Central and Eastern European Game Studies (CEEGS) conference is a gathering of game scholars organised annually by DiGRA Central and Eastern Europe, but its thematic scope is not limited to regional topics, and it welcomes participants from anywhere in the world.
CEEGS 2025 in Wrocław
This year’s conference will take place in Wrocław in Poland, “the City of one Hundred Bridges,” also dubbed the meeting place. It has long been a place on or near the border, linking multiple countries, cultures, communities, and languages. Historically influenced by Slavic, Roman, Jewish, and Germanic inhabitants, today the city continues to witness various kinds of international, intercultural, and interspecies meetings, which makes it a particularly matching scenery for the conference topic: Landscapes, Cities, Localities.
Conference Theme: Landscapes, Cities, Localities
Thinking in terms of space and environment is an experience shared by game designers, players, and scholars. Explorable, strategic, symbolic, imaginary, open or claustrophobic, game spaces can be essential genre markers, narrative devices, mechanical tools, political platforms, critical resources and more. The three spatial categories that co-create the topic of this year’s CEEGS conference – landscapes, cities, and localities – bring out the qualities that seem particularly in tune with the multifaceted and complex ways in which space may be relevant for games, game cultures, and game industries. On the one hand, they are, by definition, constructed, delineated and, more often than not, anthropocentric – locality defined from a situated point of view and usually signifying the mutual infiltration of the spatial and the social (Duncan, 1989); city as a trademark example of human-shaped habitat; and landscape implying the presence of not only an observer and their aesthetic lens, but sometimes also traveling technology (Urry, 2007). All those features resonate with controlled and pragmatic design as games’ fundamental attribute. On the other hand, each of those categories offers a different kind of flexibility, openness and porosity – local and global contexts in an ongoing negotiation within game cultures and industry; in-game urban settings frequently functioning as patchwork, heterotopian, or hybrid environments; landscapes reconciling the inevitable omnipresence of the player’s eye with various ways and not always anthropocentric goals of visualizing the gameworld space.
The three categories are also in line with the fact that many game scholars around the world are now interested in local aspects of games. The local, conceived broadly as a counterweight to the global (Swalwell, 2021), can manifest itself on different scales. In-game, this could mean a very specific area (S.T.A.L.K.E.R), a large stretch of land that now belongs to a single nation-state (Kingdom Come: Deliverance), or a region containing multiple countries (Reign: Conflict of Nations). In terms of game cultures and game production, “the local” could refer to a few friends making small games in the same city of the Eastern Bloc in the 1980s, to the contemporary indie game industry in a particular country, or to the decades-long unauthorized game distribution across Central and Eastern Europe.
The conference embraces all these scales, and also acknowledges the importance of the global scale. This year’s edition, however, puts emphasis on relatively small places and spaces, which we term as localities. The other two categories, landscapes and cities, are not meant to limit the discussion scope or oppose each other, but rather to signal the variety of approaches to space in and around the game medium: from flat to three-dimensional, from decorative to interactive, from carefully arranged to chaotic, from uninhabited to populated, from places to non-places (Augé, 1995).
We welcome academic contributions related to Landscapes, Cities, and Localities from any relevant disciplinary perspective, including the following topics:
• in-game cities as heterotopias, melting pots, transcultural or multicultural environments, and more
• simulacra, mimesis, and parody: real cities and environments mirrored in game worlds
• architectural ideals, theories, and developments as they are mirrored in digital cities
• game localization and regional game studies
• ARGs and pervasive games
• local games and local game histories
• game production: culturally important cities and regions, game dev’s impact on local environments
• urban ludic traditions and spaces
• aesthetic functions of places in games
• non-places and liminal places
• soundscapes
• games and cultural heritage, games and the politics of memory
• green gaming, game ecologies, and ecosystems
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
All CEEGS 2025 papers in the main program must contain original research work and should be submitted as abstracts of approximately 500 words (400 words minimum and 600 words maximum). Each submission needs to be accompanied by a list of references cited within the abstract, which do not count towards the word limit.
To submit an abstract, you will need to create an account (or use an existing account) in the CMT system. Please click here to submit. In CMT, your abstract and references will need to be entered as plain text in the field provided.
All papers will undergo a peer review process by at least two expert reviewers to ensure a high standard of quality, considering originality, soundness of method and/or argument, clarity of exposition, and relevance to the conference’s thematic areas.
A single author may submit multiple abstracts, but will only be allowed to present a maximum of one single-authored and one co-authored paper (or two co-authored papers). The Doctoral Consortium and workshops do not count into this limit.
If you have questions about the review process, please contact the Program Chair: Agata Waszkiewicz, agata.waszkiewicz@kul.pl
CEEGS has a long tradition of inspiring workshops, meant mainly to present and discuss work-in-progress research. Workshops will take place on the first day of the conference. If you want to propose a workshop, please contact Sylwia Jankowska, sylwia.jankowska@uwr.edu.pl. Workshops can be proposed by June 16.
Important dates:
Abstract submission deadline: 14 April 2025 (submissions will be open soon)
Notification to authors: 30 May 2025
Deadline for workshop proposals: 16 June 2025
Workshop acceptance/rejection notification: 22 June 2025
Early bird registration deadline: to be announced soon
Registration deadline: to be announced soon
More details, will come shortly to the conference website: https://ceegs.fsv.cuni.cz/ceegs2025/