The Board of Board Game Academics (BGA) is pleased to announce our call for papers for the 2025 conference and journal. BGA is dedicated to the exploration of critical issues within the distinct yet overlapping communities of tabletop board and role-playing games.
While these communities are expanding, players, creators, and scholars of tabletop board and role-playing games have traditionally been late to addressing and including diverse representations and perspectives.
For instance, production companies such as Wizards of the Coast (best known for Dungeons & Dragons) have been criticized for their continued celebration of oppressive ideological perspectives, systems, and governments.
Our combined publication and academic conference aims to contextualize, historicize, and challenge the harmful ideologies rooted not just within gaming materials, but also their communities at large.
Share with the world how you are using tabletop games to support more experiential pedagogies, enhance clinical practice, and engage with students and colleagues.
Board Game Academics aims to present practical outcomes that support real-world applications, allowing the implementation of board games in educational, clinical, and general academic settings.
Submission Guidelines
Below is a summary of the guidelines for authors interested in submitting proposals for the inaugural issue and conference.
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 should explore the practical applications of tabletop games in unique and compelling ways. Examples include but are not limited to:
- tabletop games in the class
- 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.
- Tabletop games for therapeutic purposes
- Usage and context of gaming in developmental processes
- View a complete list of recommendations and author guidelines here.
Submit Your Proposal
Abstracts of no more than 250 words for fifteen-twenty-minute presentations should be submitted to submissions by Feruary 1, 2025. Please also include a copies of your CV and preliminary works cited page as PDFs. Acceptance of proposals will be confirmed by April 1, 2024.
Presentations accepted to the conference will also be preliminarily accepted for publication in Volume III of Board Games Academic. For those interested in submitting an abstract for the conference and not the journal (or vice versa), please indicate as such in your proposal.