BeyondPlay 2024: The Transformative Power of Digital Gaming in a Deeply Mediatized Society

• Datum: 30. September 2024 – 2. October 2024
• Street: Linzer Straße 4
• Location: ZeMKI

Call for Papers

Digital Games and gaming are carriers, accelerators and subjects of change in media culture and society. In this capacity they serve as an interlink between media industries, digital technologies, media cultures, and social practices, making them ideal cases to analyze contemporary transformation processes in the context of (deep) mediatization, digitalization, and datafication.

This conference call hence builds on the premise that to understand the significance of digital games and gaming in a deeply mediatized society we need to look beyond play, i.e., the contents of games and the interaction with games alone. We call to go beyond reducing games to mere playing, examining their placement and connection within digital media environments as gamevironments to research how our communicative practices and their contexts transform through games, as well as how these games are reshaped through communicative practices. A perspective that goes beyond play indicates that researching games and gaming also allows for insights into the deepening of the mediatization and datafication of society.