My mate Tom is the co-editor of this very interesting issue for Refractory. The themes they’re interested in will be right up the alley of many of the readers of this blog. 🙂
Refractory: a Journal of Entertainment Media is a refereed, peer-reviewed, e-journal that explores the diverging and intersecting aspects of current and past entertainment media. The journal is published by the Cinema Studies Program, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne.
ISSUE THEME: Meta-Materiality: Games, New Media, The Digital
Launching as it did in 2002, The Refractory arrived on the scene just in time for its titular metaphor to get complicated, with the arrival of ‘metamaterials’ – artificial composites with negative refractive indices. When a wave phenomenon such as light travels between media, it changes speed and bends relative to the normal: refraction. But with just the right metamaterial, the positive refraction can be negated.
The wave finds its stride – the straw in the glass looks straight – total refraction. This special issue of The Refractory aims to assess its central metaphor in relationship to games and new media with a focus on the materiality of their aesthetics, assemblages, ecologies, and networks.
Some directions you may wish to consider are:
– Real-world economics, class and power in games
 – Remediation, Adaptation, Cross-media Style and the Media’s Metamateriality
– Protocol, Code, Algorithms – the materiality of Digital Media
 – Re-representation of one medium by another: e.g. Videogame Emulations, Youtube
– Arcades, public space, social mapping and locative media
– Material genres: e.g. Game engines, middleware, blogs,
 – Mobile movements and the ‘ludicity’ of technology
– Controller crises, free movement, and gestural remediation: e.g. Wii Sports
– Who actually makes games? / A history of Tose studios
– Piracy, free gaming, information control, DRM
– New Media art and artistic interventionAbstract Deadline: April 10th
 (Articles: 3,000 – 7,000 words, refereed)
 (Small Articles: 1,000 – 3,000 words)
 (Reviews: 300 – 500 words)
 Notification of Successes: April 30th
 Submission Deadline: July 1st
 Publication: Mid-Late AugustAll Enquires and Submissions:
refractorygames@gmail.com
Check it out: http://www.refractory.unimelb.edu.au/