May 11, 2018, Moscow
Games and Geopolitics
Pre-conference workshop
Moscow Game Center and Jagiellonian Game Studies Research Centre in Krakow invite paper abstracts for "Games and Geopolitics" seminar dedicated to representation of international politics in videogames.
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.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Geopolitical thinking in/of games
  • Games as critical utterances toward political concepts
  • Player-to-Player interactions affected by agendas
  • International politics' effect on videogame industry
  • State as a character, subject and protagonist

We welcome submissions from both experienced and novice researchers.
Guidelines for authors
Your submission should contain two documents:

№1 – An abstract (400 words minimum and 700 words maximum) accompanied with a list of up to 10 keywords and a list of references (bibliography and ludography). This document cannot contain any personal data including author's name, affiliation and indicative references to any previous publications of the same author.

№2 – ID. This document should contain author's first name, last name, affiliation and contact information

All abstracts will be subject to blind peer review. The deadline to submit abstracts is March 25 March 31, 2018.

Submission address: tzmajkowski@gmail.com
Important dates
Deadline for submission: March 25 March 31, 2018
Notification of acceptance/rejection: April 8, 2018
Deadline for registration: April 14, 2018
Workshop: May 10-11, 2018
Organizing committee


Magdalena Bednorz (University of Silesia)
Tomasz Z. Majkowski (Jagiellonian University)
Leonid Moyzhes (Russian State University for the Humanities)
Maksim Podvalnyi (Russian State University for the Humanities)
Piotr Sterczewski (Jagiellonian University)
Aleksandr Vetushinskyi (Moscow State University)


The project is organized with the financial support of Polish Institute in Moscow.
This site was made on Tilda — a website builder that helps to create a website without any code
Create a website