Starting in 2026, all Analog Game Studies issues will be published via eScholarship: https://escholarship.org/uc/analoggamestudies. All of the AGS back catalog will eventually be migrated to eScholarship. In the meantime, the AGS website will remain!
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According to the Chinese zodiac, the coming of spring heralds the Year of the Fire Horse, which is traditionally associated with vigor, adventure, freedom, dynamic change, ambition, and forward movement. We here at AGS fully embrace that horse grrl energy and proudly announce a new era of Analog Game Studies!
Foremost, we are excited to partner and collaborate with the University of California Irvine’s Libraries and the UC system’s eScholarship program, which publishes “original, open access journals, books, conference proceedings, and other scholarship…[and] supports publications that traverse standard disciplinary boundaries, explore new publishing models, and/or seek to reach professionals in applied fields beyond academia.”1 What does this mean for the AGS community and Generation Analog family? First, all new publications (and submissions) will be through eScholarship, starting with this spring’s issue.2 Second, we will be working in the background migrating the AGS back catalog from the old WordPress site to the new platform. Finally, eventually, the WordPress will be retired (and perhaps transformed into a resource hub); we are exploring ways to archive the look and feel of the “early years” of both the journal and the field. Assuredly, much of what makes AGS fun, unique, quirky, and accessible will continue and grow, just renovated and reimagined. Many, many thanks to Aaron Trammell for championing AGS and building the necessary bridges with UC Irvine to make this happen. And special thanks to Angela M. Vanden Elzen, our intrepid AGS librarian, and Amanda Karby, eScholarship Publications Manager, for guiding us through transition to the new digs!
Central to the move to eScholarship is our desire to remain open access, to preserve our open review and publication philosophy, and to find a stable, sustainable, and persistent “home” for the past, present, and future issues of Analog Game Studies. We did not make the decision to move lightly, weighing over the course of a year the affordances and limitations of institutionalizing the journal, its history, and its legacies. In the end, preservation, accessibility, visibility, and legibility won out. We acknowledged that AGS occupies a special position, an over-a-decade long tenure in people’s research, teaching, designs, publications, professionalization. However, we also witnessed over the years the struggle for the work just to be seen, recognized, indexed, and for our many for authors, scholars, makers, and contributors to get cited and promoted. (Of course, this is not unique to AGS but to most online, born-digital journals and publications. Academia and other institutions still have a lot of work to do to catch up.) After one too many laments over the “dearth” of analog game studies, we decided to change and upgrade our approach and our platform. In fact, we have made this notion of citational justice, diversity, and intelligibility a priority mission for the journal. As Edmond Chang and Aaron Trammell wrote for the 2025 BIPOC Game Studies Conference (here quoted at length):
As a journal, Analog Game Studies uses an open-yet-curatorial model to review submitted works. We strive to represent a varied set of perspectives in each issue and, as such, find it to be of the utmost importance to offer transparency to writers in our review process as well as authorial and topical diversity to our readers with regard to articles we choose to publish. For these reasons, the editorial board carefully curates select essays for each issue from our pool of submissions and then works closely with the selected authors in a rigorous and transparent editing process. We see this process as a collaborative, expressive, and open conversation between editor and author. It is because of this curatorial model that our essays can present clear and timely arguments in engaging and readable prose.
Now, over ten years in, our ragtag operation has hit a few material and algorithmic roadblocks from lack of visibility to the deterioration of online platforms…This is in part because we built our journal on the WordPress platform (considered de rigueur at the time), which is findable by search engines, but volumes, issues, and individual essays are not indexed by Google Scholar or paywalled databases. Visibility, legibility, and indexability are crucial parts of accessibility and citational justice. Junior and marginalized scholars often require these forms of legitimacy for promotion and professionalization. Moreover, minoritized scholars doing cutting edge work (like game studies) are often forced to publish in newer, middle-state, or perceived-to-be-less reputable journals…In other words, the problems of citation and publication are systemic, and we scholars must be active in lobbying our peers, committees, departments, conferences, and communities about celebrating smaller journals that have taken an alternative path forward than those which are more canonically or traditionally legible to the institution.3
–The Editors, March 31, 2026
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To read the full Editors’ Note, go to the first issue (Vol. XIII, No. 1) of 2026!
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