CfP: “Music in Non-digital Games” Special Issue of JSMG (Journal of Sound and Music in Games)

Call for Contributions: “Music in Non-digital Games”. Special Issue of JSMG (Journal of Sound and Music in Games)

Deadline: 31. October 2022

The Journal of Sound and Music in Games (JSMG) was successfully launched in 2020 and has published three rich and varied volumes. It has been approved for indexing by SCOPUS, an endorsement of its quality and vitality.

The planned issue, ed. by Christoph Hust (Leipzig, Germany) and Martin Roth (Kyoto, Japan), focuses on music in non-digital games – board games, dice games, card games, pen-and-paper role-playing games – within a global perspective. Its aim is to give a first overview of a broad topic that largely has not been explored before. Proposals that deal with sources from the 20th and 21st century are especially welcome. The aim is to consider games as cultural artifacts that store information about how music is conceptualized in a certain historical and cultural environment. Among others, possible topics might include:

  • games that include practical music making

  • quiz games about music

  • depiction of musical canon formation in games

  • atmospheric background music for pen-and-paper role-playing games

  • music as a plot device in P&P games

  • depiction of individual musical genres in games

  • games about the musical market

  • music games as a means of product placement, marketing, and advertising 

  • depiction of cultural and/or gender stereotypes in music games

  • games in the service of music pedagogics

  • music games and TV

For further inspiration, a small collection of relevant games can be found here.

If you like to contribute to this issue, please send an abstract (English only) of no more than 300 words to christoph.hust[at]hmt-leipzig[dot]de until October 31, 2022.

Contributors will be contacted by December 31 at latest, and texts will be due on June 1, 2023. Texts intended for publication will go through a peer review after that, and the issue is planned to be published in 2024.

You can access JSMG’s style guide here.

CFP, News, CFAHelene Heuser