International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Women, video games, and modding

deadline for submissions:
December 1, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Bridget Whelan / McFarland Books

contact email:
bawhelan@gmail.com

***DEADLINE EXTENDED: ABSTRACTS DUE DEC 1, 2017***

This is a call for article-length scholarly contributions for inclusion in a proposed collection of essays (to be published by McFarland) broadly focused around the topic of women and video game “modding.”

Potential topics may include:

Romance mods, including the politics of modding race and sexuality, NPC (“non-player character”) availability, NPC appearance, and creating or extending canonical romantic scenes
Modding the body: what sort of mods are women creating and using on their own characters? Can mods express dissatisfaction with base game character creation options?
Modding communities: how have online spaces like Tumblr fostered modding communities for women? The importance of crediting modders, the policing of gamers on how to use and credit use of mods, collaborative modding communities versus “lone wolf” modders, the backlash against websites like Nexus
Essays focused on particular games, such a Dragon Age, The Sims, or Skyrim
The relationship between female modders and developers: do developers ever respond to modder creations? Is base game content ever altered to appease modder interests? Do developers ever express disagreement or lack of support for modders?
Using modding and game creation in girls’ education.
This list is far from expansive; any proposed essay addressing some aspect of female gamers and modding will be considered.

Please email a 500-word abstract to bawhelan@gmail.com by Dec 1, 2017. Completed first drafts will be expected sometime around Jun 1, 2018. Please also include a short bio with your abstract submission.

Gothic, Ghastly, Corporeal and Creaturely: Tim Burton’s Curious Bodies

deadline for submissions:
December 8, 2017

full name / name of organization:
Fran Pheasant-Kelly/University of Wolverhampton

contact email:
f.e.pheasant-kelly@wlv.ac.uk

Call for Papers

The First International Conference on Twenty-First Century Film Directors

University of Wolverhampton in collaboration with Light House Media Centre, Wolverhampton and Redeemer University College, Ontario presents

Gothic, Ghastly, Corporeal and Creaturely: Tim Burton’s Curious Bodies

Thursday 15th February 2018 at Light House Media Centre*, Wolverhampton

Keynote: Professor Adam Barkman, Redeemer University College, Ontario

Film director Tim Burton has acquired an international reputation and critical acclaim for fantasy horror films that variously encompass alternative worlds inhabited by ghosts, animated corpses, grotesque and horrible bodies, or otherwise, ‘different’ beings. So too do creaturely apparitions feature regularly in his productions. While his work often centres on animated characters, he collaborates with a number of specific star personae such as Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter, Christopher Lee, Winona Ryder, Vincent Price, Christopher Walken, Danny de Vito, Michael Keaton, and Jack Nicholson. Burton also frequently uses composer, Danny Elfman, as well as certain crew members and technical staff to work on his films. This one-day conference seeks to draw together scholarship on the theme of ‘bodies’ in Burton’s films and invites proposals accordingly. We particularly welcome contributions focusing on:

§ Collaborative bodies – stars, actors, composers, and crew members/technical staff

§ Grotesque and vile bodies

§ Gothic bodies

§ Animated bodies

§ Compromised and anomalous bodies, and ‘freak-show’ aesthetics

§ Creaturely bodies

§ Abject and corporeal beings

§ Bodies between worlds

§ Spectacular bodies

Please send a 300-word abstract along with a 100 word bio by Friday 8th December 2017 to: Fran Pheasant-Kelly, University of Wolverhampton f.e.pheasant-kelly@wlv.ac.uk . A final listing of accepted presentations will be released on 15th December 2017.

Delegate fees for Burton’s Curious Bodies are £50 and £20 for students/concessions to include lunch, refreshments, and evening wine reception and screening of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016).

* Light House Media Centre is the Black Country’s only independent cinema, housing two screens, galleries and a café bar within the iconic Victorian architecture of The Chubb Buildings.

Call for Papers – Post-cinema – VR and AR: a Postcinematic Modernity II

Film Forum – XVI Magis International Film Studies Spring School
Gorizia, Università degli studi di Udine-Italy

March 3rd-7th 2018

Deadline November 30th, 2017

Address questions and proposals to: (goriziafilmforum /at/ gmail.com ) )
​​Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR), as well as establishing new identities and expanding the perceptions of existing users and the technologies they use, also represent two cardinal points in the (re)definition of participative and political practices in current media landscape. In this sense the Postcinema section would like to explore the “community/knowledge/power” relationship and the “community/history/truth” relationship in the production and diffusion of certain “media products”, in particular the VR and AR ones. The 2018 Post Cinema section of the Magis Spring School takes into considerations proposals in the following fields:

– Literacy and socio-economic accessibility linked to VR and AR in the new media (eg, the difficult access to the interfaces of VR gaming or the rapport with the casual gaming)
– The creation of social communities linked to the collective use of products specially created for their use through VR and AR devices.
– The user’s bodily, spatial and temporal perception during the pragmatic use of VR and AR. For example, the user’s camouflage with technology and constant development of dedicated peripherals (war games guns, footrests to allow the use of the feet currently not supported, introduction of wireless devices for the viewer …) impact;
– The relationship between truth and post-cinematics products (such as documentaries or interactive films, video games, and other digital products). In these products whose story is being told? Who is telling it? For whom? Whose truth? Who circulates in the market of whom?
– The current use and the future potential of VR and AR as tools for interpreting and re-reading a social-political setting.
– The use of “politics” in digital video games and interactive products (in the form of satire, parody, narration: eg “Trump Simulator”, “Job Simulator”). The analysis of the VR development policies adopted by different communities or countries, and the investigation of the system of power that they configure or contest.

We invite you to send us proposals for papers or panels. The deadline for their submission is November, 30th 2017. Proposals should not exceed one page in length. Please make sure to attach a short CV (10 lines max). A registration fee (€ 150) will be applied. For more information, please contact us at (goriziafilmforum /at/ gmail.com)

Embodiment in Science Fiction and Fantasy Interdisciplinary Conference

deadline for submissions:
December 31, 2017

full name / name of organization:
McMaster University, Department of English and Cultural Studies

contact email:
sffembodimentconference2018@gmail.com

**Extended Deadline for Proposals: December 31, 2017**

Embodiment in Science Fiction and Fantasy Interdisciplinary Conference

May 18-19, 2018

McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Keynote Speakers

Veronica Hollinger, emerita professor, Cultural Studies Department, Trent University, science fiction scholar and co-editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies and collections including Queer Universes: Sexuality in Science Fiction (2008). Parabolas of Science Fiction (2013), and The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (2010).

Kameron Hurley, the Hugo and Locus Award-winning author of Stars Are Legion (2017), The Geek Feminist Revolution (2016), the Worldbreaker Saga, and The God’s War Trilogy.

In response to the popularity of cyberspace disembodiment of the 80s and 90s, SFF is increasingly concerned with exploring the materiality of bodies. SFF literature, film, television and video games frequently explore how experiences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and disability inform the construction of identity and influence lived experience; question what it means to be or exceed the human; and consider the agency and nature of nonhuman bodies. This conference will explore the ways in which the body is a focus in SFF, and how the experience and representation of bodies inform how we understand human, post-human, and non-human subjects, and their positionality within material and cultural settings.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers—or panels consisting of three 20-minute papers—addressing topics that include but are not limited to the following:

gender identity
sexuality
race and ethnicity
representations of disability
body modification, cyborgs, clones
post-human and non-human embodiment
technology and the body
metamorphosis and hybridity
bodily experiences of environmental crisis
bodies, space, and geography
pregnancy, birth, aging, death and dying
bodily containment (in spaceships, or exo-skeletons)
environments as bodies, sentient ecological networks
bodily manifestations of the soul or spirit

Please send inquiries and proposals of 250-500 words (including a title, your institutional affiliation, and a bio of 100 words or less) to sffembodimentconference2018@gmail.com by December 31st, 2017. We welcome proposals from researchers of all levels, including graduate students and independent scholars.

OGOM & Supernatural Cities present: The Urban Weird

deadline for submissions:
January 1, 2018

full name / name of organization:
University of Hertfordshire

contact email:
s.george@herts.ac.uk

The OGOM Project is known for its imaginative events and symposia, which have often been accompanied by a media frenzy. We were the first to invite vampires into the academy back in 2010. Our most recent endeavour, Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Shapeshifters and Feral Humans enjoyed extensive coverage globally and saw us congratulated in the THES for our ambitious 3 day programme which included actual wolves, ‘a first for a UK academy’. Our fourth conference will be an exciting collaboration with the Supernatural Cities: Narrated Geographies and Spectral Histories project at the University of Portsmouth. Supernatural Cities will enjoy its third regeneration, having previously convened in Portsmouth and Limerick.

The Open Graves, Open Minds Project unearthed depictions of the vampire and the undead in literature, art, and other media, before embracing shapeshifting creatures (most recently, the werewolf) and other supernatural beings and their worlds. It opens up questions concerning genre, gender, hybridity, cultural change, and other realms. It extends to all narratives of the fantastic, the folkloric, the fabulous, and the magical. Supernatural Cities encourages conversation between disciplines (e.g. history, cultural geography, folklore, social psychology, anthropology, sociology and literature). It explores the representation of urban heterotopias, otherness, haunting, estranging, the uncanny, enchantment, affective geographies, communal memory, and the urban fantastical.​

The city theme ties in with OGOM’s current research: Sam George’s work on the English Eerie and the urban myth of Old Stinker, the Hull werewolf; the Pied Piper’s city of Hamelin and the geography and folklore of Transylvania; Bill Hughes’s work on the emergence of the genre of paranormal romance from out of (among other forms) urban fantasy; Kaja Franck’s work on wilderness, wolves, and were-animals in the city. This event will see us make connections with the research of Supernatural Cities scholars, led by historian Karl Bell. Karl has explored the myth of Spring-Heeled-Jack, and the relationship between the fantastical imagination and the urban environment. We invite other scholars to join in the dialogue with related themes from their own research.

From its inception, the Gothic mode has been imbued with antiquity and solitude, with lonely castles and dark forests. The city, site of modernity, sociality, and rationalised living, seems to be an unlikely locus for texts of the supernatural. And yet, by the nineteenth century, Dracula had already invaded the metropolis from the Transylvanian shadows and writers such as R. L. Stevenson adapted the supernatural Gothic to urban settings. Gaskell, Dickens and Dostoyevsky, too, uncover the darker side of city life and suggest supernatural forces while discreetly maintaining a veneer of naturalism.

In twentieth-century fantastic and Gothic, perhaps owing in part to a disillusionment with modernity, all manner of spectres haunt our cities in novels, film, TV, and video games. Radcliffean Gothic saw the uncultivated wilderness and the premodern past as the fount of terror; the contemporary fantastic discovers the supernatural precisely where space has been most rationalised—the modern city. Civilisation, rooted etymologically in the Latin civitas (‘city’), is itself put into question by its subversion by the supernatural.

Supernatural cities emerge in a range of contemporary fictions from the horror of Stephen King to the dark fantasy of Clive Barker, the parallel Londons of V. E. Schwaab and China Mieville, magical neo-Victorian Londons in the Young Adult fiction of Genevieve Cogman and Samantha Shannon, and Aliette de Bodard’s fallen angels and dragons in a supernatural Paris. Zombies lurch through scenes of urban breakdown while, in TV, there is the vampire-ridden noir LA of Angel. The large metropolises are not alone in their unearthliness—see the Celtic otherworld that lies behind Manchester in Alan Garner’s Elidor. Then there are the imagined cities of high fantasy, which form a contrast to the gritty familiarity of the cities that feature in the distinct genre of urban fantasy itself or the frequently urban backgrounds of paranormal romance. Supernatural cities are haunted, too, by such urban legends as Spring Heeled-Jack and Old Stinker, the werewolf of Hull.

The conference will explore the image of the supernatural city as expressed in narrative media from a variety of epochs and cultures. It will provide an interdisciplinary forum for the development of innovative and creative research and examine the cultural significance of these themes in all their various manifestations. As with previous OGOM conferences, from which emerged books and special issue journals, there will be the opportunity for delegates’ presentations to be published.

The conference organising committee invites proposals for panels and individual papers. Possible topics and approaches may include (but are not limited to) the following:

The urban weird

The English eerie

Folk horror’s encroachment on the city

Magical cities

Alternative/parallel cities

Urban folklore/legends

Urban fantasy and genre

YA and children’s magical cities

Monsters and demons at large in the city (Dracula, Dorian Gray, Angel, Cat People, King Kong, Elephant Man, The Werewolf of London, Sweeney Todd, Jack the Ripper, Lestat, Zombie ‘R’, mummies, witches, etc.)

Psychogeography

Gothic architecture

Cities and the incursion of the wilderness

Civilisation and nature

Alternative urban histories; neo-Victorianism and steampunk

Gothic/magical fashion, music, and subcultures of the city

Supernatural city creatures (demons, gargoyles, ghosts, vampires, angels)

Animal hauntings and city spectres

Decay, entropy, and economic collapse

Supernatural cityscapes in video games

Gotham City/comic books/dark knights

The disenchantments of modernity and re-enchantment of the city

Dark spaces/borders/liminal landscapes

Wild, uncanny areas of the city

Drowned/submerged cities

Keynote Speakers:

Prof. Owen Davies, historian of witchcraft and magic, on ‘Supernatural beliefs in nineteenth-century asylums’

Dr Sam George, Convenor of the Open Graves, Open Minds Project, ‘City Demons: urban manifestations of the Pied Piper and Nosferatu Myths’

Adam Scovell, BFI critic and Folk Horror film specialist, on ‘the Urban Wyrd’

Dr Karl Bell, Convenor of Supernatural Cities, on ‘the fantastical imagination and the urban environment’ (title tbc)

Delegates will engage with our Gruesome Gazetteer of Gothic Hertfordshire and accompany us on a tour of Supernatural St Albans and its environs.

Abstracts (200-300 words) for twenty-minute papers or proposals for two-hour panels, together with a 100-word biography, should be submitted by 1 January 2018 as an email attachment in MS Word document format to all of the following:

Dr Sam George, s.george@herts.ac.uk;

Dr Bill Hughes, bill.enlightenment@gmail.com;

Dr Kaja Franck, k.a.franck@gmail.com;

Dr Karl Bell, karl.bell@port.ac.uk

Please use your surname as the document title. The abstract should be in the following format: (1) Title (2) Presenter(s) (3) Institutional affiliation (4) Email (5) Abstract. Panel proposals should include (1) Title of the panel (2) Name and contact information of the chair (3) Abstracts of the presenters.

Presenters will be notified of acceptance by 30 January 2018. Visit us at OpenGravesOpenMinds.com and follow us on Twitter @OGOMProject

Call for Papers
Fan Studies Network North America is proud to announce its first conference:

Fandom—Past, Present, Future

DePaul University, Chicago, IL
October 25-27, 2018

Building on the success of the annual Fan Studies Network conference in the United Kingdom, and with the support of our international colleagues, we invite submissions for a North American fan studies conference. We welcome all topics and themes related to media, sports, music, and celebrity fandoms, discussions of affirmative and/or transformative fans and their contributions, as well as meta-questions such as ethics and methodology. We encourage submissions on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and other aspects of power and identity in fan works and fan communities.

The conference will feature both panels and roundtables, and we invite scholars at different stages in their careers, as well as fan-scholars, to submit:

Pre-constituted roundtables (500 word roundtable proposal)
Pre-constituted panels (250 word panel proposal; names and 500 word paper abstracts, 3-4 participants)
Individual papers (500 word abstract)
Work-in-progress speedgeeking proposals (150 words; speedgeeking involves presenting a work-in-progress to a several groups of people for 5 min each, in order to receive helpful feedback)
Please send any inquiries and/or abstracts to fsnna.conference@gmail.com by 15th February 2018. Multiple submissions are welcome, but we strive to accept as many participants as possible.

Keynote Speaker: Abigail De Kosnik (Associate Professor at UC Berkeley Center for New Media and Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies)

Conference organizers: Paul Booth, Kristina Busse, Bertha Chin, Lori Morimoto, Louisa Stein, and Lesley Willard

For more information, please click here.

CFP deadline 30th November 2017

Singularities: Where the old rules no longer apply

A one-day symposium on Sci-Fi fan events in critical event, tourism and leisure studies

Monday 11th June 2018: Cloth Hall, Leeds Beckett University (Leeds, UK)

Critical studies of SF Fandom are well-established, from early engagement by sociologists interested in why so many people attended SF conventions, to the seminal work of Tulloch and Jenkins on fans of Star Trek and Doctor Who. At the same time, scholars in leisure studies have been interested in the motivations, actions, identities and spaces of sports fans. This interest in fandom in leisure studies is now driven by a number of emerging trends: tourism studies scholars are increasingly interested in notions of fan mobilities and fan pilgrimage; critical events studies scholars are beginning to bringing their critique of events management to bear on corporate fan events, exploring the tensions between the commoditization of space and the articulation of identity in purpose built heterotopic environments; and some sociologists of leisure are arguing that fandom is challenged by the enormous changes to society brought about by post-industrialization and globalization. Whilst we are happy to support presentations that use PowerPoint, or similar, we wish to strongly encourage presentations that are more interactive and engage their audience in discussion and conversation, and not simply the sharing of research findings.

This symposium is an attempt to bring together those interested in events, tourism and leisure as ways and spaces in which to make sense of SF Fandom. The symposium will be linked to a special issue of Journal of Fandom Studies, edited by the symposium organisers – and the authors of the best papers will be encouraged to submit to this issue. The symposium will take place on the 11th June 2018. The symposium, and the special issue, will have the same remit. The symposium and the special issue are looking for papers on any research pertaining to SF Fandom that draws on concepts from leisure studies, from tourism studies, and from critical events studies. We are especially interested in the following topics:

· SF Fan Tourism Pilgrimages
· SF Fan Events and Commoditization
· SF Fandom and Digital Leisure
· SF Fan Events as Tourism
· SF Fandom as Critical Event
· SF Fandom and Leisure Theory
· SF Fandom Mobilities
· SF Fan Events and Memory Studies
· Critical Autoethnographic Reflections on Fandom Events

As this symposium is on Sci-Fi fan events you are most welcome to come to the symposium in cosplay/crossplay. There will be a prises associated with the best cosplay/crossplay costume at the symposium.

Anyone interested in Sci-Fi Fandom and Fan Events is most welcome to attend. The symposium will take place in the Cloth Hall, part of Leeds Beckett University (LS1 2HD), on Monday 11th June 2018. An early bird rate of £50, and £35 for students/unwaged, will be applied to those that register early. The full rate, and date from which it comes into effect, will be announced when details of the registration process are released in February 2018.

Abstracts should be no more than 300 words, and must be submitted by 30th November 2017 (50 years, to the day, since the first Valérian and Laureline story appeared in the French magazine Pilote). Please send your abstracts to the symposium organisers:

Ian Lamond, I.Lamond@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
Karl Spracklen, K.Spracklen@leedsbeckett.ac.uk​

Comics and the Midwest

deadline for submissions:
December 15, 2017

full name / name of organization:
SSML: Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature

contact email:
swensonjc@hiram.edu

Seeking papers for a panel on “Comics and the Midwest” at the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature annual symposium, May 17-19, 2018 at the Kellogg Conference Center, East Lansing, MI.

While Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster may have come up with Superman in Cleveland, Ohio, contemporary superhero-themed comics have primarily been set in costal cities, real or imagined. At the same time, many daily comic strips including Crankshaft, Calvin and Hobbes, and Peanuts have been set in a sometimes undetermined but definitively Midwestern landscape. What place does the Midwest have in comics? Is it only a place for origin stories or flyover country for superheroes doing battle in exotic locales? Or is it the idyllic small-town landscape shown in daily newspaper comic strips? What does the way the Midwest is drawn in comics and comic books say about the way America sees the Midwest?

Possible paper topics include:

Cleveland’s Harvey Pekar and American Splendor
The midwestern aesthetic of Tom Batiuk’s Funky Winkerbean and Crankshaft
Marvel Comic’s Great Lake Avengers dark-comic superhero team based in Milwaukee.
The midwestern landscapes of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes or Charles Schultz’s Peanuts
Superman and his Smallville, Kansas roots

Please send paper proposals of no more than 350 words to Jeff Swenson at swensonjc@hiram.edu by December 15, 2017.

CFP: The Celtic Obsession in Modern Fantasy

You are invited to submit a paper for an edited volume tentatively titled The Celtic Obsession in Modern Fantasy Literature to be submitted to Palgrave Macmillan.

Scholarship on Celtic-inspired fantasy literature has mostly focused on source-studies of pre-1980s texts (e.g. Sullivan, 1989; White, 1998). Dimitra Fimi’s recent Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy: Idealization, Identity, Ideology (2017), has widened the discussion by engaging with the Celticism vs. Celtoscepticism debate, focusing on constructions of “Celtic” identities in children’s and young adult fantasies from the 1960s to the 2010s.

This edited collection will take the debate further by focusing on post-1980s Celtic-inspired fantasy for adults. The “Celticity” of each fantasy text can be interpreted broadly to include:

Creatively re-using heroes and mythological motifs from medieval Celtic texts, such as the Welsh Mabinogion, the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge, etc.
Engaging with perceptions of the “Celts” in classical sources such as Strabo, Herodotus, and Polybius, Tacitus and Caesar.
Imaginatively utilizing insights from Iron Age archaeology, often dubbed “Celtic”
Adapting folklore traditions from Celtic-speaking countries
Evoking a looser notion of “Celtic”-like society, religion, folklore, etc., including in para-textual or marketing material
We acknowledge that the dividing line between children and adult fiction is not always clear. Papers can focus on the work of fantasists such as:

Kate Forsyth
David Gemmell
John Gwynne
Katharine Kerr
Stephen R. Lawhead
Ilka Tampke
Tad Willaims
(This is not an exhaustive list)

Although heroic or epic fantasy may seem to fit better the scope of this collection, we are open to considering proposals on other sub-genres of fantasy literature, such as urban, magical realism and SF/fantasy crossovers.

Please submit a title and abstract to the editors by: 15th December 2017
Essay due: 1st June 2018

Editors:

Dr. Dimitra Fimi, Cardiff Metropolitan University (dfimi@cardiffmet.ac.uk)
Dr. Alistair J.P. Sims (booksonthehill@gmail.com)

Game-based Learning Conference – City University of New York (1/22-23/18) – proposals due 11/1/17

deadline for submissions:
November 1, 2017

full name / name of organization:
CUNY Games Network

contact email:
contactcunygames@gmail.com

CUNY GAMES CONFERENCE: THE INTERACTIVE COURSE

Announcement

The CUNY Games Network of the City University of New York is excited to announce the fourth CUNY Games Conference to be held on Monday January 22nd to Tuesday January 23rd, 2018 at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

The CUNY Games Conference is a two-day conference to promote and discuss game-based pedagogies in higher education. Day 1 of the conference focuses on presentations; the second day takes place at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and consists of low-key game design and game play.

Game-based pedagogy uses some of the best aspects of collaborative, active, and inquiry-based learning. With the growing maturity of game-based learning in higher education, the focus has shifted from whether games are appropriate for higher education to how games can be best used to bring real pedagogical benefits and encourage student-centered education. The CUNY Games Network is dedicated to encouraging research, scholarship and teaching in this developing field. We aim to bring together all stakeholders: faculty, researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and game designers. Both CUNY and non-CUNY participation is welcome.

Our Call for Proposals (cunygames.org) is now open! Proposals are due on November 1st, 2017. Please forward far and wide!

Questions? Get in touch at contactcunygames@gmail.com! Visit our conference website as www.cunygames.org.

Call for Proposals

The conference theme is composed of two broad goals:

To invent, explore, and learn to effectively use Game Based Learning (GBL) to address higher educational goals.
To advance understanding of how people learn and how to better foster learning in the context of the new kinds of learning experiences that GBL makes possible.

To meet these goals, proposals should aspire to address the following three areas:

Innovation: In what way did you invent a new type of GBL or improving existing GBL for higher education? What new applications of GBL were developed to foster and assess learning? In what new ways was GBL integrated with other teaching methods to foster and assess learning?
Advancing understanding of how people learn in GBL learning environments in higher education: How does your work enhance understanding of how students learn in GBL environments that offer new opportunities for learning? How does your work lead to a better understanding of how to foster and assess learning in GBL environments?
Promoting broad use and transferability of GBL: How does your work inform the design and use of GBL across disciplines, populations, and learning environments in higher education?

All proposals must have a clear and explicit relevance to higher education.

The conference will feature the following session formats:

Arcade game demos

We encourage everyone to consider bringing something to showcase at our arcade this year, which will be given its own time and space separate from the presentations. The arcade area will feature posters and games (finished or in progress), game casting videos and more. We also encourage undergraduate researchers to show their presentations here.

30-minute interactive presentations: Reserved for interactive presentations only, such as workshops and game demonstrations/play. Interactive components should comprise at least 15 minutes of the presentation.

10-minute short presentations: Short talks that briefly discuss theories, research, practice, and/or individual games. 10-minute shorts may be combined into a panel – see below.

Presenters are encouraged to apply for both the arcade and the 10- or 30-minute presentation.

Your proposal must include: session format, contact information for the corresponding presenter, name, affiliation and email address for each additional presenter, title, 250-word abstract, a paragraph on connections to higher education, keywords selected from a list on the submission form, and special requests (e.g., scheduling or equipment needs). Please proofread and edit your proposal before submission. Accepted proposals will be published in our conference proceedings.

Panel Proposals: Panels of three or more speakers run 60 minutes and should include a question-and-answer period. Please submit just one proposal for your whole panel.