Biased Play
Educators, scholars, and designers of all backgrounds are invited to submit their research to a virtual summit on people and physical materials in analog games. Based on the success of GENeration Analog 2021 and 2022, Analog Game Studies and Game in Lab will be offering a third GENeration Analog event. This one will take place online on Wednesday July 26 and Thursday July 27, 2023, the week before Gen Con. A highly selective review process will afford us a day of thoughtful presentations, which will be recorded and made available to the public. The last two years’ sessions can be found here:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlYAgBDoVabyV5uyhNOCiJztR8kZTHnF_
The event will be free and open to the public.
Keynote speakers include Jeeyon Shim (Game designer), Jason Perez (Cultural Consultant), and Jessica Hammer (Thomas and Lydia Moran Associate Professor of Learning Science, Carnegie Mellon University)
The theme of the conference is biased play. For this year’s conference we focus our attention on themes of play. Play is not a neutral activity; it holds within it affordances that are often quite biased. Who gets to choose the games which are played, how are these norms enforced by communities of practices, and how do these unspoken rules allow bullies to thrive? These are just some of the questions that we hope to address at this year’s conference. We want to challenge the invisible, powerful, and taken for granted hierarchies that lie at the center of games today.
Tabletop games, role-playing games, and even childhood play are all extraordinary spaces of inquiry for this question as they necessitate a conversation about who is playing and how the rules are enforced. Play, in other words, is prominent.
We invite scholars, teachers, graduate students, and the intellectually curious to submit proposals for Generation Analog 2023, a two-day virtual conference held online on Wednesday July 26 and Thursday July 27, 2023. Designers, educators, and researchers in all stages of their career are encouraged to apply. We seek thoughtful work from authors at any stage of their academic careers.
Proposals for papers will include an abstract no longer than 300 words.
Papers could potentially cover (but are not limited to):
–Rigged systems
–Implicit rules and implied subjects in games
–Unlevel playing fields
–House rules
–Analog and digital biases
–Art Games
–Misinformation and disinformation
–“Critical Play”
–Whiteness and play
–Elections as games
–Counterplay
–Bland play
–Normative play
–Cooperative play
–Slow play
–Algorithmic or procedural bias
–Gamification
–Issues of balance in games
Submit materials to analoggamestudiesjournal@gmail.com with “Generation Analog 2023” somewhere in the subject line.
Timeline:
Abstracts due: April 15, 2023
Acceptance by May 1, 2023
Actual Workshop Dates: July 26-27, 2023 – online
Note: 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.