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.

Want to get involved? Sign up for DiGRA right now. If you are interested in presenting at the summit, submit your work to analoggamestudiesjournal@gmail.com with “DiGRA 2019 RPG Summit” somewhere in the Subject field. Submissions should utilize the DiGRA submission template (http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/DiGRA_Submission_Template_2019-1.doc). We accept short papers of 1000-2000 words in length, as well as full articles of 5000-7000 words in length. Authors’ names and any reference to sources authored by those submitting the proposal should be omitted from the submitted version. Replace your name with “Author.” Though organized as panels, each submission will be treated as an individual paper and will be individually peer-reviewed and grouped into panel presentations once accepted.

Submissions Deadlines

Submissions deadline February 12, 2019.
Acceptance/rejection notification March 18, 2019.
Final publishable draft submission deadline May 28, 2019.

For more information and the latest updates regarding the DiGRA 2019 conference, see http://www.digra2019.org