Hi All! The people over at the VGA at Mana are putting out an open call for papers for their next edition of the VGA Reader. (Also Alan and I are guest editors so you should def submit 
!!) Info below:
VIDEO GAME ART READER, Volume 6
Editors: Tiffany Funk, Eleanor Schichtel
Guest editors: Emrys Brandt and Alan Perry
Publisher: Amherst College Press
Call for Papers: Video Games, History, and the Shaping of Collective Memory
âEvery image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.â
â Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, 1942
âOur own Middle Ages, it has been said, will be an age of âpermanent transitionâ ⌠preserved in its way the heritage of the past but not through hibernation, rather through a constant retranslation and reuse.â
â Umberto Eco, The Return of the Middle Ages, 1986
âWho are you, that do not know your history?â
â Ulysses, Fallout: New Vegas, 2010
Video games offer a critical space for re-enacting significant historical events and eras, allowing players to engage with the past in an immersive manner. This power to reconstruct and aestheticize history has sparked debates over the value of historical accuracy and revisionism, with concerns about the potential for contemporary biases to shape and distort collective memory. However, the interactive nature of video games also allows for an expanding epistemological perspective that centers on pluralities rather than a hegemonizing narrative of societal history.
The Video Game Art Reader invites scholars, artists, and developers to submit papers that critically examine how video games influence and are influenced by our perceptions of history. We welcome papers exploring the intricate relationship between video games and the construction, revision, or negation of history from any era, locality, or culture. Though we accept all papers that explore how video games and history as academic disciplines overlap, we are particularly interested in analyses that address the potential of video games to challenge and shape collective memory and identity by decentering or complicating Euro-centric approaches toward building an anti-colonial future.
Other topics may include the following:
- Investigations of how video games shape collective memory through presenting immersive narratives with multiple perspectives
- Investigations of how video games challenge dominant historical narratives
- Analyses of first-person characterization as amnesiac, âpastless,â or âfish-out-of-waterâ to aid in narrative development (i.e., Fallout series, Disco Elysium, Knights of the Old Republic, Zelda: Breath of the Wild)
- Critical analyses of how history is aesthetically coded in games
- Explorations of the ethics of historical accuracy/inaccuracy in games
- Analyses of the history of the development of video games, including how apocryphal narratives shape our understanding of video games and early computing media
- Studies of game examples regarding their (accurate or inaccurate) portrayals of historical elements/characters/events, etc.
- Explorations of âremastersâ and âmoddingâ of video games and the implications of aesthetic or narrative changes in subsequent versions
- Analyses of how video games contribute to hyperreality or critically investigate the concept of the hyperreal
- Explorations of ecologies, economics, social structures, etc., of simulated places as points of comparison/contrast with our own
- Investigations of the historical multiplicities, historical revisionism, or multiverse narratives in video games
- Studies of postcolonialism in video games
- Analyses of simulation games (i.e., Sim City, Roller Coaster Tycoon, CK3) and modeling ideologies (i.e., capitalism, feudalism)
SUBMISSIONS DUE NOVEMBER 1, 2024
Send submissions or inquiries to VGAR Editor-in-Chief Tiffany Funk, tfunk@vgagallery.org
VGAR submission guide: https://shorturl.at/JG0Ja
For past open-access VGA Reader volumes, see: Amherst College Press results - page 1 of 1