Sorry for the cross-posting. The deadline of the special issue has extended until April 5, 2010. Call for papers Iowa Journal of Communication Special issue: Games and Culture: Asia-Pacific perspectives As a cultural genre, online gaming has been one of the most dynamic in the world. With a relatively short period of time, online gaming has become a major entertainment tool for fun, but has also become another channel of human relationship as part of people’s actual lives. The vast popularity of online games in the world has closely matched the widespread proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), which have facilitated communication and interaction at an unprecedented level. Through games as well as related activities, youth have used these technologies to nurture friendships through their engagement in activities such as online games, instant messaging, blogging, and the like, which assist them in constructing their own tightly-knit communities. Therefore, the booming online gaming should be seriously examined in its own socio-cultural circumstances and context vis a vis the global game industry. Due primarily to the accelerated pace of development, the academic research on online games, however, has been correspondingly sparse and limited in scope, with domestic literature tending towards either the celebratory emphasis of positive business development or the problematics of regulation and media effects oriented concerns, such as violence and addition. While such research comprises of important contributions to the emergent scholarship on online gaming, lopsided accounts tend to foreground the readily empirical observations and aggregate data to the exclusion of other possible macro factors such as globalization, intercultural communication, transnationalization of the gaming industry, and micro, more private but resonant problems in family or social life of those concerned. As a region, the Asia-Pacific is characterized by diverse penetration rates of gaming and broadband technologies. Two defining locations, Asia, including South Korea and China, and North America – are seen as both online gaming centers and the largest markets to which the world looks towards as examples of the future-in-the-present. Ever since Nexon, a Korean games corporation, introduced the world’s first graphic massively multiplayer online game ‘Kingdom of the Winds’ in 1996 and two most popular games (Lineage I and II), Korea has played a central role in the PC-based online game market and digital economy. In China, online game is also becoming a social place, where new social relations, community networks, and new type of life are formed. In this special issue to be published in September 2010, we seek to exchange our scholarship on the politics of game play and cultural context by focusing on the burgeoning Asia-Pacific region. Housing sites for global gaming production and consumption such as China, Korea, and the U.S., the region provides a wealth of divergent examples of the role of gaming as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Welcoming a range of presentations from micro ethnographic studies to macro political economy analyses, and beyond, this special issue will provide an interdisciplinary model for thinking through the politics of gaming production, representation and consumption in the region. Suggested topics of papers would discuss games in terms of one of the following areas: History of the growth of online gaming as a global industry, discourse, and media product Critical Interpretation of emerging local game industries Online games and globalization/regionalization Convergent technologies and the impact on established modes of game play Government regulations and types of game play Game fandom and free labor Gaming as social technology/media A culturally specific aesthetic to the production and consumption of certain games New media and experimental gaming Gendered consumption and production of games Deadline for this special issue of Iowa Journal of Communication: 5th April 2010. Author(s) should submit all inquires, expressions of interest and papers to Dal Yong Jin (yongjin23@gmail.com or djin@kaist.ac.kr). All submissions are peer reviewed by two scholars. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically in Word or Word Perfect format and confirm to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association and should not exceed 9,000 words in length