Video Game Cultures 2025: Gaming Landscapes
10-12 September 2025 / Department of Theory of Art and Artworks, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Prague (CZ)
In response to many different threads emerging from our most recent Video Game Cultures conferences in Klagenfurt (2023) and Birmingham (2024), the theme for this year’s conference is Environmental Storytelling. Incorporating all permutations of the concept, this includes varying gaming landscapes, utopian and dystopian virtual environments, unseen, unimaginable and unwanted virtual spaces and places. We also seek to explore how the current and upcoming climate crisis is reflected in gaming environments’ spaces and places.
We seek proposals for papers exploring all possible forms of virtual worlds in games and virtual environments. What do they promise, how do they function, and what are their aesthetic points of reference? More importantly, with recent developments in AI procedures in Text to 3D or Text to Animation, how might these gaming spaces be constructed in the future, and what is the role of the human designer in this process?
Video Game Cultures 2025 will investigate how video game cultures, technologies, practices, communities, paratexts and genres develop within the framework of five thematic tracks. As digital games encompass an expanding range of highly complex and variant phenomena, this often leads to an overlap of issues across themes. In response to the diversity of these digital experiences, we are inviting participants of all backgrounds to submit proposals to this traditionally interdisciplinary event.
Participants are encouraged to think broadly within and across thematic tracks, and submissions can address topics and questions relevant to games such as, but not limited to:
Environmental Storytelling: Space and place in game design and gameplay. Non-linear and non-Euclidean spaces. Large-scale games and simulations. The rise of computer games bigger than planet Earth. Space engines.
Eutopia and Sci-fi: Citizen science. Brave new worlds. Stars and Sci-fi sims. Alternative physics designs. Looking for the way out of environmental apocalypse. The future of (artificial) life. Escapism. Uncanny worlds.
Dystopia and Apocalypse: Horror scenarios. Apocalypse as practice. Living in dystopia. Diving into the future of evil. Dark inside but cute looking. Spaces and places of the past. Lost places and their vital memory. Environmental collapse.
Spaces for Healthy Emotions: Well-being places. Virtual 3rd places. Building virtual memorials. Sites of mourning. AR and VR Simulations of post-mortem being. Gameplay models beyond video game studies. Game space and healthcare applications. Alternative lives. Game spaces and the sublime.
AI and Hardware for Space: AI-led inventions and interventions in game design, the impact of Text to 3D and Text to Animation AI on designer productivity. Histories of procedurally generated spaces. AI produced experimental environments. A bright future for independent developers? Control, input devices and movement. XR, AR and Virtual/Mixed Reality devices and gaming cultures. The future of immersion and embodiment.
We welcome contributions to these areas that consider video games as text and/or experience, that approach the areas from the designer’s perspective, and/or that consider cultures of video gaming.
This call encourages submission of proposals for academic papers, short workshops, practitioner-based activities, best practice showcases, how-to sessions, live demonstrations, performances, and pre-formed panels. We particularly welcome short film screenings, photographic essays, installations, interactive talks, and alternative presentation styles that encourage engagement.
What to send:
300-word abstracts, proposals and other forms of contribution and 100-word bio notes should be submitted by Monday 5 May 2025. All submissions will be minimally double reviewed, under anonymous (blind) conditions, by a global panel drawn from members of the Project Team and the Video Game Cultures Advisory Board. In practice, by the time a proposal is accepted, typically it will have been triple and quadruple reviewed.
You will be notified of the panel’s decision on or by Friday 20 June 2025.
All abstracts must be submitted to: daniel.riha@fhs.cuni.cz
Ethos
This event is designed to be an inclusive academic research and publishing project. It aims to bring people together from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.
We believe it is a mark of personal courtesy to and professional respect for your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the conference and participate in all presentations. The main intention of Video Game Cultures 2025 is to create a personal, in-presence experience for its participants and to facilitate community building. Please consider this carefully when submitting an abstract for presentation.
All papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English. Selected papers may be developed for publication in a themed hardcopy volume.