Beyond doubt, one of the most exciting and interesting aesthetic trends in media is evident in today’s video games. Rising aesthetic complexity based on its simulative capacities, hybridity (instead of differentiation and segmentation) and the players’ structural integration into the screen events, allows forms of interaction and experience no other media can offer. These specific characteristics are due to the technological basis of video games, the ability to interconnect the players’ actions through an input device with actions displayed on a screen. The result of this arrangement is a virtualised playing field. Since the very beginning, this has enriched video games aesthetically through narrative forms producing fictional game worlds, where the player meets the ludic challenges by moving figures and characters and inter-acting with a variety of objects according to the options and eventualities made possible by the gaming structures.

Early video games such as Pong, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong already enhanced their ludic challenges through, and within, a fictional game world. But, since the 1990s, video games have combined ludic elements with a variety of forms and aesthetics inherited from popular media such as cinema, television or comics, in-creasing the aesthetic complexity and constantly producing new challenges and experiences. These inherited forms not only establish “remediated” references, but form an integral part of video games by adopting specific functions within the ludic action-system, thereby unfolding the simulative potentials of today’s video games. Moreover forms of attraction in video games are becoming less solely based on the configuration of rules and goals than on the narrative constructions which frame the ludic challenges. Video games such as Shadow of the Colossus, Grand Theft Auto and Silent Hill draw a lot of their attractiveness through the specific interconnections between ludic and narrative forms and structures. These video games work by establishing new modes of gaming experience expanding the dimensions of displayed events, audiovisual composition and ludic configuration.

Above all, this hybrid character of video games has been discussed within the narratology-ludology debate. Although the problem of grasping the hybridisation has not yet been solved, a main discourse achievement remains the crucial difference between narrativity and gameness in video games. The publication “Narrative Forms in Video Games” seeks to address this specific characteristic of video games by focusing on narrative and ludic forms rather than on the narrative or the game in video games. The essential distinction between game/play and narrative is there-fore put back and the cultural repertoires of forms (which individual media consists of) is made central to the focus. The publication aims at analyzing significant hybrid types of ludic constructions and challenges in video games, revising its methodological implications and evaluating approaches towards this phenomenon.

We hereby invite contributions focusing on, but not limited to, the following topics:

1. the analysis of ‘concrete’ video games and/or genres, and the relationship between video games and popular media such as cinema, television or comics as well as the analysis of ludic precursors, such as board games
2. the history of the formation of specific aesthetics, configurations, logics and challenges in video games
3. the simulative and narrative effects
4. theoretical and methodological implications

Deadline for draft copy submission (approx. 300 words): April 7, 2008

Notification of accepted proposals: April 21, 2008

Deadline for final papers: October 31, 2008

Draft copies and papers can be written in English or German.

Contact: Jürgen Sorg, sorg@fk615.uni-siegen.de, www.medienmorphologie.de