Call for papers: Game Studies and the Creative Industries
Guest Editors:
Samyr Paz (Universidade Feevale) Camila Freitas (UFPB) e Beatriz Blanco (SENAC-SP)
In recent years, digital games have become one of the most dynamic and profitable sectors of the creative economy. No longer viewed purely as entertainment products, games are increasingly recognized as sociotechnical systems that shape cultural, symbolic, communicational, and economic practices. As complex interactive media with their own languages and formats - merging aesthetics, technology, and player agency - games intersect with other cultural domains such as cinema, music, fashion, design, and literature. In doing so, they assert themselves as an integral and active part of the global creative industries.
Within this context, Game Studies has emerged as a vibrant interdisciplinary field, bringing together diverse epistemologies, methodological approaches, and empirical objects to investigate how games produce subjectivities, establish regimes of mediation, shape creative processes, and operate within the circuits of cultural production, circulation, and consumption. This field engages with a wide range of ethical, political, economic, and aesthetic issues that permeate both player experiences and the industry's structures of production.
The intersection of Game Studies and the Creative Industries invites us to view games not merely as playful cultural artifacts, but as products and processes that embody symbolic, affective, and economic value. This connection opens up space for critical discussions around performativity, the commodification of play, aesthetic innovation, regimes of visibility and invisibility, labor precarity, innovation and resistance, interactive communities, fandoms, and world-building.
This thematic dossier invites scholars to submit original articles that critically explore the connections between Game Studies and the Creative Industries from theoretical, methodological, or empirical perspectives. Contributions may address (but are not limited to) the following thematic axes:
• Creativity and Playful Practices: game design, aesthetic innovation, interactive narratives, authorship processes, ludicity as language, and experimental intersections between art and technology.
• Production, Consumption, and Circulation: independent game development, the political economy of games, fan practices, digital distribution networks, and affective economies.
• Platformization and Mediation: modding, games-as-a-service, game streaming, technological infrastructure, monetization models, surveillance, commodification, and patterns of consumption.
• Intersectionality, Representation, and Communities: gender, race, class, disability, and sexuality in games; inclusion and accessibility policies; spaces of visibility; and practices of mobilization and activism within gaming communities.
Understanding the creative industries as a space shaped by both exploitative dynamics and emancipatory potential, this dossier also welcomes reflections on the material conditions of game production, circulation, and valorization in Brazil and Latin America. We especially encourage critical perspectives that interrogate the relationships between center and periphery, coloniality and creative autonomy, hegemony and counter-hegemony.
In addition to academic articles, the dossier will accept book reviews (limited to critical analyses of books published within the last three years or reissued classics; reviews of works already covered elsewhere will not be accepted).
Submission guidelines:
• We accept original and unpublished articles in Portuguese, Spanish, or English. Submissions are open to PhD holders, including co-authored work with Master's or doctoral students, provided that at least one author holds a PhD.
• All manuscripts must follow the journal’s submission guidelines, available at: https://periodicos.feevale.br/seer/index.php/braziliancreativeindustries/about/submissions
• All submissions will undergo peer review under a double-blind evaluation process.
• Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2025
• Expected publication: March 2, 2026
References:
AARSETH, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on ergodic literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
BULUT, Ergin. A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry. ISBN: 978-1501746536. Livros, [s.d.].
CAILLOIS, Roger. Os jogos e os homens: a máscara e a vertigem. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2017.
DOVEY, Jon; KENNEDY, Helen W. Game cultures: computer games as new media. Berkshire: Open University Press, 2006.
HUIZINGA, Johan. Homo ludens: um estudo sobre o elemento lúdico da cultura. Lisboa: Edições 70, 2003.
JENKINS, Henry. Fans, bloggers, and gamers: exploring participatory culture. New York: NYU Press, 2006.
JUUL, Jesper. Half-real: video games between real rules and fictional worlds. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.
KEOGH, Brendan. A play of bodies: how we perceive videogames. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018.
KEOGH, Brendan. The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2023.
KIRKPATRICK, Graeme. Aesthetic theory and the video game. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.
LANKOSKI, Petri; BJÖRK, Staffan (Org.). Game research methods: an overview. Pittsburgh: ETC Press, 2015.
MÄYRÄ, Frans. An introduction to game studies: games in culture. London: SAGE Publications, 2008.
SALEN, Katie; ZIMMERMAN, Eric. Rules of play: game design fundamentals. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004.
SUTTON-SMITH, Brian. The ambiguity of play. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
TAYLOR, T. L. Play between worlds: exploring online game culture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009.
