Call for Book Chapter Proposals: Disability Game Studies

This CFP is looking for chapters for an edited collection to address the scarcity of disabled voices and representations in games by providing a foundational text for the intersection of disability and game studies. In short, we are seeking chapters that act as foundational texts for the different ways disability identity is being observed in gaming media while promoting disability and game studies research.

The study of representation in games is a growing area in academia, especially since conversations about the cultural ramifications of stereotypical or harmful representations have entered popular discourse. Despite this, disability representation has been significantly overlooked in the face of able-bodied and neurotypical predispositions. As it stands now, rehabilitative games research is abundant in the STEM and psychology fields and often reproduces Eli Clare’s “ideology of cure”—seeking to cure or eradicate disability. Taking

inspiration from Bonnie Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw’s Queer Game Studies and Katie

Ellis, Tama Leaver, Mike Kent’s Gaming Disability: Disability Perspectives on Contemporary Video Games, we hope that this edited collection will provide scholars with significant resources to investigate further the intersection of disability and game studies from a humanities perspective.

Games have received greater attention in academia over the past decade, both in terms of game- based courses in the humanities and campus facilities designed for courses and research in game studies. There has also been a rising number of games with alternative approaches, goals, and mechanics that allow for more nuanced and expansive representations of disability. What makes this CFP timely is that this attention to games is coupled with increased rehabilitative games research. While several scholars are working at the intersection of disability and games (Adan Jerreat-Poole, Cecilia Rodéhn, Diane Carr, Sky LaRell Anderson), the field has not received the critical attention it deserves in mainstream gaming culture or game studies. Building off the insight of these and other scholars, we are interested in authors exploring their research and thinking about how games approach disability through their narratives, representation, mechanics, or other aspects. This edited collection seeks to serve as a foundational compilation of current disability game studies scholarship that focuses on non-rehabilitative frameworks, such as Elizabeth Ellcessor and Bill Kirkpatrick’s concepts of “crip negotiation” and “cripping” strategies in Disability Media Studies, for example.

We are especially interested in hearing from scholars who exist within or in proximity to disability community spaces and have observed gameplay and design in a wide range of settings. Instead of fixating on the problematic representations tied to assumptions about normative bodies and minds, including the connections between disability, mental illness, and neurodivergence, we hope to reveal how each author observes intersectional approaches to disability through gaming media.

The proposed edited book intends to fill the gap in this research by sharing scholarly essays from interdisciplinary perspectives, ranging from theoretical perspectives to case studies, on questions such as:

• How can disability studies benefit from a game studies perspective through designing games around or playing and analyzing games through the lenses of issues of disability and ableism?
• How can we celebrate failure in tabletop roleplaying game RPG media without normalizing the pain and hardships experienced by the disability communities?
• How can we critique romanticized, essentializing, or otherwise problematic depictions of disability in RPG design while avoiding the common framing of disabled characters as inferior?
• How can RPG narratives and game mechanics exhibit methods of game design that acknowledge the diverse experiences of disability while still being critical of disabling politics and social injustice in the real world?
• How can ethnography and autoethnography be used to develop tools for analyzing narrative and game design practices?
• How can we apply complex embodiment to roleplaying games when developing, playing, or reflecting on characters with disabilities?
• How do games and gaming media promote the agency of players with disabilities concerning their characters or avatars and the game’s environment, mechanics, or other aspects of play?
• How do we account for difficulty settings and other inclusive and access-based game designs and practices in making the game accessible without alienating the challenge?

Additionally, the book intends to scrutinize the following non-exhaustive topics:

• The role of trauma and memory
• Race and disability, with particular interest in Indigenous game studies submissions.
• Gender and sexuality, (hyper)masculinity, femininity, and queerness/feminist or eco- feminism, regarding disability
• Posthumanism and transhumanism in fantasy (i.e., becoming-machine and becoming- other) (Deleuze)
• Embodiment of technology and prosthetics
• Medical innovations and healing
• Cures and diseases translated from the game world to our world
• Neurodivergent versus neurotypical game mechanics
• Embodied and philosophical approaches to characters and narratives
• Character and political motives for or against disability justice in and out of the game
• Historical influences and precedents to disability tropes in roleplaying games
• Narrative considerations for in-game dreams, nightmares, magic, and the supernatural
• Failure and its philosophical and rhetorical value for disability themes as discussed by Jay Dolmage, Jack Halberstam, Jesper Juul, José Esteban Muñoz, David Payne, and Bo Ruberg.

If interested, please email abstracts of up to 300 words to Giuseppe Femia at gwfemia@uwaterloo.ca by November 30, 2024. Please also include a bio of 200-300 words.

Final submissions will be around, but at most, 8,000 words and follow Chicago 17 citation format. These submissions will likely go through an external peer review process decided by the publisher.

The deadlines are as follows:

November 30, 2024: Abstract and author bio
February 28, 2025: First draft of chapters
April 30, 2025: Final chapters