Analog Game Studies and Game in Lab are proud to announce Generation Analog 2026. This year’s online conference will take place July 16-17, 2026. The online event is free and open to the public with registration. All presentations will be recorded and made available after the event. Check out the presentations from previous years via AGS’s YouTube channel (like and subscribe).
GREEN will be this year’s conference theme. The origins and meanings of the color are variegated, tumultuous, surprising, even playful. According to Michel Pastoureau’s Green: The History of a Color,
As a chemically unstable color, both in painting and dyeing, it was henceforth associated symbolically with all that was changeable or capricious: youth, love, fortune, fate. By the same token it tended to have a split personality. On the one hand there was good green, associated with gaiety, beauty, and hope, which had not disappeared but had become more subdued; on the other there was bad green, associated with the Devil and his creatures, witches, and poison…
The color is all around us in everyday life as well as art, literature, design, language, and history. For example, in Latin, we have viridis, often associated with vigor, life, strength, and virtue. In medieval French, we have vert gai meaning “light, lively, and appealing” contrasted with vert perdu meaning “duller, sadder, more disturbing.” In modern usage, green has gained further connotations including spring, gardens, parks, rurality, toys, plastic, military uniforms, money, greed, envy, newness, inexperience, growth, health, healing, weed, organic food, nature, environment, ecology, Earth Day, aliens, activism, and politics. These are just some of the provocations and ideas that we hope to address at this year’s conference. Tabletop games, role-playing games, political games, environmental games, and performance and play are all extraordinary spaces of inquiry for these questions as they necessitate a conversation about who is playing, how are they playing, why are they playing, and what is being played.
We invite scholars, teachers, artists, graduate students, and the intellectually curious to submit proposals for Generation Analog 2026. Designers, educators, and researchers in all stages of their career are encouraged to apply. We seek thoughtful work from authors and speakers at any stage of their academic or professional careers.
Proposals for presentations must include (ideally keep to 1-page Word or PDF document):
- Title
- Presenter Name(s) and Pronouns
- Presenter Email(s)
- Presenter Institution(s) or Affiliation(s) (if available)
- Academic abstract of 250-350 words, single spaced
- A short list of 5-7 keywords (e.g. genre, TTRPG, agency, mechanics, LARP, actual play, education)
Presentations should be up to 15 minutes in length; if a single presentation has multiple presenters, it is still limited to 15 minutes. Single presentations will be grouped into panels of four. Preconstituted panels (with four presenters) or roundtables (more than four presenters) are accepted; submit a reconstituted panel or roundtable proposal that includes an overall title, brief panel abstract, and the above information for each panelist.
Abstracts need to articulate a clear analytical, theoretical, philosophical, or artistic perspective and address how the presentation engages the conference theme. Integrating 2-3 scholarly or supporting sources is strongly recommended. Example abstracts from previous years (used with permission) can be found here: Abstract 1, Abstract 2, Abstract 3. Abstract 4.
Presentations might engage (but are not limited to):
- green analog games, environmental games, games about plants, flowers, growing things, nature
- green spaces, lawns, gardens, parks, public and private, rural and urban, green houses
- trees
- spring, fresh, seedlings, new growth, perennials, recycling, rebirth, green time
- environmental literature, ecocriticism, the “wood wide web,” green language, green activism, green politics
- green dollars, greenwashing, green colonialism, ecofascism, slow violence, environmental racism
- green as in a euphemism for the uninitiated, aka newbies
- green dice, green ink, green cards, green tokens, green tiles, green boards
- green bodies, green skin, green-eyed monsters, green and race, green aliens
- poison and unhealthiness
- green and gender, green and sexuality, green and disability, queer(ing) green
- green means go, green light, the grass is always greener on the other side, green around the gills
- green worlds
Submit materials to GenerationAnalogConference@gmail.com with “Generation Analog 2026 Submission: <Title of Presentation>” in the subject line.
Timeline:
- Abstracts due: March 1, 2026
- Acceptance by: May 1, 2026
- Conference Dates: July 16-17, 2026 (one or two day subject to overall participation)
Presentations and abstracts are anonymized and read, ranked, and selected by AGS board members. Depending on year and overall submissions, acceptance rates have been between 30 to 50 percent. We strongly encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply.
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Note: This conference is volunteer run and is jointly sponsored by Game in Lab and the Analog Game Studies Editorial Board.
Game in Lab, the board games research supporting program, is the result of a collaboration between Asmodee Research and the Innovation Factory. Asmodee Research is a department of Asmodee Group, promoting the development and valorization of gaming as a source of societal value.