GENeration Analog: Tabletop Games and Education Conference* @ GenCon 2020
**We regret that with the cancellation of GenCon, the GENeration Analog conference has also been cancelled. We look forward to planning for GenCon 2021!**
Educators, scholars, and designers of all backgrounds are invited to join us for our inaugural analog games summit at GenCon 2020.
Sponsored by Game In Lab and Analog Game Studies, GENeration Analog bridges theory and practice in the hobby games industry. We are also excited to announce that Scott Nicholson and Elizabeth Hargrave will be joining us as keynotes to discuss the importance of analog games as a hobby, as activism, and as a scholarly field.
GenCon has long served as the crossroads of the analog game industry in North America. Its size and scope have expanded as hobby board games, card & dice games, and role-playing games are being published at an astonishing rate, with crowdfunding and enthusiastic design communities leading the way. Alongside them, however, stride teachers and academics who see the benefit of such games in teaching and researching topics from cell biology, to geography, to medieval ethics. Thanks to parallel work being done annually within numerous game studies conferences across the world, an exciting convergence of global game culture and local innovation is taking place right before our eyes. It only makes sense for us to meet where so many tabletop & live-action game players meet: GenCon.**
We invite scholars, teachers, graduate students, and the intellectually curious to submit proposals for Game in Lab, a one-day conference to be held at GenCon 2020 in Indianapolis, IN. The topic is “Analog Games & Education” and can be interpreted broadly. We intend to bring together those working on non-digital games (and their digital hybrids) to build connections and advance a pedagogy for understanding analog games. The conference format will consist of engaging panel presentations of selected papers, circulated in advance. We seek thoughtful work from authors at any stage of their academic careers.
Proposals for presentations should include:
* An abstract no longer than 300 words
Papers could potentially cover (but are not limited to):
—Teaching subject material through analog games
—Analog games as historical texts
—Procedural rhetoric in analog games
—Representation in game art and mechanics
—Social tensions in analog games
—Analog games and performance
—Quantitative reasoning through analog games
—Platform studies and analog games
—Decolonization, anti-racism, and activism in analog games
—The consequences of classification within analog games
—Analog/digital hybridity in games
—Economic analyses of distribution and publishing in the analog games industry
Submit materials to analoggamestudiesjournal@gmail.com with “Game in Lab” somewhere in the subject line.
Abstracts Due: February 14th, 2020
Abstracts Acceptance Notice: March 15th, 2020
Actual Workshop Date: July 29th, 2020
*This conference 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.
**Generation Analog is a game scholarship event sponsored by Analog Game Studies and Asmodee, with the goal of promoting thoughtful scholarship on hobby board games, card & dice games, and role-playing games of interest to both researchers in higher education and the broader game design community. We are working with Gen Con to finalize details about including a program of events as part of Trade Day at the convention in Indianapolis during the summer of 2020. More details will be announced soon.