Games and Culture

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The Games and Culture publication is proud to have three of its last four publications focus on special themes this year.

Gaming in the Asia-Pacific
Games, Learning, and Society

As a region, the Asia-Pacific is marked by diverse penetration rates of gaming, mobile and broadband technologies, subject to local cultural and socio-economic nuances. Two defining locations – Seoul (South Korea) and Tokyo (Japan) – are seen as both “mobile centres” and “gaming centres” to which the world looks towards as examples of the future-in-the-present. Unlike Japan, which pioneered the keitai (mobile) IT revolution and mobile consoles such as playstation2, South Korea – the most broadbanded country in the world – has become a centre for MMOs (online massively multiplayer) games and convergent mobile DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadband i.e. TU mobile).

Adorned with over 20,000 PC bangs (PC rooms) in Seoul alone and with professional players (Pro-leagues) making over a million US per year, locations such as South Korea have been lauded as an example of gaming as a mainstream social activity. In a period marked by convergent technologies, South Korea and Japan represent two opposing directions for gaming – Korea emphasizes online MMOs games played on stationary PCs in public spaces (PC bangs) whilst Japan pioneers the mobile (privatized) convergent devices. These two distinct examples, with histories embroiled in conflict and imperialism, clearly demonstrate the importance of locality in the uptake of specific games and game play.

This issue seeks to explore the politics of game play and cultural context by focusing on the burgeoning Asia-Pacific region. Housing sites for global gaming production and consumption such as China, Japan and South Korea, the region provides a wealth of divergent examples of the role of gaming as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Drawing from micro ethnographic studies to macro political economy analysis of techno-nationalisms and trans-cultural flows of cultural capital, this issue will provide an interdisciplinary model for thinking through the politics of gaming production, representation and consumption in the region.

Topics of papers will discuss the region in terms of one of the following areas:

- Case study analysis of specific games and game play

- Is there such thing as a culturally specific aesthetic to the production and consumption of certain games?

- What is the “future” of gaming?

- Emerging and re-occurring productions of techno-nationalism in the region

- New media and experimental gaming in the region

- Convergent technologies and the impact on established modes of game play

- Gendered consumption and production of games

- Government regulations and types of game play

- Pervasive gaming and the role of co-presence

Deadline for this special issue of Games and Culture: 15th March 2007. Authors should submit all inquiries, expressions of interest and papers to Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University) larissa.hjorth [AT] rmit.edu.au.

Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media invites academics, designers and developers, and researchers interested in the growing field of game studies to submit articles, reviews, or special issues proposals to the editor. Games and Culture is an interdisciplinary publication, and therefore it welcomes submissions by those working in fields such as Communication, Anthropology, Computer Science, English, Sociology, Media Studies, Cinema/Television Studies, Education, Art History, and Visual Arts.

All submissions are peer reviewed by two or more members of the distinguished, multi-disciplinary editorial board. Games and Culture aims to have all papers go through their initial review within three months of receipt. Manuscripts should be submitted with four paper copies and electronically in Word or Word Perfect format and conform to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (Fifth Edition)0,000 words in length. Papers that do not conform to these guidelines will be returned to the author(s).

From the State of Play web site:

State of Play III: Social Revolutions is the third annual State of Play conference on the future of cyberspace convened by the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School, the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. This year, we focus on social relationships in the metaverse and how to build vibrant, flourishing, creative places.

The conference will be held on October 7-8, 2005 at New York Law School in TriBeCa, New York City. We expect this third event to be the best yet, drawing leading voices in the online virtual world and videogame space together with legal and social thinkers to explore the next-generation of cyberspace and the legal implications of its massively-multiplayer, immersive and graphical environments.
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Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media is a new, quarterly international journal (first issue due January 2006) that aims to publish innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within the context of interactive media. The journal will serve as a premiere outlet for ground-breaking and germinal work in the field of game studies.
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