteracy.” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 5 (1): 1–3. https://doi.org/10.7557/23.6123.

Keogh, Brendan. 2018. A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262037631/a-play-of-bodies/.

Miyazaki, Hidetaka and From Software. 2011. “Dark Souls.” Namco Bandai Games.

Mukherjee, Souvik. 2015. Video Games and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137525055.

Noah Caldwell-Gervais, dir. 2022. I Beat the Dark Souls Trilogy and All I Made Was This Lousy Video Essay. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_KVCFxnpj4.

Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. 2004. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.