CFP2025

American, British and Canadian Studies

Special Issue
American Narratives and Video Games
December 2025

Call for Papers

Guest Editors
Francesca Razzi, “G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara (francesca.razzi@unich.it)
Valentina Romanzi, University of Torino and University of Verona (valentina.romanzi@unito.it)

Given their exceeding popularity as both products of the entertainment industry and challenging objects of academic inquiry (Chess and Consalvo 2022; Meinel 2022), video games provide a productive case-study for the intersection of different theoretical frameworks such as cultural studies and literary criticism, along with media and transmedia studies, and adaptation studies (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013; Leitch 2017). As recent research has underlined, the complicated (and often controversial) relation between video games and US culture crucially involves the problem of ideology (Muriel and Crawford 2018; Wills 2019; Toscano 2020), encouraging a critical debate on the current nature and status of video games – seen as broad cultural hypertexts where the elements related to content, medium, and audiences dramatically converge. Whether in their specific entanglement with popular culture, politics, and history, or in their broader technological implications, video games are being increasingly recognized as a profitable subfield of American Studies, as cutting-edge research shows (Pöhlmann 2019; Mayar and Schubert 2021; Jagoda and Malkowski 2022; Fuchs, “Digital America: Introduction” 2023).

Placed within this background, our special issue wishes to deepen the critical import of video gaming on contemporary American culture, focusing on a distinctive, although relatively underexplored, aspect of video gaming – that is, their relation with the worlds and modes of American narratives. In fact, video gaming represents a peculiar form of interactive narrative in its own right (see Koenitz 2022). On the one hand, this form of interactivity clearly involves an evaluation of contents, plots, and stories as key elements, integral to the creation of video game narratives. On the other, an audience-oriented perspective underlines how video games may also represent examples of fictional self-involvement, in that they show the players’ engagement in construing their own, personal narrative (see Robson and Meskin 2016). This, in turn, nurtures the emergence of fan communities, or of other networks based on users’ experience and activity.

Thus, our issue aims at investigating the mutual connections among different narrative and literary forms simultaneously conveyed by and reflected into the composite realm of American video gaming. In particular, we welcome contributions that analyze the several strategies through which video game narratives perform transformations and rearrangements of literary and historical matters, as well as reproductions of social and cultural attitudes that characterize the American experience. These aspects may include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

– Video game adaptations of American literary classics;
– Video games adapted into fiction: video games as/and transmedia adaptation through video game novels, comics, cinema, and television;
– Fiction featuring video games: representation of video games in literary works;
– Video games featuring fiction: representation of literature in video games;
– Video games and literary genre conventions;
– Video games as storytelling: narrative strategies, viewpoints, construction of settings, scenarios, and characters;
– Video games and reader (i.e. player)-response: RPGs, player’s choices and attitudes, fan fiction writing.

Submission Guidelines

To submit a proposal, an abstract (max. 250-300 words), along with 7 keywords and a 150-word biographical note should be sent to both Guest Editors (francesca.razzi@unich.it, valentina.romanzi@unito.it) by February 28, 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be sent to the authors by March 15, 2025.

Essays will undergo a blind peer reviewing process, and must be unpublished.

Final essays should not exceed 8500 words (including notes and bibliography), and must follow the ABC Journal Guidelines for Contributors (https://abcjournal.eu/style-guide/). Essays should be sent to both Guest Editors by May 31, 2025.

Publication Schedule
• Abstract submission: February 28, 2025
• Notification of abstract acceptance: March 15, 2025
• Essay submission: May 31, 2025
• Peer review results: July 31, 2025