Call For Papers: Issue 30, Poetics of Play
For its thirtieth issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that address the poetics and politics of video games. 20 years ago Janet H. Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck and Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature began a conversation to theorize the aesthetics of video games. Since these foundational texts, game studies has sustained an interrogation of political questions concerning games, such as issues of representation and the configuration of online game spaces. Video games intersect with industrial practices, embodied experiences, as well as visual and ludic designs, all of which have specific political implications. For this issue we encourage contributors to consider two or more of these factors together, exploring “how games make complex meanings across history, bodies, hardware, and code.”1 This issue of InVisible Culture takes a cultural studies approach toward video games in that the formal aesthetics always register aspects of the culture that they emerge from. We think of games as an open category that includes a broad range of media, from …