Board Game Academics (BGA) is a journal and conference dedicated to the exploration of critical issues within the distinct yet overlapping communities of tabletop board and role-playing games.
We’re now accepting proposals for our 2024 conference and 2025 journal through April 22, 2024. See below for details, or visit our website to learn more: https://boardgameacademics.com/submissions/
While these communities are expanding, players, creators, and scholars of tabletop board and role-playing games have traditionally been late to address and include diverse representations and perspectives.
Our combined publication and academic conference aim to contextualize, historicize, and challenge the harmful ideologies rooted not just within gaming materials but also in their communities at large. Furthermore, we aim to present practical outcomes that support real-world applications, allowing the implementation of board games in educational, clinical, and general academic settings.
About the Conference
Each year, Board Game Academics partners with a tabletop gaming event that actively fosters engaging academic discourse on tabletop gaming. This year, the conference will be held on July 4, 2024, in Morristown, New Jersey, in tandem with the DexLite Convention.
Submission Guidelines
Below is a summary of the guidelines for authors interested in submitting proposals for the 2024 conference and subsequent journal.
We welcome submissions from all disciplines, fields, and academic levels and affiliations. Works we are interested in publishing are reviews (800 words), commentaries (2000 words), and papers (3000-4000 words).
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
- issues related to the history of tabletop games and their play
- use of tabletop games in the classroom
- gaming as an additive, pedagogical tool
- paratextual creation (fan and otherwise) within tabletop gaming communities
- political economy of tabletop games
- the mediated depictions of race, gender, sexuality, etc. within tabletop games
- adapting TTRPGs to therapeutic environments
- investigating historical prominence of analog gaming
- examining the sociological benefits of analog gaming
Issue 1 of the journal launched on March 1, so you can view recent articles published for an idea of topics that were accepted.
Submit Your Proposal
Abstracts of no more than 250 words for 30-45-minute presentations should be submitted to [email protected] by April 22, 2024. Please also include copies of your CV and preliminary works cited page as PDFs. Acceptance of proposals will be confirmed by May 1, 2024.
Presentations accepted to the conference will also be preliminarily accepted for publication in the 2025 issue of Board Game Academics. For those interested in submitting an abstract for the conference and not the journal (or vice versa), please indicate as such in your proposal.