International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts

Conference on Narrative Games

deadline for submissions:
February 22, 2019

full name / name of organization:
Stefan Hall / High Point University

contact email:
shall@highpoint.edu

Conference on Narrative Games

Keynote Speaker: Rachel Noel Williams (Narrative Designer at Obsidian Entertainment, Lead Narrative Designer at Telltale Games, and Narrative Writer at Riot Games)

Over the history of game design, a fundamental consideration for creators is the inclusion of narrative. Some might consider the introduction of narrative in game design as radical as the introduction of sound into film. Not all games require, or even benefit from, a narrative. For those games that involve narrative – from merely situating a player to deeply involving the player in the creation of a narrative experience – this inclusion can influence the games in a multitude of ways. Through the interrelation of interactivity principles, game mechanics, and narrative elements, games can tell stories in a way no other medium can. The success of recent games such as Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead, Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn, and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us delivered narratively immersive experiences for their players. Long-running franchises from Zork to King’s Quest to The Legend of Zelda have narratives that not only span multiple games but also other media such as novels, comic books, and televisual productions.

To celebrate all the ways that games incorporate, create, and advance narrative, the Game & Interactive Media Design Program at High Point University (High Point, NC) is hosting a conference on narrative games. Soliciting a wide variety of perspectives on all types of narrative games – not just video games but tabletop games, board games, card games, wargaming, and more – this conference aims to both interrogate and celebrate the interplay of games and narrative.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Balancing player agency within a narrative-driven game
Franchise reboots and the impact on narrative history (such as Gears of War IV (2016) or God of War (2018))
Player Reception
Players’ interpretation co-construction of interactive narratives
Physical and cognitive aspects of narrative interactivity
Game worlds and cultures
Game narratives in larger society
Casual games, interactive text-based narratives, exploration and walking simulators, and other narrative-driven games outside of mainstream deployment/reception
Story-telling through environment and asset design
Transmedia storytelling, particularly engagement with game narrative across multiple media platforms (e.g. The Walking Dead as part of a large franchise)
Intersectional discussions of representation of characters and cultures
Encouraging values through narrative design
Abstracts should range from 250-500 words and include a sample bibliography.

Abstracts should be directed to any of the four members of the conference committee:

Dr. Stefan Hall – shall@highpoint.edu

Dr. Kris Bell – kbell@highpoint.edu

Dr. Kelly Tran – ktran@highpoint.edu

Mr. Brian Heagney – bheagney@highpoint.edu

Please indicate “Narrative Game Conference 2019” in the email header.

Conference presentations should be 20 minutes in length. Please note any AV needs in your abstract submission.

Deadline for submissions: Friday, February 22nd

Acceptance notifications: Friday, March 1st

Conference: Friday-Sunday, April 12-14th

Registration fee: $40 for faculty, $20 for students (payable on site)

The Game & Interactive Media Design program is housed within the Nido R. Qubein School of Communication at High Point University (HPU). The program was named a Top 50 Game Design program in 2017 by the Princeton Review. HPU is located in High Point, NC, which is part of the Piedmont Triad including Greensboro and Winston-Salem. High Point is a short ride from the Piedmont Triad International airport (GSO) in Greensboro, the city is directly serviced by Amtrak, and is easily accessible from I-40 by car. The program also benefits from its close proximity to the Research Triangle which houses major development studios including Epic Games, Red Storm Entertainment, and Insomniac East.

Gothic Feminism 3: Technology, Women and Gothic-Horror On-Screen

deadline for submissions: February 15, 2019

full name / name of organization: Dr Tamar Jeffers McDonald, University of Kent

contact email: t.jeffers-mcdonald@kent.ac.uk

Gothic Feminism presents:

Technology, Women, and Gothic-Horror On-Screen 

2 – 3 May 2019

University of Kent

Keynote speaker: Dr Lisa Purse (University of Reading)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Gothic and technology appear, on the surface, to evoke contradictory connotations. As David Punter and Glennis Byron highlight, the Gothic came to be a term associated with the “ornate and convoluted”, “excess and exaggeration, the product of the wild and the uncivilized, a world that constantly tended to overflow cultural boundaries” (Punter and Byron, 2004, 7). Technology, on the other hand, is a term often linked to science, innovation and progressive invention. If the Industrial Revolution is emblematic of what one imagines a technological revolution to be, then technology becomes synonymous with the associations defining 18th Century culture, described by Terry Castle as “the period as an age of reason and enlightenment – the aggressively rationalist imperatives of the epoch” (Castle, 1995, 8).

Yet technology and the Gothic have been linked and have interacted since the latter’s beginnings in fiction. From the earliest reception of the original novels that give our Gothic films their name, fans and critics alike referred to the “machinery” of the narratives, implying that that the mechanisms that made them go were audible. Clara Reeve, who wrote The Old English Baron – itself is a tad creaky – commented on The Castle of Otranto that “the machinery is so violent, that it destroys the effect it is intended to excite” (Reeve, 2008, 3). And Horace Walpole, himself, made reference to the story’s “engine” (Walpole, 2014, 6).  The Gothic can thus be conceptualised as metaphorically mechanical, a link explored within a different context by Jack Halberstam who writes that “Gothic fiction is a technology of subjectivity … designed to produce fear and desire within the reader” (Halberstam, 1995, 2).

Technology and the Gothic have also intersected in more literal terms, as with the horror created by the intersection of the two in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). On the one hand, the novel stands as a canonical Gothic text, and Ellen Moers argues that the story can be defined as the Female Gothic, a term commonly associated with the women-in-peril narratives which later saw the influence of Gothic literature translated onto the cinema screen in Hollywood during the 1940s. On the other hand, the tale of an unnatural and scientific birth is credited with establishing the generic tropes of science fiction, a mode of storytelling which is indebted to technology and acknowledges “contemporary scientific knowledge and the scientific method”, as Barry Keith Grant suggests. He also continues: “Science fiction, quite unlike fantasy and horror, works to entertain alternative possibilities” (Grant, 2004, 17). However, Fred Botting notes that the combining of science fiction and Gothic – two “generic monsters” – reveals a “a long and interwoven association” whereby both genres “give form to a sense of otherness, a strangeness that is difficult to locate” (Botting, 2008, 131).

Our conference aims to explore this relationship between technology and the Gothic by focussing upon its intersection as depicted on screen within visual media, with a specific focus on how such concerns impact on gender representations and, in particular, women. This connection may be explored figuratively: the “machinery” identified in Gothic fiction can also be extended to the filmic Gothics which centre upon the Gothic heroine. The Hollywood 1940s Gothics possess noticeably excessive convolutions of plot, as with Sleep, My Love (1948), and one could argue this trend has continued in contemporary returns to the Old Dark House and horror with films like Crimson Peak(2015). Technology may also be physically present within these Gothic-horror films. If the “machinery is so violent” in Crimson Peak’s narrative, then this is additionally foregrounded within the diegesis: Thomas Sharpe’s engine for extracting the red clay from the ground stands as both a metaphor for the genre’s mechanical plot – drawing on familiar tropes which unearth deadly secrets – as well as functioning as a visual spectacle around which the climax of the film shall take place.

Actual mechanical or technological inventions which impact upon the story may be wide-ranging: the railway, cars, telephones, recording devices, electric light and gaslight are just some examples of technologies integrated into the narratives of Gothic films, often with the intention of contributing to the imperilment and oppression of the central heroine. Technology can also do this by evoking the uncanny, itself a phenomenon which forms “the background and indeed the modus operandi of much Gothic fiction” (Punter and Byron, 2004, 286). Tom Gunning demonstrates this when he recounts several versions in early cinema of a woman-in-jeopardy story, Heard Over the Phone, which could almost be Gothic in that the woman is in her own home and menaced there by a male assailant. Drawing on Freud’s musings upon the ambivalent nature of technology, Gunning highlights the ambiguous – and uncanny – position of the telephone: it is a device which brings the absent near through sound, but actually this serves only to underline the actual distances involved. Gothic-type narratives, gender, and technology merge in these early films to reveal “the darker aspects of the dream world of instant communication and the annihilation of space and time” (Gunning, 1991, 188). 

More recent Gothic and Gothic-horror films may update these technologies to include computers, the Internet and mobile phones. Technology also includes film and the moving image itself: this conference will explore how filmic technologies mediate and emphasise the connection between technology, the Gothic, and gender, including through the use of visual effects. Film is a particularly apt medium through which to contemplate these ideas as cinema’s ontology embodies both technology’s scientific roots and the Gothic’s appeal to excess and the supernatural. As Murray Leeder notes: “With its ability to record and replay reality and its presentation of images that resemble the world but as intangible half-presences, cinema has been described as a haunted or ghostly medium from early on” (Leeder, 2015, 3).

These ideas may also be explored by expanding upon the original notion of Moer’s Female Gothic: if the literary Female Gothic is defined by female writers working in this mode, then this conference would also like to explore how female filmmakers have made use of Gothic-horror conventions. It is significant to note that the most iconic examples of Gothic films focusing on stories about the victimisation of women, particularly in the 1940s, were directed by men. By thinking about the technology behind the screen, this event will also consider what influence women filmmakers have had upon this tradition, including within present day, and what further reflections may be offered between this relationship of the Gothic to gender and technology.

With this third annual Gothic Feminism conference, we invite scholars to respond to the theme of technology in the woman-in-jeopardy strand of the Gothic and Gothic-horror film or television.

Topics can include but are not limited to:

– the tension between Gothic and technology as the supernatural, fantastic and paranoia versus the rational, reason and logic. How do these elements intersect with the representation of gender in film and television?

– the traditions of the Gothic heroine on-screen and her interaction with technology. Does technology help the female character or is it another agent of terror used against her?

– the technology behind the screen. How have female filmmakers used the genres of Gothic-horror to express themselves?

– the technology of the screen. How has the technology of cinema, including visual effects, been used, and how do these aspects interact with the representation of the central female protagonist/s?

Please submit proposals of 500 words, along with a short biographical note (250 words) to gothicfeminism2016@gmail.com by Friday 15th February 2019.

We welcome 20-minute conference papers as well as submissions for creative work or practice-as-research including, but not limited to, short films and video essays.  

Conference organisers: Frances A. Kamm and Tamar Jeffers McDonald

This conference is the third annual event from the Gothic Feminism project, working with the Melodrama Research Group in the Centre of Film and Media Research at the University of Kent. Gothic Feminism explores the representation of the Gothic heroine on-screen in her various incarnations. 

Glitches and Ghosts – An Interdisciplinary Conference – 17th April

deadline for submissions: February 17, 2019full name / name of organization: Lancaster Universitycontact email: k.dodd@lancaster.ac.uk

Glitches are moments of disruption; they represent the exposure of technical process, moving away from the binaries of input and output to consider what comes in-between. The growing ubiquity of interconnected systems prompts a desire to understand such intangible networks around the user, an attempt to try and engage with these digital phenomena as alternate forms of ‘presence’ that cannot help but recourse to anthropocentric terms – virus, cloud, render ghost. The frequent ethereality of such language attempts to visualise, embody, and comprehend the profusion of technical systems that we share the atmosphere with, their very terming gesturing to their spectral protrusion into, ostensibly, ‘our’ reality. The eruption of pixels, voxels, and glitches haunts our peripheral vision, a deceptive representation of a far more intangible sphere.

‘Glitches and Ghosts’ seeks to diagnose and analyse contemporary cultural fascinations with the emergence of these digital artefacts, and how their spectral presence has come to define our current technological moment. This symposium aims to bring together researchers who are enticed by the prospect of re-conceptualising definitions of digital-based ontologies as a paradigm to engage with an era of technophobic anxieties and technophilic domination.

We are delighted to announce Dr. Will Slocombe as our keynote. Will’s research ranges between various aspects of twentieth and twenty-first century literature, focusing primarily on Science Fiction (particularly representations of Artificial Intelligence), Postmodernism, and metafictions of experimental literature. His upcoming book Emergent Patterns: Artificial Intelligence and the Structural Imagination is due out in 2019.

We welcome abstracts for 20 minute papers which engage with the confluence of glitches and ghosts within any medium or form. Suggested topics include:

• Digital art – glitch aesthetics, pixels, voxels, drone shadows, distortion etc. 
• Détournement and system subversion – e.g. hacker ‘heroes’ and neoliberal dissent.
• Technophobia – network alienation and technological anxieties. 
• Glitch and/or ghosts in music – synthwave, sampling, remixes, etc.
• Cloud spectrality, unseen network presences and how we visualise them. 
• Ghosts in the machine, electronic voice phenomenon, white noise etc. 
• Render ghosts, digital advertising and the disruption of imagined ontologies. 
• Doppelgangers, sample image databases and the ‘ownership’ of personal data. 
• Unshackled virtual consciousness, e.g. A.I. and the breaking of constraints.
• Disruption of the virtual – glitches, bugs, cheats and other subversions. 
• Digital spectres – eternal or lingering existence within the network. 
• Viral anxieties and data transmission; conceptualisations of network ‘presence’. 
• Secular digitalities, virtual ‘gods’ or spirits and ontological transcendence.
• Permanence and/or ephemerality of data, system collapse and user anxiety.
• Creative practice and the deployment of glitches and/or ghosts within media. 
• Remixed ontologies, disruption of identity boundaries and bricolage forms. 
• Omnipresent networks, ‘invasive’ devices (i.e. Alexa) and disconnection.
• Machine learning and emergent behaviour from algorithmic structures.

Please submit a 300 word abstract to glitchconference@gmail.com with a 50 word bio-note by 17th February 
#glitchesandghosts #glitchconference @GlitchGhosts

Call for Papers

An edited volume on

CONTEMPORARY INDIGENOUS POPULAR CULTURE ACROSS THE GLOBE

Editors: Svetlana Seibel and Kati Dlaske

Indigenous Popular Culture is currently one of the fastest-growing fields of contemporary cultural production in the United States and Canada, but also other regions across the globe. Indigenous artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and entrepreneurs of all walks of life proliferate increasingly on the contemporary popular cultural landscape in all its various incarnations, from popular fiction to animation to the fashion world. Diverse Indigenous practitioners of the popular throughout the world not only intervene powerfully into the landscape of popular culture and representation—a cultural field which is notorious for its various appropriations and misrepresentations of Indigenous people and cultures—but also draw attention to the pressing social and political challenges which Indigenous communities are facing today. With its ever expanding scope, Indigenous popular culture harnesses the vibrant and mutable energies of popular culture, fan culture, and geek culture in order to not only indigenize the cultural field of the popular, but also to advance Indigenous cultural archives in a multiplicity of forms. Thus, Indigenous popular culture is not only a field of a dynamic creative expression, but often also in one way or another stands in dialogue with contemporary Indigenous activist groups and causes working towards the goal of decolonization and Indigenous resurgence.

The proposed volume seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners of Indigenous popular culture in order to illustrate the cultural vibrancy, complexity, and importance of this flourishing field. We therefore invite contributions from academics as well as artists, entrepreneurs, event organizers, cos players etc. Contributions may focus on any aspect of Indigenous popular culture in any of the geographic areas throughout the globe.

Academic articles should be 6000-8000 words in length. Contributions by practitioners of Indigenous popular culture can be of artistic/creative/analytical/(self)reflexive nature and allow for wider variation in scope, i.e. could be as short as one page (text, comic strip, image, etc.). Please send an abstract of 300-500 words for an academic article, a short description up to 500 words for other kinds of contribution, plus a short biography to indigenouspopculture@gmail.com by December 31, 2018. The completed first draft of the articles/contributions will be due on March 1, 2019. The academic papers will go through a peer review process, the volume will be published prospectively in 2021 with Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Please click here for more information.

Reading Reality through Science Fiction

deadline for submissions:
June 1, 2019

full name / name of organization:
University Stefan cel Mare of Suceava, 13 University Street, 720229 Suceava, Romania

contact email:
onoriucolacel@litere.usv.ro

Reading Reality through Science Fiction

The academic journal Messages, Sages and Ages (http://www.msa.usv.ro/), based at the English Department, University of Suceava, Romania, invites contributions for an issue on “science fiction as reality-check”; the theme issue is guest edited by Roberto Paura (University of Perugia, Italy).

As speculative fiction, science fiction (SF) in literature and film has proved able to lay bare the contradictions of modernity’s techno-utopian projects far ahead of its time, prompting readers to reflect on the relationship between humankind and technological civilization. Over seventy years ago, in his robot stories Isaac Asimov anticipated today’s debate on the relationship between automation and technological unemployment. In the Cold War years, post-apocalyptic fiction played a decisive role in making exceedingly clear the dangers of nuclear war as well as in stimulating reflection on its likely long-term consequences. In the 1960s and 70s, the emphasis on the issues of overpopulation and the ecological bomb influenced the rise of the ecological movement. In the 80s, the cyberpunk scene foreshadowed the pervasive social impact of cyberspace on our lives, examining the emergence of large corporations based on the power of big data. Today, at the core of SF lie 1) climate change (i.e. ‘climate fiction’ – Kim Stanley Robinson), 2) the boundary between reality and simulation (i.e. Matrix and Westworld), 3) the pitfalls of the digital age (i.e. The Circle, Black Mirror), 4) the trade-off between opportunity and risk in the context of genetic engineering (i.e. Jeff VanderMeer, Annalee Newtiz or Paolo Bacigalupi) and 5) the rise of post-human species (i.e. Charles Stross, Greg Egan or Altered Carbon).

Therefore, in our effort to come to terms with SF’s popularity and broad reach, we ask: what do we learn from SF narratives? How can SF novels, movies and TV-series be used as a ‘reality-check’ for the whims and desires of western culture?

We invite submission on topics including, but not limited to:

– Anthropocene in contemporary SF

– SF and transhumanism

– Climate fiction

– Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction

– Technological existential risks in contemporary fiction

– Technological unemployment in SF

– SF and futures studies

– The images of science in contemporary SF

– SF and contemporary philosophy (i.e. hyperobjects)

– SF as postmodern literature

We welcome original papers in English and invite proposals (no more than 9,000 words) from senior as well as junior academics. The blinded manuscript, abstract (cca. 200 words) with 5 keywords and a brief curriculum vitae (cca. 300 words) should be in Word and PDF format. Each electronic copy must be sent by email attachment to: msa@usv.ro AND msa_usv@hotmail.com.

Deadline: June 1, 2019.

Fan Cultures and the Premodern World

History Faculty, University of Oxford, 5-6 July 2019

Following the success of the July 2018 colloquium, we are announcing a conference “Fan Cultures and the Premodern World” to be held at Oxford on 5 and 6 July 2019. We welcome proposals on various aspects of premodern (ancient, medieval, early modern) culture which can be better understood through the lens of the modern phenomena of fanfic, cosplay, celebrity studies, LARP, gaming etc. Questions discussed may include but are not limited to:

– Premodern authors as fanboys and fangirls

– Intersectionality and fandom

– The “dark side” of fandom – negative consequences of fannish devotion, including backlash to changes in canonical fan works

– Media as message(s) – the impact of media type on fandom and fan communities

– Game as a spiritual experience

– “Democratisation” of narrative

– Canon, fanon, sequels and adaptations

– Authorial self-inserts

– Theories of fanfiction and how they intersect or intervene in conversations around premodern texts, authorship and readership

– Scholars as fans

– Politics of co-opting another’s identity

– Readers as (re-)writers

– Cosplay as a part of ritual

Please send your proposals (of about 250 words) by 15 March to Juliana.dresvina@history.ox.ac.uk

For more information, please click here.