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{
    "pk": 64535,
    "title": "liches, lampreys, and the moon: an incantation for trans life & lyrical play",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "In this essay, we seek to intercept the formation of queer analog game studies (QAGS) at the moment of its emergence with a lyrical and trans-informed critique of academic field-building. We ask how we might move from frameworks of analysis that attempt to identify inherent qualities of games and their mechanics and toward those that center play as fundamentally mutable and shifting? Drawing on trans studies, critical game studies, and the experimental poetics of lyric game design, we propose a reimagining of queer analog play that resists disciplinary ossification. Rather than endorsing QAGS as a formal subfield, the paper advocates for an unruly, lyrical approach to queer game scholarship—one that privileges creative play, illegibility, and transformation over coherence or institutional legitimacy. We weave personal narrative, theoretical analysis, and experimental form to argue that trans and queer analog play has always existed beyond the bounds of legible academic structures, and that the push toward subfield status risks narrowing the radical potential of this work. Ultimately, this piece is a spell, a rant, and a poetic invitation: not to name and contain QAGS, but to scatter seeds in the open field beyond the playground, where new queer and trans futures might take root. It offers not a framework, but a mode of inhabiting scholarship—one in which play itself becomes a method of critique, community, and worldmaking.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "TTRPG"
        },
        {
            "word": "lyric games"
        },
        {
            "word": "disciplinarity"
        },
        {
            "word": "analog game studies"
        },
        {
            "word": "queer analog game studies"
        },
        {
            "word": "queer game studies"
        },
        {
            "word": "trans studies"
        },
        {
            "word": "trans games"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Articles",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7g13z87t",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "PB",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Berge",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of Alberta",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Percival",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Hornak",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2025-07-04T09:01:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/analoggamestudies/article/64535/galley/50369/download/"
        }
    ]
}