Edited by Ira Fay and Dan Roy

AR and VR games are growing in popularity and access, while also increasing in the variety of experiences players can have. They offer multiplayer embodied experiences, ranging from augmented reality games that tap into GPS and have you walking around like Pokemon Go, to virtual reality games in a headset like Beat Saber, to mixed reality experiences that are location-specific like Ghostbusters: Dimension.

We welcome submissions of analyses and studies of AR and VR games that highlight this new avenue of gameplay experiences. We would also like to encourage designers of such games to submit post-mortems of their own work, as well as breakdowns of their design philosophy and lessons learned in their practice.

ETC Press is accepting submissions for this special issue of the Well Played journal. All submissions are due 30 April, 2023.

All submissions and questions should be sent to:

well-played (at) lists (dot) andrew (dot) cmu (dot) edu

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The Well Played Journal is a forum for in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game. It is a reviewed journal open to submissions that will be released on a regular basis.

Contributors are encouraged to analyze sequences in a game in detail in order to illustrate and interpret how the various components of a game can come together to create a fulfilling playing experience unique to this medium. Through contributors, the journal will provide a variety of perspectives on the value of games.

The goal of the journal is to continue developing and defining a literacy of games as well as a sense of their value as an experience. Video games are a complex medium that merits careful interpretation and insightful analysis. By inviting contributors to look closely at video games and the experience of playing them, we hope to expand the discussion, and show how games are well played in a variety of ways.

The ETC Press is an academic and open-source publishing imprint that distributes its work in print, electronic and digital form. Inviting readers to contribute to and create versions of each publication, ETC Press fosters a community of collaborative authorship and dialogue across media. ETC Press represents an experiment and an evolution in publishing, bridging virtual and physical media to redefine the future of publication.

https://press.etc.cmu.edu/publications/well-played/journal_series/well-played

Twitter: https://twitter.com/etcwellplayed