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The Centre for Media Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy, St. Petersburg State University, in collaboration with the Game Philosophy Network, have come together to organize a double conference on philosophical issues raised by computer games.
The 13th International Conference on the Philosophy of Computer Games will be held in St. Petersburg, Russia, from October 21–25, 2019.
The theme of this year’s conference is The Aesthetics of Computer Games. Playing games yields particular kinds of playful experiences or perceptions through the senses, which can be studied with an aesthetic focus, emphasising aísthēsis over noêsis. Computer games can be regarded as playful media that organise our perceptions and modify our sensibilities.
For this conference, submissions are welcome on (but not limited to) the following themes and questions:
- Aesthetics as aesthesis (aísthēsis). Is there an aesthetics or mode of experience that is specific to computer games? How do their visual, audio, and haptic aspects come together to produce distinctive experiences? How are ‘experience’ and ‘perception’ explored in computer games and shaped by them? Can concepts such as ‘affect’, ‘atmosphere’, and ‘rhythm’ be productively applied to computer games? What is the role of game interfaces on player experience?
- Games as art? What are the conditions of possibility of games being art? How do computer games fit into established categories or conventions of aesthetics, and how do they contribute to new ones? Do games recognised as having a claim to artistic status differ from mainstream games? How do accounts of art based on necessary and sufficient conditions match up against anti-essentialist accounts in terms of gauging the status of computer games?
- The aesthetics of gaming practices. Are games collaboratively authored? How do different kinds of play, or player-game conjunctions, bring about different kinds of gaming pleasures or aesthetic experiences? How do different bodies encounter computer games and what can be said about the way in which gameplay experience is mediated by our bodies? Do some kinds of gameplay or extra-gamic player practices have an aesthetic orientation? Are computer games performances?
- The ethical, political, and social dimensions of game aesthetics. What is the transformative potential of computer games and how does this compare to the transformative capabilities ascribed to artworks? How do aesthetic issues interconnect with ethical, social, and political ones – what is the autonomy or heteronomy of the aesthetic domain? How are taste, sensibility, and habit acquired with respect to gameplay and what are the social implications of this?
Submissions should be made in the form of extended abstracts of up to 1000 words (excluding bibliography). The deadline for submissions is 23.59 GMT, Sunday 11 August 2019. Please submit your abstract through review.gamephilosophy.org. All submitted abstracts will be subject to a double-blind peer review process.
Proposals are also invited for themed panels and workshops that will take place on 20 and 24 October, 2019. Please contact the program committee chair if you are interested in organising one.
- Program chair: Dr Feng Zhu (King’s College London).
- Organizing chairs: Alina Latypova (St. Petersburg State University) and Konstantin Ocheretyany (St. Petersburg State University).
For more information about the conference please visit http://gameconference.mediaphilosophy.ru/pcg2019.html and gamephilosophy.org.