Special Issue "The Art of Adaptation in Film and Video Games"
A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752). This special issue belongs to the section "New Media".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 August 2020) | Viewed by 78622
Special Issue Editor
Interests: fantasy film; horror film; narrative-driven video games; video games for learning; adaptation studies; screenwriting; video game narrative design
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
We live in a world of adaptation, and a failure to study that world means we must ignore an increasingly important part of contemporary culture.
—Dennis Cutchins
Studying the transformative journey of content from one genre or medium to another is of great interest to academics in several disciplines, to members of the public who are avid consumers of media, and also to practitioners of adaptation—and we are all practitioners, whether we are delivering a message by email that was originally intended to be spoken, or adapting a graphic novel into a television series like HBO’s Watchmen. But what exactly is adaptation, and what constitutes an original work? Scholars within the relatively new, interdisciplinary field of adaptation studies often cite persistent ideas from the Romantic era as driving current notions of what it means to be original, but should those ideas still dominate today? Or should we allow ourselves to be convinced—as Linda Hutcheon writes that she is in “On the Art of Adaptation”—that TS Eliot and Northrop Frye were correct in suggesting that “all art is derived from other art”?
Although questions such as these may seem somewhat abstruse, other questions remain concretely present whenever adaptation is involved. For example, when we see a beloved film remade, we are conditioned to immediately ask if it is faithful to the original. And in the case of content that is transferred from one medium to another—such as when the 1979 film Alien was loosely adapted into the 2014 video game Alien: Isolation—an exciting new layer of complexity emerges: we must now ask profound questions about the differences between, and the true potentials of the mediums involved in order to understand the adaptation process in a meaningful way.
How we answer these questions can help us to understand the mediums through which we create, communicate, and learn. It can help us to understand ourselves, and the culture of adaptation in which we live.
Christian Thomas
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1200 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- adaptation studies
- adaptation
- film
- media
- film and media studies
- video games
- rhetoric
- story
- narrative video games
- genre awareness
- pedagogy and video games
- pedagogy and film
- environmental storytelling
- digital games
- new media
- art direction
- localization
- Japanese video games
- Chilean cinema
- virtual worlds
- postcolonialism
- Star Wars films and video games
- telltale games
- horror video games