CFP: Teaching Video Games in the Humanities: New Media, New Pedagogies (Special Issue, deadline for abstracts 14th January 2025)

Posted by Dr Marta F Suarez and Dr Iris Kleinecke-Bates on 2024-10-21

Teaching with Video Games in the Humanities CFP

Timeline:

CFP - Abstract deadline: 14th January 2025
Deadline for reviews: 31st Jan 2025
Article deadline: 30th September 2025
Issue release: early 2026

CFP: Special Issue of Open Screens - Teaching Video Games in the Humanities: New Media, New Pedagogies

In recent decades, both the production and consumption of video games have experienced exponential growth and video games quickly becoming a dominant form in media and cultural production. As an activity that began with arcades and simple games, gaming has grown into an industry that Gough (2021) describes as the largest form of entertainment and cultural expression, and, as studies such as Engelstaetter and Ward (2022) indicate, ‘video game playing has … become more of a mainstream activity. Overall, more people are gaming across a broad demographic spectrum. Gamers nowadays more closely resemble the general population and are not as clustered into certain demographic groups’. Video games intersect with various fields in the humanities and beyond, creating avenues for interdisciplinary study and opening up questions around narrative evolution, storytelling, and immersive experiences that challenge traditional linear narratives, whilst also raising questions around ethics, representation, and identity.

As a result, the integration of games studies into higher education, beyond their place in computer science and game design, is becoming increasingly pressing. Teaching games and teaching with games can create avenues for students to develop critical media literacy skills, enable the exploration of interactive narrative constructions and player agency in the medium, and establish connections with other media.

This special issue seeks to invite perspectives from different humanities fields and seeks to explore the importance, challenges, and evolving strategies for teaching video games in the humanities as a context in which the dominant focus is on critical analysis, narrative structure, representation, ethics, and cultural impact. The volume will address how video games, as cultural texts, can be taught effectively within a humanities context, bring opportunities to teach other subjects through play, and highlight intersections with other modes of scholarly enquiry. By seeking an interdisciplinary dialogue on the integration of video games within traditional humanities subjects, this special issue wishes to address both the theoretical underpinnings and the practical challenges involved.

Please note that accepted proposals will show a clear engagement with academic scholarship around video games from a humanities perspective and/or scholarship around education and pedagogy within a HE context and will focus on evidenced practice, research, or theory rather than anecdotal experience in the classroom.

Areas of enquiry are:

Teaching specific video games in the context of history, cultural studies, screen studies, digital media, creative writing, or literary studies
Teaching with video games, including the use of games as virtual environments to illustrate and explore other contexts.
Teaching through video games, such as utilising games as tools within the teaching context

Potential topics might include but are not limited to:

Games as teaching, learning and assessment tools
Games and history (representation of history / history of games, etc)
Games and identity (race, gender, class…)
Games and disabilities
Game adaptations
Games as visual narratives
Games and aesthetics
Games, participation, player agency, and affect
Games and creative writing
Games and the industry
Games and ethics

Please submit an abstract of your proposed article (300 words) and a short bio (100 words) to Iris Kleinecke-Bates and Marta F. Suarez at teachingvideogames@gmail.com by 14th January 2025. Please note that Open Screens accepts research articles and audio-visual essays.

Authors will be informed of the selection within two weeks after the deadline. Full written articles (5000-8000 words) or equivalent video essays will be due at the end of September 2025 and will subsequently go through an anonymous peer review process. Video essays and other audio-visual submissions should be supported by a 800-1500 word research statement, which must describe the outcomes and application of the filmmaking research, outlining how the film makes a substantial contribution to knowledge and understanding in the field.

In addition, reviews of books, DVD releases and events within the theme of the special edition will also be welcome.

For more information about Open Screens publishing guidelines, please visit Author Guidelines (openscreensjournal.com)

The initial selection will be done by Iris Kleinecke-Bates and Marta F. Suarez as the editors for this special edition. Peer review for full articles will be organised by the editors, with the aim to have 2 anonymous reviews for each submission.

References

Benjamin Engelstatter and Michael R. Ward (2022). Video games become more mainstream.

Entertainment Computing 42.
Gough, G. (2021). Number of Gamers Worldwide 2021; Statista: Hamburg, Germany.

Guest editor(s)’ information

Iris Kleinecke-Bates is a lecturer in Film and Television Studies. She teaches and researches in television, media, film, and cultural studies. Her research specialism are in period drama, adaptation, memory and nostalgia, television studies, with a particular interest in the intersection of identity and material object reality. Iris has published on period drama, adaptation, representation of the past, memory and nostalgia, and more recently on material cultures of television. She is currently working on a monograph about post-apocalyptic realities across different media forms and an article on The Last of Us (2014 and 2020) and Horizon: Zero Dawn (2017) and Forbidden West (2022)

Marta F Suarez lectures at Manchester Metropolitan University on culture and history through film. With a PhD in Screen Studies, her research engages with topics related to speculative fiction, transmedia narratives, and the intersections of gender, race and class in contemporary screens. Among others, she has led and taught units on screenwriting, race on screen, power and culture, film language, and transmedia narratives. Alongside some work on Spanish and Argentinean cinema, she has published on The Walking Dead (2010-2022), and has work forthcoming on Diablero (2018-2020), The Expanse (2015-2022), Everything, Everywhere, All at Once (2022) and two pieces on The Witcher universe.