The Fan Studies Network

CFP: Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, special issue on Science Fiction and Videogames

For over half a century—from the spaceship duels of Spacewar! and the
attacking waves of the Space Invaders, through to the explorations of
the Metroid series and the complex environments of the Bioshock
games—electronic gaming has made extensive use of science fictional
themes and settings. Likewise, science fiction, in books like Ender’s
Game, films like The Last Starfighter, and TV shows like Defiance, has
often explored tropes of videogaming within its created worlds. Both
regularly, even obsessively, address questions of identity,
embodiment, and representation, as well as the constructions and
constraints of culture; both are also constituted in the complex and
often fraught relations between fan groups and society.

Foundation (http://www.sf-foundation.org) seeks papers for a special issue on science fiction and
electronic gaming that will delineate and explore zones of concern
shared by these two rapidly developing bodies of criticism and theory.
What might their intersections reveal about the gaps, conflicts, and
kinships of our present cultural moment? How does the history of
science fiction criticism speak to game studies, and vice versa? How
might the modes of play we develop in electronic realms translate to
our methods of critical reading or viewing? What SF works, canonical
or otherwise, might be read differently when seen as anticipating or
responding to digital gaming?

All topics and methodologies are welcome, potentially including (but
not limited to) genre theory, fandom, constructions and
representations of cultural identities, physical and intellectual
disability, platform studies and media archaeology, software and
critical code studies, print culture, and readings of individual
titles or series.

Send submissions of up to 8,000 words (including endnotes) by 15 April
2014 to journaleditor@sf-foundation.org, attaching the file as
electronic text in either .rtf or .doc format. For questions about
formatting, see the Foundation style guide at sf-foundation.org;
direct all other inquiries to Andrew Ferguson at af3pj@virginia.edu.

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