Call for Chapter Proposals, Game Criticism

Call for Chapter Proposals, Game Criticism

As attention to the study and criticism of games grows, attention to how games are studied and criticized must keep pace. For some time, game studies has relied on methods of criticism appropriate to previous media and developed by prior disciplines. These methods have treated games as objects for anthropological studies, textual analysis, literary analysis, user experience studies, and technology studies, among many others; however, games often require that they be treated differently because of the medial, technological, or textual constraints they place upon methods. These constraints can subtly change the definition of the object of analysis as it shifts, for example, from a designed technology to a played technology. The different definitions of what a game is reveal different arguments about their success as games.

This edited collection’s goal is to demonstrate how these various definitions affect the criticism and study of games using representative essays. Proposals that treat games as technological, as experienced, as communicative, as performative, as persuasive, as literature, as social, or as played are especially welcome.

Specifically, I am looking for proposals for chapters that analyze games or game play and make the methods of that analysis clear to readers. Authors are encouraged to identify how their chapter defines the game(s) in their proposal.

All proposals must be original work and not submitted to another publication. Proposals should be no more than 500 words.

Please submit proposals as .docx or .pdf files to gaines.hubbell@uah.edu by July 21, 2016.

Final chapters will be between 6000 words and 8000 words in MLA style due by November 15th, 2016.

This manuscript is under contract for peer review and publication with McFarland.

For questions or comments, please email me at gaines.hubbell@uah.edu.