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:
- presentation title,
- presenter’s name, email, pronouns, and affiliation (if available),
- an abstract no longer than 300 words, and
- 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.
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.