Call for papers

National Video Games: Cultures, Industries, Communities – international conference

University of Warsaw, 4–6 December 2026

The end of history was cancelled years ago, and national ideas have been on the rise ever since. Game scholars, too, have been studying the relationships between national cultures, video games and game industries for about a decade. We now have a wealth of material about the game cultures of numerous different countries across the world; there are also publications that examine the national categorisation of games itself.

But we still need to know more. Many places have not been studied much yet; in particular, publications about African video games are scarce and mostly seem to concern South Africa. The anglicisation of international research allows us to access some information on the countries whose languages we do not speak, but it may also prevent us from noticing the studies done in other languages. It also obfuscates national traits of games developed in the Anglosphere, especially the US, painting them as default. Meanwhile, Japanese games are often considered highly entangled with the national context, despite strong connections and mutual influences between the US and Japanese game development and player cultures.

The very concept of “national culture” is rarely questioned in relation to games: the idea that nation-states have distinct cultures of their own, which influence locally made games, holds quite strongly. This is partially fuelled by the nation-states’ direct attempts at curating “national cultural games” and including video games in the official pedagogy of national culture – which invites the question of the role video games hold in the larger framework of national cultural politics, and encourages the analysis of games together with other state-sponsored and state-approved media: national literature, theatre, cinema, radio and television.

Moreover, the importance and prominence of postcolonial theory in game studies results in putting more emphasis on the power dynamics between centres and peripheries. This often leads to painting games entangled with national cultures as an attempt to promote local cultural heritage and resist imperial demands of stronger cultural actors. There is therefore little discussion of what differentiates between national, regional and ethnic cultures in games. This leads to overlooking the fact that what could be perceived as resistance from the Anglophone point of view can also fuel nationalism on a domestic level. That opens up another area of inquiry: how content which is considered a charming expression of local culture can become a dangerous tool of alt-right radicals in the age of new nationalism.

As the discussion on video games and national cultures is far from over, we invite contributions scrutinizing their entanglements, including but not limited to the following:

  • national game canons, national games and national game industry histories
  • video games as tools of a nation-state
  • official and unofficial national cultures in video games
  • national versus regional, local and ethnic cultures in video games
  • theoretical perspectives and methodological tools in analyses of video games and national cultures
  • non-Western national cultures in video games
  • games and cultural heritage
  • video games vis-à-vis national literatures, cinemas and televisions 
  • video games and new nationalism
  • transnational game production 
  • game localisation and local specificity 
  • national funding schemes for video games
  • national game development 
  • player communities and local prejudice 
  • game industries, labor, and unionisation 
  • national archiving and collecting initiatives 
  • national policies and institutions for cataloguing, archiving and preserving games

Submission guidelines

The conference language is English. Submissions in the form of an abstract of 400–600 words (plus references) will undergo double-blind peer review. Please make sure the submission is anonymous and the references to your own work, if used, are included in a way that does not reveal the author’s identity (i.e. avoid saying “in my previous work [citation]”).

The submission link is here. To submit an abstract, you will need to create an account (or use an existing account) in the CMT system. After logging in to your account, you should be able to see a “Create new submission” button.

Participation is on-site only (no hybrid form). A single author may submit multiple abstracts, but will only be allowed to present a maximum of one single-authored and one co-authored paper (or two co-authored papers).

Important dates

  • submission deadline: 30 June 2026 
  • submission acceptance: 1 September 2026 
  • registration and payment: 15 October 2026 
  • final program: 31 October 2026 
  • conference: 4–6 December 2026

For questions and queries, email the organizers at kapog@uw.edu.pl.

Organizing committee

Mirosław Filiciak
Paweł Frelik
Magdalena Kozyra
Stanisław Krawczyk
Tomasz Z. Majkowski
Aleksandra Prokopek
Agata Waszkiewicz

The Microsoft CMT service was used for managing the peer-reviewing process for this conference. This service was provided for free by Microsoft and they bore all expenses, including costs for Azure cloud services as well as for software development and support.