Call for Abstracts:

The Well-Read Game
Special issue of the journal Well Played
https://playstorypress.org/2025/06/16/well-played-journal-cfp-well-read-games/

Curators:
Tracy Fullerton and Matthew Farber, authors of the new MIT Press book The Well-Read Game: On Playing Thoughtfully

Deadline for submission of abstracts: September 1, 2025
Deadline for final submissions for essays: January 15, 2026

In Tracy Fullerton’s and Matthew Farber’s new book, The Well-Read Game: On Playing Thoughtfully, part of The MIT Press’ Playful Thinking series, they propose a new framework of interpretive play. This framework is a theory of player response, exploring the ephemeral and emotional responses that occur when people are in a state of play. When we play a game, we experience more than just its formal structures; we may notice its aesthetic details or connect its character to our own lives. We tell ourselves stories as we play, ask questions, and react to the game’s intent. In The Well-Read Game, these experiences are called “readings” because they involve so many of the same inherent aspects of engaging with literary, cinematic, and other expressive texts. When we think of a game that is experienced in such a way, we can call it “well-read,” as well as well-played, in order to emphasize the personal, interpretive, and meaningful nature of these experiences and the way in which they relate to our reading of texts of all kinds.

Play Story Press is accepting submissions for a special Well Played journal issue based on the theories and techniques proposed in The Well-Read Game, which will be an edited collection of personal readings, interpretations, and discussions of how to evoke and express aesthetic experiences of games. Abstract submissions (200-300 words) are due 1 September 2025. Final submissions for essays (3000-5000 words) will be due 15 January 2026.

All submissions and questions should be sent to: wellplayed[at]playstorypress.org

The Well Played journal is a forum for in-depth, close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game. This issue will be blind peer-reviewed and curated by the authors of The Well-Read Game, focusing on the techniques explored in that book.

Contributors are encouraged to think about moments of gameplay that were emotionally moving and explore these moments in terms of the following:

• Connection to personal experiences that relate to gameplay
• Reflection on moments of learning and transformation
• Discussions between co-players with different lived experiences
• Layering of readings and rereadings of the same game from different life moments
• Discussion of outcomes of a game book club or literature circle questions. I.e., How did the game impact you? How do you think you’ll remember it in a few months or years?

As an example of a well-read moment, here is a reading by a 15-year old Journey player,

We had this experience where we would play with people and not know who they were and still have a profound connection with them. Toward the end of the game, it suddenly gets really cold and icy, and it becomes really difficult to progress. Eventually, your character sort of gives up, you can’t go on any longer, and at that point, my dad and I thought it might have been the end of the game. It was sort of a sad ending until minutes later, the game comes back up and you’re at your goal. You’re at this beautiful mountaintop filled with all the creatures you’ve seen in the world below. And it’s this beautiful example of the End, and that it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I think that that gave my dad some kind of peace because, near the end of his life, he was playing a game that told him that, in the end, it would be all right. It was a few weeks after he passed that I realized this journey within the game, it reflected the journey I was going on with my dad.
—Sophia Ouellette (2016), fifteen-year-old Journey player

For more about this call’s expectations, contributors are encouraged to read the book. For additional context, you can watch video of the Book Launch Pre-Festival Session at Games for Change. Also, two guest blog posts provide more context for the well-read framework; for the Connected Learning Alliance, A New Theory of Player Response, and for Sesame Workshop’s Joan Ganz Cooney Center, Playing Well Together: The Possibilities of Co-Play in Well-Read Games.

Play Story Press™ (playstorypress.org) is an open community publishing consortium of/by/for the field and our community. It is a diamond open-access academic publishing initiative in which contributors retain all their intellectual property. We work with our contributors in as timely a manner as possible so that we can share ideas that have impact and significance in our society.