[Air-L] CFP: Digital Studies Special Issue - ARGs in the Real World

[Gerald Voorhees]

Apologies for cross-posting, but please feel free to distribute.


This is a call for papers on Alternate Reality Games and the real world, by
the journal *Digital Studies / Le champ numérique*.

*Digital Studies / Le champ numérique* (ISSN 1918-3666) is a refereed
academic journal serving as a formal arena for scholarly activity and as an
academic resource for researchers in the digital humanities. DS/CN is
published by the Société canadienne des humanités numériques
(CSDH/SCHN)<http://www.csdh-schn.org/>,
a partner in the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations
(ADHO)<http://www.digitalhumanities.org/>.
DS/CN was founded for CSDH/SCHN at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab,
University of Victoria, in 2008 by Ray Siemens and Christian Vandendorpe.

It is the nature of ARGs that they place players in real world settings,
working to find clues or solves puzzles. But the fictional scenarios
envisioned for ARGs are not easy to contain, and the boundary between
fictional and real spaces is constantly in tension.

How, then, are we to reconcile these two realms while still maintaining a
fictional scenario for players to engage in and with? What are the ethical
implications of ARGs in the real world? Furthermore, what role does
censorship and safety play in the designing and implementing of these
games?

We invite submissions of papers interrogating these issues, or any other
similar issue pertaining to ARGs and their existence within public and
private spaces.

Interested authors should contact the journal directly (
http://www.digitalstudies.org) or email Kent Aardse at kaardse at uwaterloo.ca.