Call for Papers: Generation Analog 2025

We are excited to share the news that Game in Lab and Analog Game Studies are once again joining forces to host Generation Analog 2025, taking place online on July 16 & 17, 2025.

This year's theme is PUNK, exploring how games embody and express punk attitudes, spaces, and art.

PUNK will be this year’s conference theme.  It will explore games and punk attitude, punk rock, punk style, punk spaces, punk fashion, punk art, pop punk, and punk play.  The conference hopes to shake things up, to rattle a few cages, to disrupt the normal, naturalized, and official, and most importantly, to find and foster care, healing, empathy, and joy. 

In “Guilty of Not Being White: On the Visibility and Othering of Black Punk,” writer, scholar, and poet Marcus Clayton agrees, “This is the very ethos of punk rock: being loud during a time when those abusing power demand quiet. The conversion of sorrow into anger, into an energy that can be maintained and used to create social upheaval in the name of equality is exactly what punk wants to do and why it breathes.” 

Clayton continues, “Punk inherently celebrates equality and inclusivity with its brash sea of noise, yet punks of color are continually left drowning in those waters. At the forefront of the genre is the push against the establishment and its many forms—governmental interference in community lives, capitalistic greed, gender and sexual inequality, and racism—but when viewed through the lens of a punk of color, those pushes do not register any physical progression.”  Therefore, generation analog invites everyone to put the punk into games, to play like a punk, to design punkly, to punk intersectionally, and to DIY alternative materialities, performativities, economies, and possibilities of play.

Abstracts should articulate a clear analytical, theoretical, philosophical, or artistic perspective and address how the presentation engages the conference theme.  Integrating 2-3 scholarly or supporting sources is recommended.  Presentations might engage (but are not limited to):

  • *punk (i.e. cyberpunk, steampunk, Afropunk, gothpunk, solarpunk, biopunk, silkpunk, hopepunk)

  • subcultures, countercultures, alternative spaces and games

  • punk histories and communities, anti-racism, anti-fascism, anti-authoritarianism

  • race and punk, gender and punk, sex and punk, disability and punk, punk of color, games of color

  • anti-establishment, anti-capitalism, anti-consumerism, anti-conformity and games

  • punk and the urban, suburban, and/or rural

  • punk stories, zines, posters, pamphlets, manifestos, and games

  • resistance, rebellion, and political disruption and violence and games

  • music, sound, noise, sonic norms

  • shows, stages, performances, dances, bars, sweaty and smelly bathrooms, mosh pits, and backrooms

  • indie games, DIY design, play, organizing, ethics

  • feminist punk, riot grrls, queercore, ACT UP, Queer Nation, crippunk, anti-normativity, queer experimentation

  • adaptations, commodification, co-optation, “selling out,” of “not punk enough,” or the fantasies of “keeping it real”

Proposals for presentations must include (ideally, 1-page Word or PDF document):

  1. Title

  2. Presenter Name(s) and Pronouns

  3. Presenter Email(s)

  4. Presenter Institution(s) or Affiliation(s) (if available)

  5. Presenter(s) Location/Time Zone

  6. Abstract of 250-350 words, single spaced

  7. A short list of 5-7 keywords (e.g. genre, TTRPG, agency, mechanics, LARP, actual play, education)

Example abstracts from previous years (used with permission): Abstract 1, Abstract 2, Abstract 3. Abstract 4.

Presentations should be around 15 minutes in length.  Preformed panels will be considered and should include four presenters; submit a panel proposal that includes an overall title, brief panel abstract, and the above information for each panelist.  Submit materials to GenerationAnalogConference@gmail.com with “Generation Analog 2025 Submission” in the subject line.

Timeline: 

Abstracts due: March 31, 2025
Acceptance by: May 1, 2025
Conference Dates: July 16-17, 2025

Presentations and abstracts are anonymized and read, ranked, and selected by AGS board members.  Depending on year and overall submissions, acceptance rates have been between 30 to 50 percent.  We strongly encourage people from underrepresented groups to apply.

Generation Analog is volunteer run and is jointly sponsored by Game in Lab and the Analog Game Studies Editorial Board. 

Chloe Germaine