Overview
The 9th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment will be held at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Interactive Entertainment 2013 (IE2013) embraces some of the recent changes in games discourses both inside and outside the academy, and turns its attention to “Matters of Life and Death”. In a field concerned with entertainment, seriousness has hovered on the edges of discussion and helped us interpret technologies of leisure. If we reframe seriousness as ‘matters of life and death’, we can look again at the factors which impact computer games and other interactive entertainment. Questions emerge from this framing and from recent discussions such as: How do we map changes in the economic environment of games? How do designers deal with increasingly mobile, active, tactile play forms? How do scientists evaluate and build for diversifying platforms? How can we study the manufacturing, resourcing and logistics of games distribution – especially when those systems are largely digital?
How do games and other software types get archived and historicised? For IE2013, we hope to see papers which take on these and other new topic areas loosely driven by material and concrete concerns from across all sectors of the research community.
Important Dates
Long Paper Submission: 16 June 2013
Short Papers Submission: 16 June 2013
Panel Submissions: 16 June 2013
Exhibit Submissions: 16 June 2013
Demo Submissions: 16 June 2013
Author Notification: 15 July 2013
Camera Ready Papers (all categories): 15 August 2013
Workshop Dates: 29th or 30th September 2013
Conference Dates: 30th of September – 1st of October 2013
Tracks
This years overarching theme is Matters of Life and Death. The tracks will loosely interpret the concepts underneath that theme. These tracks are by no means exhaustive but provide discussion points for where some of the major discussions in game studies and connected fields have explored recently. IE’s format encourages and pursues deep collaboration between theorists and practitioners of all types and the abiding strength of previous years has been the depth of disciplinarity conversation.
Material Matters
This track centres on material and concrete questions for games across the sciences, but can include material work from the humanities. Anticipated papers would include: heuristic methodologies, control and evaluation, design practices and methods, design history, experience measurement, networking models, advances in game graphics, advances in game sound.
Life
This track centres on production questions and new boundaries in game development. Anticipated papers would include: exercise and physical games, indie games, the ‘new arcade’ movement, changes in development methodologies, education games, experimental gameplay forms, advances in simulation and artificial intelligence, mobile and portable games.
Death
This track will centre on discussions about entropy in game development and culture. Anticipated papers would include: game and software preservation, labour and production histories, legal disputes, grey and black markets, digital distribution, mineral and electrical component studies.
These themes are diffuse enough to take in papers from various fields. Papers concerning applications and demonstration of games thinking not listed here will be welcomed. IE has always been a very diverse conference and we expect this year to be no different.
Please progress to the IE2013 Submission Page for submission, review and acceptance details.