Southwest PCA is accepting proposals beginning Oct. 15 for game scholarship under the Game Studies, Culture, Play, and Practice Area. This is a wonderful conference as all of the game panels are in the same room, which creates the sense of an ongoing scholarly conversation about games.

The Game Studies, Culture, Play, and Practice Area invites papers, panels, and other proposals on games (digital and otherwise) and their study and development. Proposals are welcome from any and all scholars (including graduate students, independent scholars, and tenured, tenure-track, and emeritus faculty) and practitioners (developers, artists, archivists, and so forth). Unusual formats, technologies, and the like are encouraged.

Possible topics include (but are in no way limited to):

• Advertising (both in-game and out)
• Alternative reality games
• Archiving and artifactual preservation
• Competitive/clan gaming
• Design and development
• Economic and industrial histories and studies
• Educational games and their pedagogies
• Foreign language games and culture
• Game art/game-based art (including game sound)
• Game engines and entertainment
• Game streaming
• Gender and sexual identity
• Haptics and interface studies
• Hardware/platforms
• Histories of games
• Localization
• MOGs, MMOGs, and other forms of online/networked gaming
• Performance
• Pornographic games
• Religion and games
• Representations of race and gender
• Representations of space and place
• The rhetoric of games and game systems
• Serious games
• Strategy games
• Table-top games and gaming
• Technological, aesthetic, economic, and ideological convergence
• Theories of play
• Transmedia and games
• Wireless and mobile gaming