Calls for Participation

July 9, 2024

Since 2018, our Game In Lab initiative has been doing fantastic work by supporting and funding over 25 board game research projects worldwide, all disciplines are welcome, from social sciences to AI and the arts, or any other relevant field.

Today, we are pleased to announce the opening of the 2024 International Call for Projects, which will be accepting submissions until September 6th.

This year, special attention will be given to projects that investigate the following areas of focus:

➡️ Sustainability and Justice: the role of tabletop games in addressing crises of environmental and social sustainability, and in promoting climate and social justice.

➡️ Fifty Years of Dungeons and Dragons: the function of tabletop roleplaying games in addressing and promoting social inclusion, decolonization, and diverse cultural representations.

➡️ Healthy People and/or Planet: the potential of games to support healthy lives, therapeutic applications, and community health and resilience.

➡️ Cultural Heritage: the preservation and promotion of games as important sites of cultural heritage and history and/or the use of games in heritage research and preservation.

Please feel free to share this call for projects to anyone who may be interested in applying, considering the international scope of the program and the call.

We are hopeful that we can rely on your support to advance this critical project and express our gratitude in advance for your dedication.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us (Audrey and Léa) or use the contact form if you have any questions!

Best regards,
The Game in Lab team

February 21, 2024

CFP: Generation Analog 2024 “HOME”

Analog Game Studies and Game in Lab are proud to announce Generation Analog 2024.  This year’s online conference will take place July 24 and July 25, 2024.  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!): https://shorturl.at/asKQ9

HOME will be this year’s conference theme.  We will explore games and home, play and home, playing at home, being stuck at home, playing with others, and playing home alone.  We will interrogate playing house, play(ful) rooms, game rooms, gaming tables, home squares, home bases, home teams, home brews, house rules, and play as (sometimes) “safe as houses.”  Finally, we will imagine alternative domesticities, materialities and economies, found families and gaming groups, and even queer(er) and more radical places, spaces, and possibilities of play.  In fact, according to Steven Vider in The Queerness of Home,

Home is not only about shelter and stability but also a sense of personal, cultural, and political connection and recognition, from our communities and a larger public…[and] the many ends that home may serve—the normative and the queer, constraint and liberation, isolation and community…Making a queerer home means recognizing the material, psychological, and cultural meanings embedded in the everyday practice of homemaking—neither to deny nor reify its power and primacy, but to question and expand its limits. (227-228)

These are just some of the provocations and ideas that we hope to address at this year’s conference.  Tabletop games, role-playing games, and even childhood 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 2024.  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 papers must include:

  1. presentation title,
  2. presenter’s name, email, pronouns, and affiliation (if available),
  3. an abstract no longer than 300 words, and
  4. a short list of 5-7 keywords.

Abstracts should articulate a clear analytical, theoretical, philosophical, or artistic perspective and address how the presentation engages the conference theme.  Presentations might engage (but are not limited to):

  • spaces and home environments
  • game rooms, game tables, and game storage in the home
  • domesticity in analog games
  • coziness
  • slow games
  • the mechanics of “home”
  • home town, home land, belonging, and exile
  • going home, coming home, leaving home in analog games
  • the unhoused or “homeless” in analog games and gaming communities
  • haunted houses, home invasion, and monsters in the closet and analog games
  • “house rules”
  • “home brews”
  • analog games and “lockdown” (i.e. quarantine, imposed time at home, housebound)
  • analog games and family-friendly, suburban, game nights
  • backyard games
  • queer(ing) home, domesticity, family in analog games

Presentations should be no longer than 15-18 minutes in length depending on panel size.  Submit materials to GenerationAnalogConference@gmail.com with “Generation Analog 2024 Submission” in the subject line.

Timeline: 

Abstracts due: March 31, 2024 extended to April 7, 2024 by 11:59 PM EDT

Acceptance by: May 1, 2024

Conference Dates: July 24-25, 2024

Download the CFP in PDF form.

February 14, 2024

Analog Game Studies – Assistant Editor(s)

Analog Game Studies (AGS) is looking for 1-to-2 new Assistant Editors to join the team!  Analog Game Studies is a volunteer-run, open access game studies journal that caters to a combined academic and popular audience, with stakeholders in education, industry, and gaming communities.  AGS also runs Generation Analog, an annual online tabletop games and education conference.  These are volunteer/service positions.  If you are interested in applying,  please send a cover letter that speaks to the desired qualifications, a current CV, and a writing sample (up to 15 pages, published or unpublished) to analoggamestudiesjournal@gmail.com by March 25, 2024 with the desired position in the subject line.

Two positions are available: AGS (Journal) Assistant Editor and Generation Analog (Conference) Assistant Editor.

The Journal Assistant Editor will:

  • Attend editorial board meetings (about once a month, 10-15 hours a month, busier during publication weeks or conference months)
  • Work with Associate and Senior Editors; manage editorial work necessary to bring between one and four articles to press per year
  • Develop, procure, and curate authors to publish; may become the permanent Book Review editor
  • Assist in the copy editing of AGS print volumes

The Conference Assistant Editor will:

  • Attend editorial board meetings (about once a month, 10-15 hours a month, busier during publication weeks or conference months); in the first year, shadow the Editor-in-Chief and Senior Editors regarding conference organization
  • Assist in editorial work as needed to bring between one and four articles to press per year
  • In the first year, assist with planning, organizing, and running Generation Analog; thereafter, assume a leadership role in organizing the conference
  • Assist in the copy editing of Generation Analog Proceedings

In addition to these required tasks, we will work with you on any initiatives that you may be  interested in spearheading.

Desired qualifications:

  • Background in critical cultural studies, e.g. Critical Race Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Critical Media Studies
  • Ph.D. in a related field strongly preferred (or comparable academic, industry, and/or project planning experience)
  • Familiarity with game studies and some key journals within the field
  • For the Journal Assistant Editor, previous editorial experience
  • For the Generation Analog Assistant Editor, previous conference organizing experience
ARCHIVED CALLS
August 14, 2020

CFP: Revisiting the Fiend Folio

This special issue of Analog Game Studies examines the Fiend Folio: Tome of Creatures Malevolent and Benign (Turnbull 1981) in its historic and contemporary significance to game cultures and game design. Fiend Folio was an anthology of monsters published in 1981, the fifth official hardbacked rulebook of TSR’s Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D). It was the first TSR publication that was led by its newly instituted UK branch. The source of many of the monsters in the Fiend Folio was a regular feature in the London-based periodical White Dwarf, ‘the Fiend Factory,’ which published homebrew monsters from the campaigns of its readers.

The diversity of perspectives created by multiple authors, along with the monster illustrations from White Dwarf’s in-house artists of presents a strikingly different vision of AD&D from the official ‘Gygaxian’ vision of the first four rulebooks. However, the Fiend Folio continued to entrench many of the well-established and problematic views that were espoused in earlier materials for AD&D and original Dungeons and Dragons (Gygax & Arneson 1974). Views that continue to reinforce a culture of hegemonic white masculinity in game design today.

The Fiend Folio was met with substantial public criticism from within TSR. In issue 55 of Dragon, TSR’s official magazine, contributing editor Ed Greenwood wrote a four-page negative review that characterised the rulebook as a “disappointment” (1981, 6). This special issue aims to consider how Fiend Folio failed to meet expectations, and disrupted and challenged ”common sense” publication norms and approaches to game design by exploring 1) the tensions between world-building and technical challenge in monster design 2) the role of unconventional and unusual monsters in role-playing games and game cultures 3) the role of art and illustration in fantasy world-building.

Work that approaches these issues from a critical race perspective is particularly welcome. Given long-term concerns about racism and race representation in Dungeons & Dragons and the recent ill treatment of non-white employees at Wizards of the Coast, the Fiend Folio provides a lens into the complexities of white reactionary fandom in early role-playing games. The problematic concept of ‘race’ in the character design of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is established (Garcia 2017; Hibbard 2019). The controversial Drow (as Elf, Dark) was one of the monsters published in the rulebook, and other creations demonstrate elements of the identified orientalism of early Dungeons and Dragons (Trammell 2016). The Fiend Folio offers the opportunity to extend the critical analysis of AD&D by focusing on the role of monsters. Recent scholarship has opened important trajectories for examining how monster design can embed problematic world views (Stang & Trammell 2019), and is demystified, made mundane and knowable through containment within the rules (Jaroslav Švelch 2018).

Perspectives that draw on feminism, disability studies, gender studies, indigenous studies, queer studies and critical whiteness studies are also encouraged. Hegemonic norms of whiteness, masculinity, able bodiedness and cis heterosexuality saturate the monster designs submitted by the Fiend Folio‘s contributors, artists, and editors. These have had a broad, multi-decade impact on how monsters are conceived of in games and gaming culture.

Read the full CFP here: https://analoggamestudies.org/cfp/fiendfoliocfp/

January 15, 2019

Generation Analog Logo

Click here for the GENeration Analog CFP!

January 9, 2019

CFP: RPG Summit @ DiGRA 2019 – 6-9 August 2019 – Kyoto, Japan

The Role-Playing Game (RPG) Summit has returned! DiGRA 2014 (Utah) and 2015 (Lüneburg) featured special mini-conferences dedicated to all things role-playing related. This Call for Papers is separate from DiGRA 2019, but the event itself is a part of DiGRA. The summit is hosted in collaboration between DiGRA and Analog Game Studies. Papers will be reviewed by the Analog Game Studies team and then included in their own collection, the DiGRA 2019 RPG Summit Proceedings, which will be made available in the DiGRA digital library and through the Analog Game Studies website.

The summit is a gathering of interdisciplinary scholars engaged in RPG studies, a field which includes work on tabletop RPGs, live-action role-play (larps), live-action online games (laogs), online freeform, single-player computer and console RPGs (CRPGs), and multiplayer online RPGs (MORPGs). Thanks to the recent publication of  Jose P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding’s handbook Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations, the field is now more visible than ever and has an easy point of entry. But questions raised by our present-day media ecology are anything but easy. The presence of Twitch-streamed TRPG players (“Actual Play”) and larp YouTube “influencers”  have given RPG media a more public face than ever, and in turn have transformed the way games are published, played, and analyzed. The diffusion of RPG culture and discourse between continents has also created unexpected industry alliances and scholarly interchange. In an increasingly polarized world, RPGs illustrate the contours of network society, demonstrate how systemic incentives work on a personal level, and act on political structures, the latter often without emphasizing the politicality of the medium.

DiGRA 2019 “Game, Play, and the Emerging Ludo Mix” will be held in Kyoto, Japan from 6-9 August, 2019. The RPG Summit itself will be a part of the conference and will bring together international RPG experts. Those submitting to the RPG summit should feel free to submit different, additional proposals to the main conference. All attendees will register for – and have access to – the entirety of DiGRA 2019, including the RPG Summit.

Read the full CFP here: https://analoggamestudies.org/cfp/rpg-summit-digra-2019/

January 9, 2019

CFP: The Analog Origins of Digital Games @ FDG 2019 – 26 – 30 August 2019 – San Luis Obispo, California

The analog game revolution is upon us! This workshop calls for an exploration of the analog origins of digital game mechanics. We welcome research of all kinds for an interdisciplinary discussion of how analog and digital game design cross-pollenate. Of particular interest are oral histories, critical cultural analyses, and technical perspectives that get under the hood and reveal the algorithmic likenesses of digital and analog games. This workshop aims to foster a conversation that reveals the complex cultural and technical intersections of games and society, and in doing so recovers a lost history of authorship that has been obscured by the vogue of the digital. Digital games have long been inspired by analog games, and vice versa. The first step in this project of recovery is to identify overlaps between these two fields of design. By working together in this workshop, we can begin the process of recuperation tying digital games to a sometimes inspirational and sometimes problematic cultural landscape that has always been at play.

We are interested in any approaches to comparing analog and digital games that help fill our gap in scholarly knowledge on this topic. One submission to this workshop might show how the design biases of Magic: The Gathering developer Richard Garfield have fueled the highly competitive economic landscape of eSports. A separate submission might offer an archeology of random number generation, excavating forgotten methods of uncertain play. A technical analysis could compare the statistical makeup of bodies in tabletop role-playing games to the statistical systems which compose the body in popular JRPGs such as Dragon Quest.

Not only have analog game mechanics inspired digital mechanics like Civilization 6’s hex map and card upgrades, Super Mario Party’s modular dice, and Divinity 2’s RPG inspired world, they have also become the core mechanic—if not totality—of games like Hearthstone, and Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales. Queer and indie game designers like Avery Alder and Naomi Clark (amongst many others) have produced amazingly thoughtful designs as well that set the pace for how games can speak to the emotional depth of the human experience with their games The Quiet Year (2013) and Consentacle (2014) respectively. Finally, movements like Actual Play—epitomized by the program Critical Role and the Maze Arcana community—have put a spotlight on how digital distribution networks like YouTube allow for traditionally analog games like Dungeons & Dragons can facilitate new forms of play within digital communities.

FDG 2019 “The Analog Origins of Digital Games” will be held in San Luis Obispo, California from 26-30 August, 2019. The Analog Origins of Digital Games workshop will be a part of the conference and will bring together a unique panel of analog game experts. Those submitting to this workshop should feel free to submit different, additional proposals to the main conference. All attendees will register for – and have access to – the entirety of FDG 2019.

May 12, 2015

Analog Game Studies (analoggamestudies.org) is an online academic journal committed to increasing the visibility of analog games within the broader field of game studies by providing a periodically published platform for the critical analysis, discussion of design, and documentation of analog games. For more detail on what we do, see “Reinventing Analog Game Studies.” We are currently seeking submissions for three forthcoming issues in 2016 on the following themes. (Articles published online will likely appear in a yearly print anthology as well.)

Economics and Industry of Analog Games
Analog games emerge from specific institutions and forms of economic exchange. Board game designers have “made it” when they license their product to Days of Wonder or Fantasy Flight and are distributed by Alliance. Debates rage about whether Hearthstone has taken Magic: The Gathering‘s market share. Indie press role-playing games are marketed on Kickstarter after they have been assembled via InDesign, Photoshop and Scrivener. But such economic logics also come with their political dimensions: Alliance, Wizards of the Coast, and Kickstarter all have their own business models, each of which expresses a distinct view on the workings of the world and each of which proscribes certain content as “unprofitable.” Politically radical games often emerge from grassroots scenes and alternate economic models. Golden Cobra freeform games – dealing with topics from school shooters to rock gardens – offer up all contest submissions as free PDFs on their website. The open-source d20 system introduced a diverse array of role-playing games, including many that challenged industry standards of representation. For this issue, we seek articles that take a critical look at the raw financial and production dimensions of the analog games industry. How do business models and institutional frameworks impact the shape and content of the games we play? What constitutes a “publisher” anyway? What is the lifecycle of an analog game product?

Affective Games and Bodies at Play
How do games make us feel? What are the affective resonances of winning, losing, and cheating? How does the fun/serious dichotomy become established? How might we reclaim the body in game studies? When we play, we play with others. We activate practices and technologies in order to engage with objects, ideas, and bodies. To play is to be situated within complex networks of relationality as we play in, with, and outside of games. Games, therefore, are never neutral. Games make us feel things and feelings are political. If we examine games for their affective dimensions, what implications are to be found with regard to power, as our playful actions set off ripples of intensity across networks of relation? Although research and speculation exist on the emotionality of video games, the sociality of online networks, and the psychology of the military-entertainment industry, how might these findings be further elucidated, complicated, debunked, or otherwise put into variation through an analysis of analog games? This issue aims to address how theories of play might contribute to conversations in affect studies, and how training our attention to the scale of emotion and sensation may complicate conversations in game studies.

OPEN CALL
In addition to the themes above, AGS is also extending an open call for submissions on any other topics relevant to analog game studies. We also welcome submissions for book or game reviews, or interviews (please see this and this for examples of the style we aim for).

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AGS is an academic journal with an open-yet-curatorial editorial process. Submissions from students, independent scholars, and industry professionals are welcome, and accepted contributors will work closely with an AGS editor in an intensive, personalized, and collaborative editorial process throughout the weeks leading up to publication.

Full manuscripts (2000-4000 words) are preferred, but shorter abstracts or proposals will also be considered. Alternative formats—such as games, videos, and podcasts—are also welcome. Please email submissions to analoggamestudiesjournal@gmail.com no later than Tuesday, December 15th, 2015.