We invite research articles and notes that explore the varied landscape of insightful gameplay, and we welcome texts from multiple disciplines, genres, and personal histories of gameplay.
Call for Papers – Video Games and Insightful Gameplay
Video games are increasingly used and discussed as a medium for creating and sharing meaning – be it as a form of learning [1], self-knowledge [2], persuasion in fields such as politics or advertising [3], or a way of mending a “broken reality” with a layer of meaning [4].
Gameplay has also been used for distributed problem solving in science, with ‘Foldit’ as a notorious example [5], public awareness of distressing psychological conditions such as depression [6]–[8], or for historical commemoration [9], among other goals.
Feel free to write us for any question.
| Guest editor: Doris C. Rusch, DePaul University |
Deadline for manuscript submission: May 15th, 2015
Send manuscripts at: compaso@compaso.eu
Some orienting questions include:
- How can games stimulate players’ insights into the world around us, or how can they fail to do so?
- How do players derive and formulate insights when playing? How do people make meaning from gameplay?
- How can games occasion moral reflection and moral experiences [10], [11], or avoid it?
- How can games encourage empathy [12] – or discourage it?
- What is the role of various elements of a game (fictive worlds, mechanics, textual elements) and of the game paratext [13](player forums, reviews, markets etc.) in shaping gameplay as meaningful experiences?
- What is the diversity of meaning acquired by various people playing a game, or same persons in various instances of play? How do players relate to this multi-voicedness of gameplay?
References
[1] J. P. Gee, What Video Games have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
[2] D. Rusch, “Mechanisms of the Soul: Tackling the Human Condition in Videogames,” Proc. from DiGRA, 2009.
[3] I. Bogost, Persuasive Games. The MIT Press, 2010.
[4] J. McGonigal, Reality is Broken. Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: The Penguin Press, 2011.
[5] S. Cooper, A. Treuille, J. Barbero, Z. Popović, D. Baker, and D. Salesin, “Foldit.” [Online]. Available: http://fold.it/portal/info/science.
[6] Z. Quinn, P. Lindsey, and I. Shankler, “Depression Quest,” 2013. [Online]. Available: http://www.depressionquest.com/.
[7] D. C. Rusch, T. I. Ing, and R. Eberhardt, “Elude.” Gambit.
[8] D. C. Rusch and A. Rana, “For the records.” [Online]. Available: http://fortherecords.org/.
[9] Ubisoft, “Valiant Hearts. The Great War.” 2014.
[10] M. Sicart, “Wicked Games: On the Design of Ethical Gameplay,” in DESIRE’10, 2010, pp. 101–111.
[11] M. Sicart, The Ethics of Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009.
[12] J. Belman and M. Flanagan, “Designing Games to Foster Empathy,” Cogn. Technol., vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 5–15, 2010.
[13] M. Consalvo, Cheating. Gaining Advantage in Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007.
