I have presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in a variety of capacities, and I’ve served on the committee that reviews conference submissions a couple times. I mention this not to make myself sound official (I’m very decidedly not) but to make clear that my unofficial advice is grounded in some deep familiarity with the organization, the conference, and its processes.

I’m writing this geared towards graduate students and early-career folks in game studies, but it might be useful outside that (you be the judge).

SCMS is a humanities conference.

First off: SCMS is a humanities conference for cinema and media studies. That means the conference prioritizes humanistic work that asks humanities-type questions and uses humanities-type research methods to study movies and other media. What that means can be fairly broad. There’s a robust group of people doing digital humanities and videographic criticism. Panels can range from labor histories to production studies to textual analysis of the films of a particular director. There’s a lot of interesting work!

Look through a program from a past conference to get a feel for what “humanities conference for cinema and media studies” means in practice. You can also check out the organization’s publications, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and [in]Transition.

There are different types of submissions.

You can submit an individual paper, a pre-constituted panel, a roundtable, or a workshop.

An individual paper is the easiest to submit, but it’s often the least likely to make it onto the program. Reviewers go through every single proposal and review them. The individual papers are then put into panels, and these are generally intended to be meaningful groupings, so if your paper just doesn’t quite fit, it might not make it even if the reviewers generally felt pretty good about it.

A better option is to put together a panel of several related papers. This is also a really useful way to network — reach out to people at varying career stages and who have different institutional affiliations to make a well rounded panel.

Abstracts need stakes and a connection to the field.

When I have students read papers, I always point them to the section that says “In this paper, I … First, then, and ultimately … This matters because …” This is functionally the paper in miniature. While not every paper does this, ones that do are usually pretty well organized because they know what they’re doing and why. Your abstract should similarly be a paper in miniature–and it should know what it’s doing and why.

Have a sense of stakes and also connect your argument to the field. For the purposes of getting into SCMS your field is the type of work that you see at SCMS’s conference and in its publication.

Did I mention it’s a humanities conference?

Because SCMS is a humanities conference, it’s not the type of conference that has proceedings. Rather, people tend to bring things that are polished versions of works in progress.

Conference presentations are a means to getting feedback to help improve what will likely become a journal article. After the conference, researchers can revise and expand their talk and submit it to a journal. This way, that article nets a couple of different CV lines, because you have the in-process conference talk and the finished, published journal article. Ah, peer reviewed publications, the coin of the realm.

SCMS is medium agnostic, sort of.

SCMS includes a huge variety of work on a diversity of media. Recently, the Video Game Studies Special Interest Group has been one of the largest if not the largest SIG. Sometimes a particular area of study gains a lot of traction, and owing to the history of the organization there’s a lot of work on cinema.

This does not mean there isn’t room for your work! It also doesn’t mean that reviewers won’t look at your work carefully and thoughtfully. Every single submission is read by at least two people. Members of the programming committee try very, very hard to give all work a fair shake. Many times this means people are reading submissions they know little about, but the goal of a review is to see if the abstract seems sufficiently developed.

Make sure your abstract is connected to the field and clear about its stakes. That “So what?” question looms large in the humanities. You need an answer.

Rejection sucks. Rejection is inevitable.

I’m writing this in part because I heard from several graduate students that they’d felt discouraged from submitting. Please don’t be! The organization has taken steps to try to make more room for a diversity of voices in the conference program, which is part of why you can only fulfill one role now.

Getting into conferences can be harder as a graduate student, but a lot of things are hard as a graduate student because they’re harder the first time (or first 5-10 times) you do them. In this case at least that difficulty is absolutely not because graduate submissions are taken less seriously. I’ve highly ranked submissions from master’s students and given low scores to submissions from senior scholars.

If you don’t get in, that’s feedback, not a failing. Revise your proposal, put it together as a panel, seek out some other conference. A panel I was on that SCMS rejected later wound up at ICA with almost no changes.

Sometimes it’s just a dice roll. SCMS has a hard cap on the number of presentations and panels it can accommodate, and at some point, some really good proposals aren’t going to make it in.

Try anyway.

Even though you might not always get in, it’s worth trying your hand and submitting. I recommend SCMS to junior game studies folks frequently for a lot of reasons:

• It’s a large, well-respected conference from an established organization, so it looks good on your CV, and it’s pretty professionalized and well organized.
• The Video Game Studies SIG is a warm, welcoming community of scholars at a ton of different career points and offers a lot of resources for networking and mentoring.
• People are mostly pretty nice. YMMV, but I find this really important.
• Because it’s a humanities-based conference, there’s a huge diversity of approaches and topical concerns.
• Diversity work is often front and center, so if you work on something related to gender or race or disability studies, you’ll feel right at home, which is pretty rare in game studies.

If you can’t even …

If you want an SCMS-type experience of a humanities-focused game studies group but don’t want to deal with the perceived high stakes, the Game Studies, Culture, Play, and Practice (GSCPP) area of SWPACA remains my academic and intellectual home in many meaningful ways.

It’s a regional conference so it’s low stakes, but many of the other points I make about why I recommend SCMS hold true for GSCPP at SWPACA. The CFP for that conference is here.