In the last couple of months the Affinity Games team has gone through a ton of changes in their lives that have demanded a lot of time and energy. But, make no mistake, we have been working too! New versions of the Romance and Sexuality decks will be available on The Game Crafter and FREE Print-to-Play (P2P) versions will be making their way to the website on December 21, 2019, the Winter Solstice. We’ve also done a lot of work on the website and creating new gameplay Modes for both single player and multiplayer Modes of play.
We have also been writing our tails off! A 16k+ word essay on Friendship Games for JGSS and a 20k+ (GASP!) word chapter on Dating Games for a collected volume on Love and Affection in Games: A Design Primer. We’re not done though! We have really unified around the need to write more, do more research on and ultimately focus ourselves on Affinity Games broadly speaking. We did hear back from JGSS and while one reviewer very much wanted to publish the essay, the second reviewer wanted significant edits. So, we won’t be publishing out Friendship Games paper with JGSS, but will happily rework it for either Game Studies, another publication, and/or us it for a future book. This has prompted us to think about future decks for Fellowship of Fools: The (Friendship/Romance/Sexuality/…) Game as well as projects above and beyond. We have a new card game idea that we want to pursue this winter before we start on the Fellowship of Fools: The (Kink) Game deck. Once it’s ready to be released we’ll have a new website for it, and (finally) set up an Affinity Games website to showcase our games and theory.
We have also submitted a paper abstract that was accepted to The Queerness and Games Conference. Our paper is titled, “On the Queer Revolutionary Potential of Relationship Anarchy and Affinity Games.” We also submitted all of the FoF decks: Fellowship of Fools: The (Friendship/Romance/Sexuality) Game, and will hear back about the game early in 2020. We also submitted paper abstracts for two talks to DiGRA, which will be held in 2020 in Tempere, Finland. These are called Friendship Games: The Foundation of Games for Making Friends and Dating Games: (Re)Designing the “Oldest Game” and are based off of our most recent research and writing. We also are considering submitting a session proposal for Games for Change 2020.
This give you a bit more of a sense of where we will be taking things over the next few months. You will be getting more regular updates and excerpts of what we’ve been writing now that we have a road-map and we look forward to sharing more with you as the various pieces continue to fall into place.