About Ludosemiotics
Ludosemiotics includes all approaches to play, games and gamification that focus on the meaning-making, interpretative and cultural processes that arise from playing. It is conceived as a gathering for all research rooted in Semiotics or Semiology, regardless of the specific schools or theories adopted.
While classical Semiotics has addressed games, toys and playfulness since its early days, a stronger focus on games from a semiotic perspective started to emerge in the 2000s. Now, almost two decades later, the researchers engaging with ludosemiotics have reached a critical mass, and the approach has achieved a good level of credibility with the publication of several recent books on the topic (Hawreliak 2019, Thibault 2020, Aroni 2022, Giuliana 2024). The time has come, then, to bring together the different researchers working on ludosemiotics, both established scholars and young researchers moving the first steps along this path, in order to share our perspectives, establish collaborations, cooperate, and start to build a community around our work.
The First Ludosemiotics Conference, hence, aims to be both a moment to gather together, and a starting point to establish the basis of the future of the field.
Submissions
In particular, we encourage participants to present research work with a strong analytical approach, such as case studies or even demos. While we can always discuss the theoretical basis of our research, we especially want to see what can be done with Semiotics in this field.
The possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Analog games vs digital games: dialogue, influences and transformations.
- Animal and human forms of playing
- Arts and games
- Artificial intelligence in games and automated forms of play
- Boundaries of games and play between texts and practices
- Child play and adult play: shapes and shades of ludic meaning
- Commonalities and differences of playing among cultures
- Common sense and rules
- Communities of players
- Embodiment and prostheses in VR, AR and computer games
- Experience’s construction and discourse in games and playing
- Game studies and semiotic studies on games
- Game genres and play types
- Gamification of contemporary culture in our everyday life
- Ideologies and stereotypes of games and on games
- Indeterminacy in games between linguistics and philosophy
- Internet culture and gaming: from memes to streaming
- Learning and playing: relations and dialogues between edusemiotics and ludosemiotics
- Lies and truth in games and play
- Methodologies of Semiotics for analysing games and players
- Multimodality of meaning-making in games
- Narratives as games and games as narratives
- Nostalgia and memories of playing: from retrogaming to remakes
- Presence and influence of games in classic authors and general theory of semiotics
- Scopic regimes and pleasure of watching in videogame: from cutscenes to game movies
- Sports and esports
- Rhetorics in and of games
- Role-playing between subjective interpretation and impersonal enunciation
- Toys and toying between analog and digital games
- Transmedial logic and translations of games in movies, series, anime and literature
The deadline for abstracts is the 15th of March 30th of March 2025 (extended).
Notifications of acceptance will be sent mid-April 2025.
Key References
Aphek, E., & Tobin, Y. (1990). The semiotics of fortune-telling. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Aroni, G. (2022). The semiotics of architecture in video games. London, England: Bloomsbury.
Bankov, K. (2022). The digital mind: Semiotic explorations of digital culture. London, England, & New York, NY: Springer.
Barnabé, F. (2017). L’énonciation vidéoludique: Analyse du jeu Portal. In M. G. Dondero (Ed.), Les plis du visuel. Réflexivité et énonciation dans l’image (pp. 155–178). Limoges, France: Lambert-Lucas.
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Bartezzaghi, S. (2016). La ludoteca di Babele. Torino, Italy: Utet.
Bartezzaghi, S. (2024). Chi vince non sa cosa si perde: Agonismo, gioco, guerra. Milano, Italy: Bompiani.
Blomberg, J. (2018). The semiotics of the game controller. Game Studies, 18(2). Retrieved from http://gamestudies.org/1802/articles/blomberg
Chatenet, L., & Giuliana, G. T. (2025). Semiovers: Pour une sémiotique des mondes virtuelset numériques. Rome, Italy: Aracne.
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Giuliana, G. T. (2024). Il videogioco come linguaggio della realtà: Introduzione a una nuova prospettiva semiotica. Rome, Italy: Aracne
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Hawreliak, J. (2019). Multimodal semiotics and rhetoric in videogames. New York, NY: Routledge.
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Idone Cassone V. and M. Thibault (2016) The HGR framework: A semiotic approach to the representation of history in digital games. gamevironments, (5), 156-201.
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