Showing posts with label cfp. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cfp. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Level Design Workshop at GDC 2019: submissions due November 2

GDC season is coming up soon. If you have any interest in level design and you have something to say about it, then please submit a proposal to the Level Design Workshop mini-track at GDC 2019.

Although it is supervised by AAA developers with a level design background, like Clint Hocking or Joel Burgess or Lisa Brown, you don't have to be a AAA developer -- hell, they even let me give a couple talks in past years, and I'm just some kind of vaguely-leftist pseudo-academic weirdo? Again: indie, modder, altgames, etc. folks of all backgrounds are all welcome and encouraged to submit, as long as there's some relevance to environmental world design for any game genre. I don't look at the submissions, but I know the committee truly does want to highlight any new voices and new approaches to level design.

(Also: this is a really great alternate way to attend GDC without going through the main submission process. The applicant pool here is smaller, the mentoring process is more cozy, and we often do some kind of group level design dinner that week.)

Submit a proposal within the next two weeks, by November 2nd. Good luck!

Full blurb is below:

Saturday, February 24, 2018

CFP: last week for submissions to Queerness and Games Conference 2018

Just a quick note / reminder to people: there's about one week left to submit your session and panel proposals to the 2018 Queerness and Games Conference, in Montreal this September 29-30. I've attended in past years and might attend this year, and I recommend it as a pretty inclusive conference for students, professionals, designers, and academics alike. Money for travel and free accommodations are also available on request. Maybe see you there!

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

CFP: Queerness and Games Conference 2018 at Concordia University in Montréal

photo of Tanya DePass speaking at QGCon 2017
The Queerness and Games Conference (or QGCon) is running again in 2018, this time in beautifully affordable Montréal. Here's the call for papers, panels, and talk submissions, copy and pasted from the website, emphasis added by me:
The Queerness and Games Conference is now accepting submissions for presentations at its fifth annual conference, which will be held on September 29-30, 2018 at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada! Proposals for conference talks and other sessions are due March 1st, 2018 (details and instructions below).

QGCon is an annual event that brings together developers, academics, educators, and activists to explore the intersection of LGBTQ issues and video games. Proposals for talks, pre-constituted panels, workshops, roundtables, and post mortems are welcome. Speakers from all backgrounds are encouraged to submit. Because QGCon is a community-oriented event that seeks to foster dialogue across areas of expertise, we especially value sessions that engage a broad and diverse audience. Please note that, since QGCon attendees come from across academia, industry, and beyond, different speakers may bring different ideas about what constitutes a “talk” or a “panel.” QGCon values these differences and kindly requests that, as per the submission guidelines below, prospective speakers describe the approach they hope to take to their proposed session.

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

ART GAMES DEMOS, call for submissions -- 16 December 2017, in Lyon, France


Ever wanted to exhibit your experimental glitch machinima in France? Well, now's your chance! The curator Isabelle Arvers sends over this call for machinima (!) as well as videos / games / installation submissions on the theme of borders and migration:
As part of the Nuage Numérique Festival in connection with the presentation of TALOS, a show by Arkadi Zaides, on December 16, 2017 at the Subsistances in Lyon, Art Games Demos launches a new call for projects dedicated to the theme of borders and migration.

We are looking for creations in the following categories: video creation; 2D, 3D, 4D, VR; machinima; glitch, hacks, alternative controllers; independant/experimental/under development videogames; installations; prototypes; performances; music.

Send your proposals to: iarvers@gmail.com; chloe.desmoineaux@live.fr; residence@labo-nrv.io
Sounds like a good time, and France is (probably) lovely this time of year.

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Apply to STUGAN, a bucolic game design residency in Sweden


Stugan is a residency program for indie game designers to hang out together in a beautiful cabin in the Swedish countryside and work on their stuff.

They call it an "accelerator", but don't that word dissuade you. If you consider yourself more of an artist than a businessperson, it's OK, they have hosted plenty of artsy experimental designer types too.

There's been some understandable criticism of Stugan's arrangements: Like many artist residencies and opportunities, there are certain barriers to access -- you're basically foregoing paid work for a few months as a sort of working holiday, and you'll need existing funds to travel to Sweden somehow.

However, I think it's worth noting that many art residencies often have hefty application fees and/or require attendees to pay for their own room and board. Compared to that inaccessible norm in the (messed-up) art world, Stugan is a somewhat reasonable deal that's firmly in the middle of the pack for art, and extremely rare in video games funding.

Of course that doesn't mean it's "accessible" -- so if you're interested in Stugan but don't necessarily have the resources, you might want to do some research into funding sources for artists, you might be surprised. Also, if you're a student, talk to your school -- many institutions offer travel grants for programs like this.

Or just cross that bridge when you come to it? You can apply to Stugan for free. Good luck.

Monday, December 12, 2016

Call for games / installations: Now Play This 2017 in London, England


I highly encourage any designers and developers reading this to submit their games and things for Now Play This:
Now Play This is a festival of experimental game design, showcasing some of the most interesting games and playful work being made around the UK and the world. It will run for the third time at Somerset House in London from 7-9 April, 2017, as part of the London Games Festival. There’ll be an exhibition of games running throughout, plus special events including a board games afternoon, a strange controllers showcase, and, on Friday, a day for discussion between practitioners. Tickets will be available from February 2017.
It is a curated show, but they're also open to submissions and contributions. There's "a small honorarium of £75 for work [... they] also cover limited travel and production costs." Here's the basic brief, which seems to encompass, "basically anything interesting":
We’re interested in everything you can play: videogames, boardgames, street games, performances, paintings or drawings that invite you to play while you look, responsive sculptures, artist-designed toys, interactive installations, games for one person, games for twenty, things that probably aren’t technically games but never mind, strange contraptions, unreleased work, old favourites. Our 2015 and 2016 lineups given an idea of what Now Play This is like, but for 2017 we’re particularly interested in:
  • Games that look at landscape in an interesting way
  • Games that experiment with duration – very short games, games that build up gradually over time, games that are different depending on when you play them
  • Games that were never made: thought experiments, doomed proposals, prototypes that never received a public release
  • Play objects: things – digital or physical – that invite players to invent their own games or decipher the rules of the object and its interactions
  • Games around embodiment which consciously consider the physical existence of the person playing
  • Games with strange controllers
  • Games that can take place in the outdoor areas of Somerset House
We’re also particularly interested in work that uses paper in interesting ways, or that’s fun to play as well as watch, or which can accommodate a large number of players (whether through short play sessions or many simultaneous players).
Last year, they featured my dick pic game Cobra Club HD in their exhibition, and I'm told lots of giggling moms hogged the kiosk and kept shooing their kids away. Sounds really fun! If you're in London, make sure you don't miss it!

Friday, January 15, 2016

Two 2016 NYC games conferences to submit talks to, like, right now

What kind of games conference do you run after an IndieCade conference co-chair confesses that games conferences aren't "working"? Well, uh... let's do a bunch of conferences to try to figure it out!

Different Games is a diversity-focused games conference in the beginning of April, run by organizers based in Brooklyn and Atlanta. DG, in particular, holds a special place in my heart for administering the original arts grant that began my current track of gay sex games, so you could say they were kind of on the bleeding edge of indie sustainability. This year, Different Games 2016 (April 8-9) has several different tracks / themes:
  • Affective Play (i.e. feelings, emotions, bodies)
  • Video Games in Latin America
  • Video Games and Indigenous Culture
  • Accessible Game Design (i.e. making the field more accessible to new designers)
  • Participatory Game Design (i.e. game design as a workshop process, Freire?)
  • Race and Culture in Games
  • Player Agency, Mods, and Glitches
DG 2016 session submissions close on January 22nd. They also accept more traditional academic paper submissions, and game submissions for their arcade as well. (Huh, turns out they were all closed already, and only game submissions are open now? That was fast!)

IndieCade East, held in the sinister shadow of the academic-ish NYC games scene, has always been the slightly less chill / more intense of the twin IndieCades. (More ideas! More e-sports! More beer!) Its relatively young age also means that it's more open to experimentation. This year, IndieCade East 2016 (April 29 - May 1) is trying out some very interesting changes with their format:
  • It's now in the middle of Spring instead of the middle of Winter. (Yay!)
  • The conference chairs are Jennie and Henry Faber, developers and community leaders from Toronto (!) which is in Canada (!!) and NOT in the United States (!!!)
  • The three conference tracks recognize a post-indiepocalypse world: (a) design lessons from fields outside of games, (b) economic sustainability for games, (c) future tools and technology.
Of course, you aren't necessarily limited to those themes, and the only real criteria is that you can say interesting things about games -- either way, session submissions close on February 3rd.

* * *

Hopefully you, dear reader, will be at one (or both) of those events? See you in April!

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Queerness and Games Conference 2015, call for proposals, due by July 1


The good folks at QGCon at UC Berkeley need YOUR session proposals for their third year running. I participated in the first year it ran, 2013, and I enjoyed the mix of scholarly rigor and casual atmosphere, there a pleasant mix of academics and not-academics that's very refreshing.

You can be a super academic-y academic and present a paper, or you can talk about a game you made, or discuss a specific games community you're part of, or even relate your personal experience with games and/or run a workshop. They're pretty accommodating and welcoming and supportive, even if you've never given a talk before. It's also pretty unique, there's really no other conference on the circuit that even tries to approach these topics.

I highly recommend submitting a proposal by July 1st, especially if you live around the Bay Area or along the west coast, it's just a short trip over.

Here's an excerpt of the call:

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

DECK (Doom Engine Creator's Kit) needs artists and sound designers.


JP LeBreton has recently announced the "DECK" (Doom Engine Creator's Kit) project, an open-source public-domain all-in-one bundle of Doom technology: a game engine + editor + game assets + tutorials, all integrated together and easily accessible. It's intended to empower people to easily make cool lo-fi 3D first person games and it sounds really cool...

... but it needs help. It needs some Doom-style character sprites, some Doom-style environment textures / decoration sprites, and a lot of audio design. Pitch in and help build free indie game tools!

Here's my contribution so far, some painterly-ish pseudo-photo "medieval manor" textures:


It was kind of fun to work at low resolution without having to worry about shaders or 3D meshes or UVs or whatever. I recommend it.

Monday, December 10, 2012

CFP: "Different Games" at NYU Poly, due Feb 1

Different Games is a new game conference in NYC that focuses on race / gender / sexuality / disability / politics in games. If you have something to say or make (game / installation / workshop / talk) then you might want to submit something by Feb 1st. More info at http://www.differentgames.org/cfp/

(Also, NYC is at its best in April...)