Call for Papers: Multiplatform 2
Graphic featuring Symposium Title
Multiplatform 2022: Corporealities
22-23 June 2022
International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester
Organisers: Rob Gallagher, Chloé Germaine, Paul Wake, Jack Warren
The Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre is pleased to invite submissions to Multiplatform 2: Corporealities, a two-day conference on bodies and embodiment in games, supported by Game in Lab and the Centre for Creative Writing, English, Languages and Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University.
The issue of embodiment in games encompasses political, social and material concerns, and requires us to pay attention to the positioning, mediation, and representation of gendered, sexed, and racialised bodies within analogue and digital games. Game Studies continues to address this issue in a variety of ways. The burgeoning subfield of queer game studies, for example, has applied insights from queer and trans theory to games and play (Marcotte, 2018; Pozo, 2017; Ruberg, 2019), while another vein of research has explored the relationships between gaming cultures, porn cultures and the forms of erotic play found online (Paasonen, 2018; Apperley, 2022). Other scholars have focused on representations of ability, disability, and able bodies in games, and on questions of accessible and enabling interface design (Boluk and LeMieux, 2017; Carr, 2020). Indigenous gamers and gamers of colour have explored how entrenched a normative understanding of the embodied player is in games, while offering means to challenge this entrenchment (Nakamura, 2017; Russworm, 2017; Laiti, 2021). Affect theory, post-phenomenology and new materialist thought have been mobilised to offer accounts of gameplay as an embodied practice that implicates players in networks of human and nonhuman actors (Ash, 2015; Keogh, 2017; Anable, 2018). AR, VR and XR technologies, gestural interfaces and performance capture rigs have been analysed in terms of their capacity to alter the terms on which physical bodies enter and engage with gameworlds (Parisi, 2015; Hjorth and Richardson, 2020). Elsewhere, studies of livestreaming have considered how streamers mediate their bodies and surroundings (Anderson 2017), while work on e-sports has addressed the bodily rigours of elite play (Brock, 2021). In the field of analogue and material game studies, meanwhile, scholars have considered the ongoing effects of white privilege and hegemonic masculinity in tabletop gaming spaces and communities (Pobuda 2018; Trammell 2021).
The conference will run over two days, the first of which will focus on analogue games and play, the second of which will focus on the digital. We envisage these two days as existing in dialogue, developing conversations across the two and welcome papers and panels that explore the relationships between the two. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
How do different bodies encounter games?
In what ways are gameplay experiences mediated by our bodies?
Embodiment and Augmented reality games
Embodiment and Virtual reality
Immersion
Avatars and virtual embodiment
Representing and accommodating differently able bodies
Play, pleasure and desire
More-than-human bodies and corporealities in games
Live-Action Roleplaying Games, Re-enactment, and Performance
Bodies and/or Objects in Analogue and Tabletop Games
The role of embodiment in game design
Game interfaces and platforms
Key information
Individual papers will be limited to 20 minutes.
Panels will be 90 minutes (30 minutes for questions), so three papers are recommended per panel.
The deadline for submissions is Friday 6 May. Please submit your abstract by email to mmgc@mmu.ac.uk.
Notification of accepted submissions will be sent out by Friday, 13 May.
Proposals for Individual Papers
Please provide the title and a 300-word abstract of the paper you are proposing; your name, institutional affiliation/status as an independent scholar, and email address; and a brief statement (no more than 100 words) about your work as well as any relevant publications, presentations, or projects-in-progress.
Proposals for Panels
We are also open to proposals for panels and sessions in other formats (e.g. roundtables). Please provide a 700-word (maximum) description of the topic of the session and of each participant’s contribution; the title of the panel and the titles of the individual papers (if the session is a panel); and for each participant, the name, email address, institutional affiliation/status as an independent scholar, and a brief statement (no more than 100 words) about the person's work as well as any relevant publications, presentations, or projects-in-progress. Proposals should be submitted by the organiser.
Confirmed Speakers
Day One
Michael James Heron is Senior lecturer in Interaction Design (games and graphics) at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. He also serves as the program administrator for the Game Design and Technology masters programme, which covers everything from the architecture of game engines to how to conduct critical research on roleplaying games. He also runs his own website Meeple Like Us where he investigates the intersection of games and accessibility within a board-gaming context.
Matteo Menapace is a game designer who makes cooperative games and teaches people currently designing Daybreak, a game about tackling the climate crisis, with Matt Leacock. Matteo will be leading a game making workshop.
Day Two
Susanna Paasonen is a Professor of Media Studies at the University of Turku. Her publications include Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press 2011), Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press 2018), and Distracted, Frustrated, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MIT Press 2021).
Irene Fubara-Manuel is a lecturer in Digital Media Practice at the University of Sussex, and a media artist working in animation and game design. They write on race and sexuality in pop culture and are currently interested in African digital futures.
Zoyander Street is an artist-researcher and critic working at the fringes of indie videogames for over a decade. Led by ethnographic and historical research, Zoyander creates lo-fi glitchy games and custom hardware for festivals, galleries, and museums, using interaction design to harness the expressive potential of audience participation.