Our friend down under Larissa Hjorth forwarded this Call for Papers for a special issue of Convergence Journal about mobile gaming and convergent mobile media.
Convergence Special Issue
Distractedly engaged: mobile gaming and convergent mobile media
Deadline for full and final submissions: 31 July 2010
From casual games on the mobile phone to fully-fledged networked, location-aware hybrid reality, mobile devices are increasingly widespread and well developed as cultural artefacts. Designers and players of mobile games and social media are participating in reconfigurations of location, space, place and corporeality. The iPhone, Android and other smart phones have integrated and commoditised features that were previously experimental, expensive and complex — mobile internet, location-awareness, rich gaming and so on. The innovations combining these affordances provoke new questions for scholars of computer games, media, and the human-technology relation.
The motivation behind this special issue of Convergence is to stimulate discussion, debate and research into the burgeoning area of mobile gaming and mobile social applications. We hope papers will effectively apply philosophical, new media and/or ethnographic approaches to extend the critical discourse about emerging and cross-platform ‘screen cultures’, new forms of telepresence and dynamics of mediatic distraction and engagement. In particular, the issue seeks to counter the notion that our experience of screen media is largely ‘virtual’ and disembodied — or at most exclusively audiovisual.
We seek papers that explore the following:
• Different forms of mobile gaming and mobile social applications and how they impact upon notions and experiences of distraction, engagement and technological embodiment.
• The gendered nature of technologies and how this manifests in stereotypes around gaming and mobile new media.
• The role of mobile media in networked, cross-platform and hybrid reality gaming, and the divergent or convergent relation between online and offline gaming.
• The relation between mobile gaming and the burgeoning user-created content (UCC) environment of Web 2.0, participatory media culture and convergent screen media.
• Mobile gaming and screen cultures theorised in terms of spatial, contextual and corporeal practices.
• Interpretations of mobile gaming and social applications that focus on the cultural specificity and geo-spatial located-ness of such experiences.
• Critical analyses of the relationship between mobile gaming and other media cultures. • Enquiries that focus on the emerging complex new media literacies associated with mobile gaming and mobile social applications, and the concomitant modes of embodiment and presence.
• In the context of these themes, critical explorations of recent innovative mobile games and handsets such as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android.
Guest editors:
Chris Chesher (University of Sydney) chris.chesher {AT} usyd.edu.au
Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University) larissa.hjorth {AT} rmit.edu.au
Ingrid Richardson (Murdoch University) I.Richardson {AT} murdoch.edu.au
Jason Wilson (University of Wollongong) jason_a_wilson {AT} yahoo.com.au
More info at: http://lrweb.beds.ac.uk/convergence/callforpapers/mobilegaming