CFP: Extending Play

Extending Play is back, and this iteration will play with the concept of time. We are looking for papers that excavate the past, interpret the present, and forecast the future of play and games.

We aim to continue the mission of the previous two Extending Play conferences, to entertain all approaches to the traditions, roles, and contexts of play, extending them into far-flung and unexpected arenas. Extending Play 3 will take an inclusive and pluralistic approach to temporality and play, inviting creative applications of the concepts as they relate to all things playable– from games and moving images to recorded sound and performance. Submissions are open now.

Extending Play III asks important questions about the temporalities of play from emergent scholarly perspectives: Can media archaeology and game preservation revise the history of games and play? Do new methodologies, such as big data and network analysis force us to reconsider the predictability of play? Can queer temporalities of play produce new activist futures? How is gamification shaping our experiences of time? How are notions of time and play constructed by social scientists, humanists, preservationists, and policy researchers?  

We invite scholars, students, makers, artists, archivists, visionaries, game designers, and players to the third iteration of the Rutgers Media Studies Conference: Extending Play, to be held September 30 and October 1, 2016 on the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, NJ. Submissions are welcomed from scholars working in media studies and all related fields across the humanities and social sciences.

In keeping with the tripartite division of past, present, and future, Extending Play invites three types of submissions — papers, panels, and interactive projects. The organizers invite traditional academic papers and panels of 3-4 presenters, along with any form of game, performance or display that submitters may wish to propose. In the past our conference has presented traditional research presentations alongside:

• workshops,
• playtests,
• finished games,
• technology demos,
• performance art,
• happenings that defy classification.

For academic papers and panels, each presenter will have a maximum of 15 minutes to offer his or her ideas as a presentation or interactive conversation, and/or may also adopt a more creative approach, incorporating such elements as:

• material accompaniment (hand out a zine, scrapbook, postcards, etc)
• performance (spoken word, song, verse, dance, recording, etc)
• game (create rules and incorporate audience play)

For more information, please visit Extending Play's website

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