New Releases and Publishing Roundtable!

Author

Play Story Press
May 24, 2025

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Have you ever wanted to be the hero? Save the world with an unlikely team of misfits? Spark and inspire change? The Dragon Age video game series allows players to play as a hero and a leader to fight monsters, overcome challenges, and shape a story, leaving a mark on a digital world and the hearts of the virtual people within it. Beginning in 2009, the video games, novels, and graphic novels that explore the game’s world, Thedas, have given role-playing game enthusiasts the chance to explore concepts of morality, leadership, identity, and even love. Join us in this adventure to explore the world of Dragon’s Age and its impact on players with the help of social scientific theory.

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Teacher Craft is about how teachers learn to use new digital media. Teacher learning is central to reform and change across subject areas and age levels, but how much do we really know about how teachers learn to try new lessons in classrooms? Minecraft is currently the game of choice for millions of youth and also for these seventeen teachers who claim it has transformed their classrooms. Its rapid adoption also provides a unique window of opportunity to look inside the recent memory of innovative teachers and unpack how they learned. Why did they pick Minecraft? More importantly, how did they pick Minecraft? Where did they hear about it? Who do they trust for ideas? How do they test new ideas? Can we begin to identify the trajectories of truly innovative teachers? It turns out, we can - and it may not be what you’d expect.

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Analog Game Studies: Volumes 1-4
https://playstorypress.org/analog-game-studies/

Analog Game Studies is a quarterly journal for the research and critique of analog games. We define analog games broadly and include work on tabletop and live-action role-playing games, board games, card games, pervasive games, game-like performances, carnival games, experimental games, and more. Analog Game Studies was founded to reserve a space for scholarship on analog games in the wider field of game studies.

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This volume resulted from the inaugural GENeration Analog conference held online July 27-28, 2021. The event was initially envisioned after the 2018 Gen Con in Indianapolis, USA. It is a collaboration between the Analog Game Studies journal team and Asmodee Research’s Game in Lab.

GENeration Analog 2021 is divided into four sections, admittedly with much dialogue between all their contents. Making and Materiality focuses on the fundamentals of analog game design and their hybridity between the classroom and online platforms, among others. Communities and Inclusion takes a hard look at game cultures and how they enable and/or block a greater diversity of bodies and voices within them. Mediation and Role-Playing carries us into the pairing of form and content in RPGs as a field of research. Legacies of Dungeons and Dragons concludes the book with three essays on a pivotal game title for us all.

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Play Story Press hosted a Publishing How-To Zoom Roundtable. The session focused on a variety of innovative ways to share scholarly ideas to make the most impact. We also offered tips for building communities of practice to help grow fields of knowledge.

The panelists shared their stories and perspectives, and helped facilitate group discussions and Q&A with attendees:

-Drew Davidson & Brad King – Editors at Play Story Press -Lindsay Grace – Knight Chair in Interactive Media at the University of Miami -Zoe Wake Hyde – Director at Radish Press -David Thomas – Co-Founder of Professors at Play

Key Takeaways

  • Find out the specific tools and processes you can use to produce a book, with or without a publisher

  • Challenge norms and notions of academic publishing and dissemination of scholarship

  • Learn how open access can transform your reach and impact

  • Rethink scholarly publishing formats

  • Understand why community matters!

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