[Air-l] CFP: World Building: Space and Community: UF Games and Digital Media Conference

[Zach Whalen]

(my apologies for any cross-posting)

CFP: World Building: Space and Community: UF Games and Digital Media Conference

The University of Florida's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and
the Department of English are pleased to announce the 2007 UF
Conference on Games and Digital Media: "World Building: Space and
Community," which will be held in Gainesville, Florida, on March 1-2,
2007, in conjunction with the annual Conference on Comics, which will
be March 3-4.

This third annual conference on games will focus on the construction
of digital worlds, with particular emphasis on the various
spatialities of games and other digital media.  We are especially
interested in spatiality as it is employed in the construction of
virtual worlds both in terms of the graphemic representation of game
objects, as well as the dual role these spaces perform as both
narrative structures and sites of play.  We are also interested in
spatiality as it relates to the development of social space (including
online spaces like World of Warcraft and gaming message boards) as
well as the relationship of real-world locations like arcades and game
cafes to the play experience.

Confirmed speakers include Scott Jennings, senior designer for NCSoft
and writer for The Rantings of Lum The Mad and Broken Toys, ARG
designer Dave Szulborski, and Nick Montfort, author of Twisty Little
Passages and co-editor of the New Media Reader.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

·      Classic roleplaying games, and their construction of narrative
and social spaces.

·      Narrative eccentricity of gaming worlds (Extra lives,
continues, linear level design, etc)

·      Single-screen games (Pong, Tetris, Popcap's web-based games, etc)

·      The spaces beyond the screen (Pits, the sky, halls of mirrors, etc)

·      Constraints of gaming (Forced scrolling, immovable objects,
level timers, etc)

·      Play as narrative advancement (The restriction of game plots to
plots that involve frequent breaks for violence)

·      Human opponents, monsters, and bots

·      Hints and Advice (Informal social networks and professional help)

·      Playing together (MMOG clans, hanging out in the basement, and
family gaming)

·      Games as performance (DDR, party games, and speedruns)

·      Alternative reality games (As social spaces and as worlds
"layered" on the real world)

·      Artificial socities and virtual pets (The Sims, Civilization,
and Tamagochi)

·      Spaces of play (Arcades and gaming cafes)

·      Representations of three-dimensional spaces on the screen (Old
side-scrollers, the fake-3D of Doom, and "true" 3D gaming)

·      The many failures of virtual reality

·      Stories in/about gaming (Roleplaying stories, official fiction,
historical reenactment)

·      Competitiveness in gaming (High score lists, tournaments, and
professional gaming)

·      Games on television (Captain Power, the Super Mario Super Show, and G4)

·      Digital reworkings (Photoshopping, machinima, and fanvids)

·      Gaming and "geek" culture (Penny Arcade, gaming conventions,
the legacy of E3)

·      Interfaces and the mediation of mediality

We also encourage submissions that cross over with the Comics
conference, on the topic of "World Building: Seriality and History,"
particularly those that consider the role of time and space across
multiple media. We will also consider two-part submissions on related
topics to be presented across the two conferences, and other proposals
that push the formal constraints of a conference presentation.

Abstract submissions should be approximately 250-500 words in length.
Presentations will be 15 minutes with 5 minutes of question and answer.
The deadline for abstract submissions is January 1st, 2007. Abstracts
should be submitted via the conference website at
http://www.english.ufl.edu/worlds . Please direct all questions to
sandifer at english.ufl.edu.