Religion Call for Papers | @relcfp

Friday and Saturday, March 20-21, 2026

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

The UNCG English Gaming Outreach Network., as supported by the Videogaming and Esports Studies Networ’k, Invites you to our second annual game studies conference. This year’s theme centers on give and take-1deas of exchange and transaction in gameplay, in discourse about play, and in communication between gamers, gaming media, and game creators. We are interested in gaming as a co-creatjve experience between many entities, one which imparts responsibility, poses questions, and provokes responses. This experience is malleable; the boundaries along which entities encounter each other aresites of shifting transactions that define and redefine such things as agency, creation, embodiment, and immersion. How do games invite, enable, restrict, or disallow co-creation? What responsibilities do games have toward players, and what responsibilities do players, reviewers, or the public have toward games and game creators?

The 2026 interdisciplinary UNCG Game Studies Conference seeks proposals for academic, creative, or non-traditional scholarship engaging with the theme and related topics. We welcome proposals about video and analog games from undergraduate students, graduate student s, faculty , and independent and emerging sc holars.

Proposals might consider, but are not limtted to, such ideas as:

• Gender or queer theory
• Feminism
• Transmedia and multimodality
• Critiques, reviews, hype, and other reactive or reflective gaming practices
• Games designed for health, wellness, or therapeutic functions
• Games designed for causes, such as environmentalism or mental health advocacy
• Fan-made pursuits such as modding, machinima, and fan fiction
• Relationships across media, such as those between Marvel games, Marvel media franchises, and the military-entertainment complex
• Questions of agency, player embodiment, immersion, etc.
• Pedagogy and transmedia or rnultimodal approaches to teaching

We invrte proposals from individuals, panels of no more than four presenters, roundtable discussions, and non-traditional sessions. The organizing committee will assemble panels from the accepted individual proposals. Some proposals will be accepted as Talk-and-Play presentations, which include the audience’s ability to play a portion of the game included in your presentation. For these we will use the UNCG Esports Arena, which offers a presentation area and 48 gaming PCs for attendees.

Share proposals by January 20 , 2026 via Microsoft form: https://forms.off1ce.com/r/RSVxdSPSvs

Proposals should include the following:

• A title
• A 500-word maximum abstract for individual proposals
• A 1,000-word maximum abstract for panels and roundtables, including the common subject, theme, or other connective material
• There will be options in the proposal form to indicate in-person or remote attendance for your presentation, A/V needs, or other specific requests.
• Please send any questions to [email protected].

If you are looking for resources for writing your abstract, we have a folder with helpful information available on request to the above email, and we will have an abstract review window from December 12-19, 2025. If you want to take advantage of an abstract review, please complete this form during that week. We will also have support resources available for any accepted panelists who have little or no conference experience. Give and take is not just our theme; it’s something we strongly believe in for our relationships with our panelists, so we will be in touch with what we can offer to assist your presentation development.