The call for papers for the Game Research Lab annual spring seminar is now available. This year topic is “Breaking the Magic Circle”, borrowing the concept of Johan Huizinga from the 1930’s.

“Huizinga wrote about the free and voluntary nature of play, how it is “an activity connected with no material interest” and how it “proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space”, involving and absorbing players utterly into a separate world set off from the “ordinary” life, while being created and maintained by communities of players.

“Breaking the Magic Circle” seminar invites presentations from multiple points of view, including theoretical as well as empirically based studies into that question or expand existing conceptions regarding digital games and play.

Particular fields of study might include, but are not limited to:

• pervasive, mobile or location based gaming,
• alternate reality gaming
• casual, non-immersive or coincidental forms of play,
• professional gaming,
• money gaming, betting and gambling within digital games and play.”

Read the whole call for papers here.