In and Out of Art History: The Video Games Conundrum

LEA (The MIT Press) Special Issue

In recent years, renowned museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York have started acquiring video games for their permanent collections. At the same time, other leading art institutions have been expanding their engagement with video games beyond collection and preservation. Notably, in 2013 the Victoria and Albert Museum in London appointed its first ever Games Designer in Residence. Those initiatives reflect the rapid technical and conceptual evolution of video games over the past four decades, which has resulted in their gradual recognition as a new type of cultural object. However, the firm establishment of video games as a distinct art form remains a rather contested subject not only among art historians, but also among cultural theorists and practitioners at large. The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (The MIT Press) is inviting proposals from academics, art historians, video game theorists and practitioners, for an issue examining video games in relationship to and within art history. The issue aims to locate and investigate questions such as: Can we identify moments when art history and the history of video games are bound together? Are there modes of inquiry that can be developed to mutual benefit? Can video games challenge now canonized and hegemonic discourses within art history?

Relevant areas of interest addressed by the issue’s contributors could include, but are by no means limited to:

- Historical precursors
- Artistic practices of multiple authorship
- Intersections with digital theories and methodologies
- Video games as interactive and experience-based art
- Online gaming and the democratization of the cultural object
- Indie games
- ‘Art games’ and their relation to the mainstream gaming industry
- Ludological and narratological approaches

Please submit your abstract by April 23, 2017.

The deadline for submission of full articles will be July 20, 2017.

See abstract and paper submission process and guidelines here: https://www.pubpub.org/cac/page/call-for-papers-gaming