I’m gearing up for attending THATCamp Games 2013 by brainstorming some session ideas. THATCamp Games is a digital humanities and game studies unconference that builds on the well-regarded inaugural 2012 THATCamp Games, which I co-organized with Anastasia Salter. This year’s organizers, Lee Zickel and Bill Deal, have some awesome new ideas planned (e.g. a more structured game design jam), and I’m really looking forward to attending. In 2012, we had scholars, students, game industry professionals, librarians, and grant agency officials from across the country, and we not only discussed game theory and research, but played and built digital-humanities-inflected games as well.

THATCamps are “unconferences”; you can read more at THATCamp.org if you’re unfamiliar with the movement, but the basic idea is to get a bunch of digital humanists together to talk and plan and share knowledge. Instead of presenting papers, in the weeks before the event attendees blog proposals for topics and questions they’d like to discuss, and on the morning of the event these proposal titles are usually taped up on a wall, and everyone gets a bunch of stickers to apply to the sessions they’d most like to attend (here’s one proposal I made for last year’s THATCamp Games, as an example). Proposals with the most stickers are put on a schedule and given rooms to meet in. THATCamps are open to anyone working in or interested in the digital humanities without regard for job or place in (or absence of place in) an academic hierarchy. Sessions are lightly facilitated by the person who proposed them, but they’re meant to be conversations where everyone talks, not rigid forums with a presenter or with participants such as students getting less of a voice.