[Air-L] CfP: “Critical Game Design” proposed special issue of Design Issues

[Malazita, James Wilson]

Hi Everyone,

We (Jim Malazita and Elizabeth LaPensée) invite abstracts for a proposed special issue of Design Issues, titled “Critical Game Design.” Please let us know if you have any questions, and we’re looking forward to reading abstracts!

"Critical Game Design" Special Issue Description:

Despite critical work by foundational games scholar-designers such as Tracy Fullerton, Mary Flanagan, and Katherine Isbister, the academic field of games has largely developed along two separate axes: game production and games criticism. This split produces tensions for game scholars, who, despite often self-describing as “interdisciplinary,” are still bound by the epistemic, political, and institutional boundaries of the academy. Game scholars must produce scholarship in forms that are knowable and legitimizeable by their institutions. Researchers in game production face challenges when articulating the impact of colonial, race-based, and gendered legacies of their “purely technical” field. Conversely, researchers in games criticism risk being labeled as “selling out” when attempting to practice scholarly and political critique through game production. Tenure and job search committees, already concerned with the disciplinary and epistemic “fit” of games candidates, are likely to discount production work by scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and critical work by scholars in the computational sciences and development. Game scholars have thus been required to internalize knowledge practices about how research is conducted, what topics are considered “in bounds,” and what questions and criticisms are permitted. Though “design methods” have been posited as a way to muddle through these tensions, they are often done so in ways that reinforce the modularized, consilience model of game scholarship, or without engaging with the intellectual and political tensions and criticisms that design research itself faces.

This proposed special issue seeks to address the gap in the intersection of knowledge production across games criticism and design research. We're especially interested in providing a venue for games scholars engaging with design research and practice as a form of critical knowledge-making, as well as for broader conversations about the roles that different practiced and embodied research knowledges can have in the Game Studies community. We expect that essays will engage with the political and epistemological dimensions of design research, including how systems of power legitimize certain ways of knowing over others, the challenges of integrating critique and material practice, and the potential for games + design to highlight feminist, Indigenous, and raced knowledges that have been marginalized in both game studies and in design research.

Examples of topics of interest to this issue include, but are not limited to:

  *   Connecting Game Studies with game design
  *   Game design as knowledge practice
  *   Feminist, Indigenous, critical race, and disability interventions in game design
  *   Intersections of design research and game design
  *   Materiality, platforms, and game design
  *   Game design in/as academic institutions
  *   Dismantling disciplinary boundary work between design and critique
  *   Politics with and through game production
  *   Theorizing game design
  *   Institutionalization of critical game design
  *   Game Design and Game Studies in the higher-ed classroom

Articles will have a maximum length of 5000 words (not including citations), formatted in Chicago Manual Style. Interested Authors should send an abstract of 300 words, alongside a short author bio and 2 page CV, to the guest editors (malazj at rpi.edu and odamino at msu.edu) by December 4, 2020.

Jim Malazita, Assistant Professor, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Elizabeth LaPensée, Assistant Professor, Michigan State University



Jim Malazita
malazj at rpi.edu
Assistant Professor
Science & Technology Studies
Games & Simulation Arts & Sciences
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute