Archives par mot-clé : journalism

Call for papers – Bedroom Journalists? Zines and Early Player Cultures (GAMEVIRONMENTS)

Bedroom Journalists? Zines and Early Player Cultures, GAMEVIRONMENTS (special issue)

Submission deadline : June 1st, 2026

Scheduled publication : Summer 2027

edited by Arno Görgen and Aurelia Brandenburg

Call for papers

In the 1980s and 1990s, for many computer game enthusiasts, the dream of a job in the games industry often began in their bedrooms: some created their first games on the C64 or Atari, while others wanted to write about games and literally put together their own gaming magazines. However, not much is known about these so-called zines.

Compared to other areas of the history of games and gaming, there has been relatively little research on the histories of print publications as part of cultural histories of gaming cultures in general. There are exceptions to this rule, however, although these exceptions tend to focus on the history of commercial gaming magazines and their contents. The most notable example for this is Graeme Kirkpatrick’s book (2015) who investigated the emergence of UK gaming magazines, but especially for magazines in English, there also have been other studies such as Fisher (2015), Summers and Miller (2007, 2014), Cote (2018) or Schmidt et al. (2020) that used gaming magazines as a vehicle to analyse representations of gender and in a similar vein, scholars such as Condis and Morrissette (2023) or Laabs (2023) have also been investigating the famously sexist print ads these magazines used to publish especially in the 1990s and 2000s. Meanwhile, approaches that either focus on the production side of these magazines or try to investigate the fringes of the professional fields these magazines established, are far rarer. Graeme Kirkpatrick touches upon this issue due to his timeframe starting in the early 1980s and others, such as Trammel (2023) tend to brush them as well when incorporating sources such as newsletters into their research. There also are some highly localized studies such as Metzmacher’s (2017) dissertation on early German computer magazines that regards these magazines as actors in early networks of computer hobbyists and thus, in part also early gaming enthusiasts.

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Nineteenth-Century Transmedia Practices

Type: Call for Papers
Date: January 30, 2020 to February 1, 2020
Subject Fields: Popular Culture Studies, Journalism and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural History / Studies, Art, Art History & Visual Studies
 

CFP, International Symposium: “Nineteenth-Century Transmedia Practices”

30th January – 1st February 2020

University of Vienna, Austria

Organizers: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Monika Pietrzak-Franger (University of Vienna, Austria) and Prof. Dr. Christina Meyer (FU Berlin, Germany)

The notion that media content can proliferate and that consumption practices converge has given rise to a host of fascinating research projects in and outside of academia in the past years. Next to pedagogy, literary and cultural studies, such disciplines as economics, film and media studies along with legal studies have begun to trace, analyze and interpret various patterns and practices of transmediality. Simultaneously, numerous (globally operating) transmedia consulting companies began to invest in transmediality as a central marketing strategy (M.-L. Ryan 2017). In general, scholarship on transmediality has tended to focus on contemporary participatory media practices and media convergences in a networked culture (e.g. Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013) along with addressing various principles of storytelling (cf. H. Jenkins 2008; M. Freeman 2017, 2018; M.-L. Ryan & J.-N. Thon 2014; etc.). In the meantime, some efforts have been made to trace historical developments and cultural specificities in transmedia practices (esp. Freeman 2014, 2016), very few of these, however, went beyond the beginnings of the 20th century.

This conference aims to instead focus on the historicity of transmedia practices, with particular focus on the long nineteenth century (roughly from 1780 to 1920), a century that famously saw the birth of the mass media and brought the “frenzy of the visible” (J.-L. Comolli 1980). We understand practices not just as activities or performative acts of an individual, or a human being, but of ‘transpersonal” institutions (such as clubs, libraries, academies, advertising companies, syndicates, etc.). We thus read practices as forms and ways of actions, agency and performance that are discursive and systemic (networked) rather than as isolated acts. Moreover, the conference is interested in how specific content(s) in multiple media that stay recognizably the same dispersed across cultures in a time before digital convergence. Tracing the processes, economics and technologies involved in transmedia practices and the aesthetics of expansion and transgression in the long nineteenth century will allow for an enhanced understanding of specific configurations in the past and reconfigurations in our present moment. We are interested in contributions, both case studies that may act as models for specific developments as well as more theory-driven investigations, that address questions like:

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