Games Studies Triple Conference

Call for papers

Values in Games

We hereby invite submissions to the 12th International Conference on the Philosophy of Computer Games, to be held in Copenhagen on August 13-15.

The theme of this year’s conference is “value in games”. The topic will connect central themes in the study of games, including questions about the importance of games in a human life, the ethical value of games, and the values communicated through games. For this conference, we invite papers that explore these and other aspects of value in games.

We welcome submissions on (but not limited to) the following questions:

Can games contribute to a meaningful life?
Is there a special value to games, distinct from other social practices?
What is the value of difficulty, achievement, excellence, and skill in games
What is the relationship of the artistic value of games to their other values?
How do games transform the values that normally attach to activities outside the gaming context?
Are games an integral part of ideal society?
Can games contribute to an ethical life, and in what ways?
How do games encode systems of values, especially in their mechanics and game-play? In particular, how might they encode biases and other problematic attitudes?
How can the values in games be studied?
What value might games have for thinking about issues of race, gender, and sexual and romantic orientation?
How might we justify the inclusion or exclusion of transgressive content in games (violence, pornography, racism)?
How do players relate to, resist, shape, or appropriate a game’s values?

In addition to papers that are directed at the main theme we invite a smaller number of papers in an “open” category.

Accepted papers will have a clear focus on philosophy and philosophical issues in relation to computer games. We strongly encourage references to specific examples from computer games, as well as reference to diversity of games and game types. We are especially interested in papers that aim to continue discussions from earlier conferences in this series.

Submission procedure

The abstracts should have a maximum 1000 words (maximum 700 words for the main text and 300 for the bibliography).The deadline for submissions is May 21st. Please submit your abstract through review.gamephilosophy.org. All submitted abstracts will be subject to double blind peer review. Notification of accepted submissions will be sent out by June 1st. Participation requires that a paper draft is submitted by August 1st and will be made available on the conference website

We also issue a call for workshops or panels to be held on August 15th. Please submit a short proposal to the program committee chair by May 21st if you are interested in organizing an event.

About Games Philosophy

Over the last years, computer games have received growing attention from academic fields as diverse as psychology, literary studies, sociology and learning studies. The game philosophy initiative aims to broaden the scope of this effort by facilitating discussions dealing with philosophical issues raised by computer games. By doing so, we do not only want to contribute to our understanding of this phenomenon, we also want to contribute to the establishment of a new philosophical discipline, the philosophy of traditional games and computer games, capable of taking its place alongside such disciplines as the philosophy of film and the philosophy of literature. Read more here

Conference Committee

Program Chair:
C. Thi Nguyen, Utah Valley University
cnguyen@uvu.edu

Conference Chair:
Michael Debus, ITU
msde@itu.dk

Program Committee

Pawel Grabarczyk, Rune Klevjer, Anita Leirfall, Sebastian Möring, Stephanie Patridge, Jon Robson, John R. Sageng, Mark Silcox, Daniel Vella

Philosophy of Computer Games Conference 2018

12th International Conference, Copenhagen, 13/8-15/8 2018