The online journal gamevironments invites researchers to submit their work to gamevironments for possible publication in a special issue due for publication December 2017.

Whether by console, PC, mobile phone, VR headset, or other interface, video games and modern Jewish expression are now often intertwined. Jews who grew up with video games over the last forty years and who are growing up today are literate in the mechanics, visuals, sound effects, music, tropes, trends, and storylines of these games. That literacy necessarily can frame and bend contemporary Jewish practices. Likewise, those immersed in Jewish cultural and religious expression read video games through sensibilities informed by their Jewish journeys. Educator-researchers now develop video games for the purposes of the acquisition of Jewish cultural practices, such as understanding Jewish history, literature, and ethical reasoning. Players explore religious and cultural through game interfaces.

In an effort to collect new research and perspectives on these and related themes, gamevironments seeks paper proposals for an issue with focus on Jewish cultural practices, including religious expression. We wish to collect results as well as theoretical, analytical, methodological, and other social science and humanities approaches to Jewish expression and video games, in a broad sense. Papers may explore any aspect of the relationship between video games and Jewish cultural practices, including religious practices. For example, but not limited to:

  • Video games as Jewish cultural expression or practice
  • Video game practices intersecting with contemporary Jewish cultural and religious practices
  • Jewish studies approaches to video games; video game approaches to Jewish studies
  • Design principles based on data and scholarly theoretical frameworks known in the humanities and the social sciences
  • Interreligious or interfaith studies of video games including Jewish cultural practices
  • Analysis of video game culture through Jewish scholarly lenses
  • Expressions of Jewish life in video games, regardless of genre
  • Video game studies, critical and cultural analysis on Jewish topics
  • Jewish cultural expression or history in the video game industries
  • The use of Jewish sources for creating environments, styles, art, soundscapes, traditions, languages, lore, myths, religions or any sense of adaptation of Jewish sources
  • Space, time, and/or place: the use in video games of Jewish conceptions of time, maps tied to Jewish history, and/or of Jewish locations
  • The use of Jewish tropes, allusions, stereotypes, storylines, literary references, or narrative structures
  • Approaches to creating speculative/fictional religious systems influenced by Judaism
  • Issues of Jewish journeys, beliefs, ideas, ideologies, politics, ethics, morality, and agency in video games
  • Video games as elements, adjusters, or renewers of a collective and narrative memory
  • Video games as history, politics, including e.g. themes of historical traumatization, nationalism, anti-Semitism, emancipation, gender, totalitarianism, heritage, Jewish ethnic identities,
  • Serious games, games for social impact, games for learning related to Jewish life.

Studies related to any of the above-mentioned ideas, or other similar topics, are welcome as submission to this issue.

Submission deadlines:

Title and abstract submission (approx. 500 words plus Harvard style references to be included): 29.03.2017
Full text submission: 12.07.2017
Review results returned: 13.09.2017
Revised text submission: 8.11.2017
Online publication: 31.12.2017

Please consult the gamevironments submission style sheet before submitting your paper,   as well as the Help Desk for some general principles.

Note: All abstracts must include Harvard style references.

Please send any queries, texts and articles as RTF files to the issue editor, Owen Gottlieb using the subject header “gamevironments:”