Draft:Analog Game Studies Journal

• Comment: See Wikipedia:Notability (academic journals) KylieTastic (talk) 19:00, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

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Analog Game Studies (AGS) is an academic journal dedicated to the study of Red analog games, which expands and extends game studies to include board games, card games, tabletop role-playing games, live action role-playing games, and multimodal games with analog components. Topics include: Dungeons and Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, Nordic LARP, game design, games and learning, actual play, fandoms, and race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other identities and experiences in analog games. According to the AGS website, the journal's goals and editorial philosophy include:

• to provide a platform for the documentation and analysis of games that use dice, cards, boards, pencil, paper, tokens, and/or performative elements.
• to provide peer-review services and help cultivate an interested audience for such material.
• to encourage the development of analog game studies theory and methods across disciplines.

The journal has been in production since 2014 publishing three to five issues a year. Each issue contains three to six scholarly articles, academic book reviews, even interviews. AGS publishes in English but includes authors and perspectives from around the world. AGS has published five volumes through ETC Press (now Play Story Press). Furthermore, starting in 2020, AGS organizes Generation Analog, an annual online tabletop games and education conference, co-presented with Game in Lab.

History

Analog Game Studies launched its first issue on August 1, 2014. The editors were Aaron Trammell, Evan Torner, and Emma Waldron. The idea for the journal emerged from conversations at the national conference of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCAACA) in March 2013, which was held in Washington, DC. According to the inaugural editors, "Analog Game Studies is committed to providing a periodically published platform for the critical analysis, discussion of design, and documentation of analog games."

Evan Torner describes Analog Game Studies as "an open-access, freely accessible online journal that initially grew out of the community itself. We wrote and solicited academic essays that covered topics of direct interest to practitioners and designers...The journal was and is capacious and accepting. Both established and marginalized voices could be given equal space in print."

Editorial Policy

Analog Game Studies uses a peer-to-peer review process connecting editor and author (and external readers when necessary). The journal's editorial policy stresses mentorship, collaboration, transparency, conversation, and timeliness. According to Nick Mizer, who went through the process, "AGS is first-rate when it comes to the peer review and editing process, and I don’t mind saying that the editors put me through the wringer in a good way, making the piece much better than my original submission. But at the same time it is also fast, lightweight, and lean compared to traditional journal models." Depending on the number of issues, the journal accepts between 9 and 15 articles a year.