Call for Papers:

GachaCon 2027: Otome Games
February 1-3, 2027
School of Creative Media
City University of Hong Kong
https://tinyurl.com/gachacon2027callforpaper

Deadline for submission of abstracts: November 30, 2026

Following the successful conclusion of GachaCon 2026: Genshin Impact in February 2026, we are pleased to announce the next annual edition of GachaCon. For 2027, we will host a three-day hybrid event. Two days will be dedicated to this year’s thematic focus: otome games. A third day will be reserved for presentations relating to any aspect of gacha games that need not relate to the thematic focus, just like how the 2026 edition included excellent presentations not directly related to Genshin Impact.

THEMATIC FOCUS

Otome games have attracted growing attention within videogame culture in recent years. Emerging from Japan’s female-oriented game culture, otome games typically centre on a female protagonist, allowing players to step into her stories and develop romantic relationships with multiple male characters. After more than three decades of development, otome games have now expanded across console, PC, and mobile platforms and circulate far beyond Japan (Saito, 2021), becoming an important component of global popular culture for women.

Globally, developers have produced games that adopt or reinterpret conventions associated with the genre, starting from Japan’s Angelique (Koei, 1994) and Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side (Konami, 2002), to China’s Love and Deepspace (Papergames, 2024) and Tears of Themis (miHoYo, 2020), South Korea’s Mystic Messenger (Cheritz, 2016), and independent otome games produced in North America and Europe. Players likewise encounter otome games across different cultural contexts, languages, platforms, and fan communities (Liu & Lai, 2026; Zhang & Vlachokyriakos, 2025).

The development of otome games has also increasingly intersected with gacha and other forms of live-service game design. In many contemporary mobile otome games, players acquire character cards, illustrations, stories, voice lines, and other content through randomised reward systems, limited-time events, and recurring monetisation. Such gacha mechanics have attracted scholarly and regulatory attention because of their gambling-like characteristics and related concerns surrounding transparency and consumer protection (Xiao, 2024). The gacha systems also connect the collection and consumption of virtual items with players’ relationships and attachments to fictional characters (Blom, 2025; Zhangshao et al., 2026). Otome games therefore offer a particularly interesting context for examining how gacha mechanics become intertwined with gender, romance, intimacy, character attachment, and forms of cultural and economic value.

The significance of otome games extends beyond romance as a narrative theme. Otome games offer a particularly rich site for examining how videogames imagine and mediate gender, desire, intimacy, and relationships. They invite players to navigate romantic choices, develop attachments to fictional characters, engage with carefully constructed ideals of femininity and masculinity (Andlauer, 2018), and create a community for players seek and provide social support (Lei, 2024). At the same time, these experiences are shaped by game systems, narrative, character design, monetisation models, localisation, and platform infrastructures. Otome games therefore sit at the intersection of questions that have concerned scholars across game studies, monetisation studies, gender and sexuality studies, media and cultural studies, fandom studies, Japanese and East Asian studies, law, psychology, and human-computer interaction.

However, this scholarship remains dispersed across disciplines, regions, and academic communities. Researchers studying otome games may find themselves situated within broader conversations about videogames, Japanese popular culture, romance media, gender, fandom, or digital platforms, with relatively few opportunities for sustained exchange centred specifically on otome games.

Therefore, the Creative Media Policy Observatory at the City University of Hong Kong shall gather international researchers from different disciplinary, methodological, and regional perspectives. We hope to create a space for examining both the established conventions of otome games and their ongoing transformations across cultures, technologies, industries, and player communities, while situating these discussions within the broader study of gacha games and related forms of digital play.

Notably, while otome games will be a focus, we are equally interested in work that takes the gacha game conversation in other directions, particularly towards emerging and less frequently examined issues.

Abstracts may address (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• Otome games
• Narrative and storytelling
• Character design: love interests, protagonists, and visual appeal, etc.
• Romance, intimacy, desire, and emotional engagement
• Affect and affective labor
• Gender, sexuality, and representation
• Character attachment, parasociality, and player–character relationships
• Gacha mechanics, character collection, and monetisation
• Player communities, including their reaction to various issues
• Localisation, censorship, and transnational circulation
• Game industries, production practices, and developer perspectives
• Voice acting, character performance, and creative labour
• Regulation, policy, consumer protection, and game governance
• Marketing: offline events, merchandise, social media posts, etc.
• Any other topics relating to gacha games

SUBMISSION

To be considered for presentation, please submit an extended abstract of 800 words (excluding references) by downloading and using the GachaCon template (https://tinyurl.com/gachacon2027template). Submissions do not have to be anonymised and will be reviewed by the GachaCon co-organisers.

Accepted extended abstracts will be presented as 15-minute talks (plus 5 minutes of Q&A). We will also publish the extended abstracts online prior to the conference under a CC BY 4.0 licence. Extended abstracts are to be submitted via this Google Form (https://tinyurl.com/gachacon2027submit). If you cannot access the template or the Google Form, please email the organising team via [email protected].

Please note: this is intended to be a mostly physical event to foster networking and discussion beyond the Q&A, and we therefore strongly encourage all presenters to attend in person. However, we will also consider your submission if you are only able to present remotely. For transparency, we anticipate having at most one remote session consisting of about three papers. We do intend to livestream the conference to facilitate remote participation.

If you are a student (including PhD students) who played a leading role in the research, please indicate this in the Google Form where requested. If not already selected for the main programme, student-led submissions are then additionally considered for the dedicated early career session and/or the poster session. Papers in the early career session will be presented as 10-minute talks (including questions).

We aim to award prizes for the best papers.

EDITED BOOK

We hope to invite all otome game-relevant presenters to contribute to an edited book on otome games.

To enable everyone to attend, there will be NO registration fee for GachaCon 2027, which will be free. Please do register and attend in-person or tune in online via https://tinyurl.com/gachacon2027register.

IMPORTANT DATES

Abstract submission deadline: 30 November 2026
Notification of acceptance: 14 December 2026
Conference: 1–3 February 2027

ORGANISERS

LEON Y. XIAO, City University of Hong Kong ([email protected]) Leon is trained in English law and researches video game and gambling policy and regulation with a focus on empirical evaluations of compliance and implementation. Recent studies focused on using laws to access research data (e.g., social media advertising repositories enabled by the EU Digital Services Act). His research is often relied upon by policymakers and regulators globally. Leading media regularly feature his findings and commentary.

YISONG HAN, City University of Hong Kong ([email protected]) Yisong Han is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on game studies, gender studies, and digital media, with interests in avatar customisation, game production, and game cultures

KUMA X. XIONG, City University of Hong Kong ([email protected]) Kuma is a PhD student funded by the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme (HKPFS) at City University of Hong Kong. She is interested in gender, fandom, and monetization, particularly in the context of otome games. She explores female players’ affective experiences and their efforts to gain a stronger voice in gaming cultures. Her research interests also extend to physical chance-based products, such as blind boxes, card packs, and gachapon.

TIANYI ZHANGSHAO, University of Sydney ([email protected]) Tianyi Zhangshao is a third-year PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. His doctoral research examines the monetisation of Chinese video games through the perspectives of governance, production, and culture. Parts of this work have been published in New Media & Society.

LUDOLOGY

Koei. 1994. Angelique. Super Famicom. Tokyo, Japan: Koei.

Konami. 2002. Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side. PlayStation 2. Tokyo, Japan: Konami. Papergames. 2024. Love and Deepspace. Mobile (iOS, Android). Shanghai, China: Papergames.

miHoYo. 2020. Tears of Themis. Mobile (iOS, Android). Shanghai, China: miHoYo. Cheritz. 2016. Mystic Messenger. Mobile (iOS, Android). Seoul, South Korea: Cheritz.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andlauer, L. (2018). Pursuing One’s Own Prince: Love’s Fantasy in Otome Game Contents and Fan Practice. Mechademia, 11(1), 166-183. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/725976

Blom, J. (2025, June). Love as a service in otome games. In Abstract Proceedings of DiGRA 2025: Games at the Crossroads.

Lei, Q., Tang, R., Ho, H. M., Zhou, H., Guo, J., & Tang, Z. (2024, May). A game of love for women: Social support in otome game Mr. Love: Queen’s Choice in China. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-15).

Liu, T., & Lai, Z. (2026). Eroticism and Design Workshops in Game Interfaces:

Exploring a Mobile Otome Game for Chinese Women. Games and Culture, 21(5), 1067-1087. https://doi.org/10.1177/15554120241306788

Saito, K. (2021). From Novels to Video Games: Romantic Love and Narrative Form in Japanese Visual Novels and Romance Adventure Games. Arts, 10(3), 42. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts10030042

Xiao, L. Y. (2024). Loot Box State of Play 2023: Law, Regulation, Policy, and Enforcement Around the World. Gaming Law Review, 28(10), 450-483. https://doi.org/10.1089/glr2.2024.0006

Zhang, V. N., & Vlachokyriakos, V. (2025). Beyond the Screen: Exploring the Emotional and Social Impact of Otome Games on Global Players. In Proceedings of the 23rd EUSSET Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies. https://doi.org/10.48340/ecscw2025_ep05

Zhangshao, T., Tan, W., & Wang, Y. (2026). Affective Predation: Gendered play, Monetisation, and Precarity in Otome Gacha Games. Abstract Proceedings of DiGRA 2026.