New Publication: Generation Analog 2021

Game in Lab and the Analog Game Studies journal announced the publication today of Generation Analog 2021: Proceedings of the Tabletop Games and Education Conference, edited by Evan Torner, Shelly Jones, Edmond Chang, Megan Condis, & Aaron Trammell.

This publications, the proceedings of the first Generation Analog conference in 2021, includes articles about making, materiality, community, inclusion, mediation, and role-playing. You can download it for free here, or purchase a print copy from publishers, ETC Press.

Generation Analog 2021 is divided into four sections, admittedly with much dialogue between all their contents. Making and Materiality focuses on the fundamentals of analog game design and their hybridity between the classroom and online platforms, among others. Communities and Inclusion takes a hard look at game cultures and how they enable and/or block a greater diversity of bodies and voices within them. Mediation and Role-Playing carries us into the pairing of form and content in RPGs as a field of research. Legacies of Dungeons and Dragons concludes the book with three essays on a pivotal game title for us all.

Among the articles is, ‘Dark Forests and Doomed Adventurers: An Ecocritical Reading of Horror Roleplaying Games’ by MGC co-director, Chloé Germaine. In this article, Chloé explores the ecological potential of tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) through a close reading of contemporary horror games. She argues that these games go beyond representing anxieties about ecological disaster. Instead, they offer a generative mode of collaborative worldbuilding in a time of climate crisis. She examines the ethics of TTRPGs through the lens of ecocriticism, identifying tensions between game texts and game play. Such tensions are productive and play out through collaborative storytelling techniques and ludic mechanics that invite players to reflect on the interrelationship between humans and the worlds in which they are embedded.

You can find out more about the MGC research that fed this paper on our YouTube channel, and listen to our MGC ecohorror TTRPG actual play here.