Call for Participation – Kick-Off-Workshop der DHd-AG Spiele

Workshop: Game Science. Digital Humanities for Games and Gaming

Organiser: AG Spiele @ Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V.

• Dr. Dr. Stefan Höltgen (Medienwissenschaft, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
• Jun.-Prof. Dr. Melanie Fritsch (Medienkulturwissenschaft, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)

Date: Saturday, 12.03.2022, 10am-6pm – Please note the new date!

While game studies have predominantly focused on the “surfaces” of games such as aesthetic, discursive, social, historical or philosophical aspects during the last two decades, their “subfaces” (F. Nake) have not yet been as thoroughly investigated and were only touched by their producers. But the technical and formal aspects of games that build their dispositifs (and therefore their aprioris) constitute a rich part of the game culture as well. These include specific genealogies, styles, and sublime aesthetics in their rich histories and phenomenologies that should be documented and preserved in order to understand a game as a whole. In addition, all epiphenomena that deal with the ephemeral character of gaming as a (performative) act should be included as well: from the audio-visual outputs of the games and specific actions of gamers from the viewpoint of anatomical, physiological, and neurological human-machine interactions through specific aspects of gaming culture that create a universe of paratexts around the games.

Against this backdrop, the AG Spiele (Working group for Games) of the DHd. e.V. (Digital Humanities within the German-speaking World) focuses on games (analog and digital computer games, video games, mechanical, electro-mechanical, and hybrid games and game devices), gaming and gaming cultures. Within the digital humanities, games have been used as methods and tools (for gamification to gain meta data or as simulations for interactive visualization projects). AG Spiele, however, focusses on games themselves as cultural and technological artifacts that can be analyzed with methods of the digital humanities.

We invite scientists and scholars from different disciplines, such as game studies, computer science, media studies/science, philology, electronics, formal sciences, history, and other fields that are concerned with games to get into an interdisciplinary exchange within the frame of this kick-off workshop.

For this purpose, we invite talks (max. 20 minutes) during which planned and finished game DH projects can be presented or ideas for new projects and collaborations can be brought up for discussion. Some potential fields of interest are:

• Hardware, software, and knowledge preservation / digital heritage preservation of games
• databases for games and gaming processes
• quantitative analysis of game input and output
• formal analysis / formalizing gaming processes
• game source codes as a type of text 
• paratexts / gray literature of games and gaming culture
• artificial intelligence for game analysis and game playing
• legal conditions and constraints for game preservation and game research in the DH
• virtualizing and emulating games
• media specific collections, exhibitions, and provision of games
• medical and biological aspects of gaming
• gamer cultures
• your suggestion!

Please submit your proposal on a topic from those areas (or similar) with a maximum of 1200 characters, a short biography, and a short list of your publications in the field. Submission deadline is February 15th by email

To attend our workshop as a (more or less) passive discussant, please write us an email until February 28th and attach some information about your fields of research/interests and a short academic biography. (Please understand that we only invite a limited number of participants to ensure the workshop character.)

The workshop will be held in English language and is supported by the Digital Humanities im deutschsprachigen Raum e.V., and the Department for Media Science at Humboldt-Universität Berlin.

Contact and applications