Promptuary – An Anthology of Playable Games Home Page
About this Anthology
Unlike traditional game studies publications, Promptuary is explicitly a game design anthology, focused on publishing short games — as rules texts, print-and-play materials, and other printable formats. We believe that game design can be a creative, technical, and scholarly endeavor and that games themselves can be worthy of peer review, academic publication, and recognition as works of scholarship and innovation.
The anthology’s title, Promptuary, pays homage both to games providing creative and/or strategic “prompts” to their players and also to the name of the “card abacus” (or “promptuary”), an early calculating tool that existed at the borderlands of the analog and the digital. Inspired by this boundary-straddling piece of technology, Promptuary aims to reflect the excitingly diverse and multi-form landscape of contemporary game design by publishing an innovative mix of peer-reviewed short form games and games-related content.
Volume 1 Call for Submissions
For its inaugural volume, Promptuary’s theme will be Strange Worlds: Science, Technology, and the Anthropocene. We welcome submissions for a thematic volume of games that speak to our past, present and future entanglements with science, technology, and the environment.
Submissions could include (but are not limited to):
- Games about the history and possible futures of science and technology
- Games about (un)natural environments, multi-species interactions, and sustainability
- Games about advanced machines, cyborgs/robots, and human-nonhuman distinctions
Submissions are due for volume 1 by November 30, 2026.
For more details on the submission process, see our submissions requirements.
Contact Us
See the CMU Press website for more information about the Games series, or reach out to series editors Jonathan Walton (CMU Entertainment Technology Center) and Ashley Werlinich (CMU Libraries).