Analog Game Studies (AGS) is an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the academic and popular study of games containing a substantial analog component. We are a volunteer-run, open access, open review publication that caters to a combined academic and popular audience, with stakeholders in the humanities, education, industry, and gaming communities.  

Analog games are interesting in their accessibility, their innovative potential, and the already lively current discourse surrounding these games’ design and implementation. Anyone can design an analog game, as opposed to hardware-intensive video games, which often require massive programming teams with specialized skillsets. Thanks to these games’ accessibility and agility, game studies scholars frequently use analog games to teach specific game principles, from the act of removing pieces in chess to building a character in Dungeons & Dragons. Yet serious studies of these games’ logics, affordances and constraints are still developing in the game studies community. We intend for the journal to help tease out broader socio-cultural meanings at stake in analog game design and play. Analog games ultimately permit designers to explore concepts and systems that would be otherwise impractical or hard to implement on a digital platform. Rather than conceiving of analog games as a “pure” game form, we recognize their specific histories, trajectories, and potential. We also recognize that much has already been said about analog game studies within design communities, and this forum will help us maintain a shared language across these mostly private networks and across disciplines such as history, psychology, media studies, sociology, anthropology and literary studies. Bridging these diverse networks is the purpose and reason for existence for this journal.

AGS accepts scholarship and other academic writing on tabletop role-playing games (TTRPG), traditional and parlor games (e.g. chess, go, backgammon), board games, strategy and miniature games, collectible card games, live-action role-playing (LARP), and related topics and artifacts.  AGS works and publishes in (American) English.  

Our Format and Editorial Process

As a journal, Analog Game Studies uses an open-yet-curatorial model to review submitted works. We strive to represent a varied set of perspectives in each issue and, as such, find it to be of the utmost importance to offer transparency to writers in our review process as well as authorial and topical diversity to our readers with regard to articles we choose to publish. For these reasons, the editorial board carefully curates select essays for each issue from our pool of submissions and then works closely with the selected authors in a rigorous and transparent editing process. We see this process as a collaborative, expressive, and open conversation between editor and author. It is because of this curatorial model that our essays can present clear and timely arguments in engaging and readable prose.

All submissions will be reviewed by the Analog Game Studies editorial board, which collectively determines whether an essay will be accepted, returned for revision and resubmission, or rejected.

Aims and Scope

The goals of the journal are (1) to provide a platform for the documentation and analysis of games that use dice, cards, boards, pencil, paper, tokens, and/or performative elements, (2) to provide open peer review mentorship, particularly for new and underrepresented scholars and designers, and (3) to encourage the development of analog game studies theory and methods across disciplines as well as to help cultivate an interested audience for such material.  

Analog Game Studies publishes year round, triannually or quarterly, with issues generally coming out in March, June, September, and December.  

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Featured image by Will Wright from Pexels. Creative Commons.