It’s once again time for Generation Analog, an annual online tabletop games and education conference organized by Analog Game Studies and Game in Lab:
PUNK is this year’s conference theme. We will explore games and punk attitude, punk rock, punk style, punk spaces, punk fashion, punk art, pop punk, and punk play. We will address and interrogate games, mechanics, genres, platforms, performances, narratives, and worlds that embrace punk histories, philosophies, aesthetics, and politics. We hope 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. We refuse to be resigned; we refuse to stay quiet; we refuse to stop dreaming. 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.” Moreover, we strive to recover, remember, and reinvigorate the stories, voices, bodies, places, practices, and play of those forgotten and marginalized, whitewashed and straightwashed. 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, we invite 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.
This year will only be one day, Thursday, July 17, from approximately 8:45 AM to 8:00 PM EDT, and will feature Quinn Murphy (Thoughtcrime Games) as keynote and Dr. Aaron Trammell (UC Irvine) as the first annual AGS Presidential Lecture. The full program with abstracts is here.
This conference is one of the highlights of my year, and I am always thrilled to be a part of the crew that organizes, runs, and enjoys it! For more information, go to the Generation Analog webpage. And if you miss the conference, the sessions will be recorded and available at AGS’s YouTube page! #StayAnalog!