Despite geopolitics' decline as an academic discipline in the developed countries after World War II, geopolitical thinking is still alive and well in common discourse and popular media or even politics in developing countries, including European ones. In the light of the aforementioned, it is not surprising that geopolitics also can be found in works of fiction including video games where it actually seems to be the dominant form of portraying a state.
Geopolitics as a theory has a concept of a national state as a "living organism" which struggles to survive in competition with other states and, subsequently, conceives it as either the most important or simply the only actor of international politics while regarding other entities commonsensically related to politics (such as NGOs, corporations, media, religious and scientific institutions, etc.) as either extensions of a state or agents of someone else's "soft power" – puppets, used by their masters to dominate neighbors' economies, media and culture without direct military confrontation. The aforementioned may indeed seem as a description of a state in a typical strategy game: a player usually impersonates not an individual ruler or a people but a state itself and thus is expected to act as if this state had its own interests and goals in life, primary in relation to those of its citizens whose well-being can be conceived of only as a means to an end.
As this topic provides an abundance of both objects of analysis and research angles, we invite scholars from all fields interested in digital and non-digital games to join our discussion in Moscow, May 10-11, 2018.