Following the colloquium « Jeux et Société, approches sociales, artistiques et rhétoriques » (Games and Society: Social, Artistic, and Rhetorical Approaches) (Montpellier 2025), RHETOLUD is organizing a summer school from June 1st to 5 at the University of Montpellier Paul-Valéry.

• Collectively thinking about gaming norms through game design practice

The event is aimed at designers, artists, authors, and researchers who are particularly interested in the language of games (board, video, hybrid) and the representations they convey. Analyzing this language requires being able to identify meaningful and regular structures within games, on which an artistic and stylistic interpretation of the game can be built.

• Four days of immersion to reflect and create

The goal of this summer school is to provide a space and time for collaborative creation and research to explore how to observe, model, and refine the forms, discourses, and values at the heart of playful structures. Drawing on procedural rhetoric and its developments [Bogost 2006 to present, Flanagan 2009, 2023, Bonenfant 2016, Genvo 2010 to present, Sicart 2011, Siegel 2015 to present], this four-day meeting aims to question the dominance of certain mechanics that condition the playful experiences and aesthetic registers offered by games. For example, heroic fantasy is frequently linked to mechanics of exploration, combat, and object accumulation; science fiction often invokes conquest, resource management, or space travel; management games are almost always rooted in productivist representations. These links, which are as much a result of cultural tropes as they are of socio-historical legacies, shape the imaginations of designers and players. While these associations can sometimes inspire, animate, and immerse, the mechanics and systems actualize worldviews, thought patterns, and ideologies that are sometimes more difficult to detect during gameplay.

• Reinventing game design practices, tools, and language

The summer school aims to foster collaboration among participants, who are themselves creators of worlds and representations in their games, in order to (1) understand how representations and mechanics support and reinforce each other; (2) to reflect on the spaces for creativity that arise from their diversion or hybridization. The proposed approach will be faithful to RHÉTOLUD's research-creation methodology by offering moments of reflection, led by specialists in procedural rhetoric, statistical game analysis, and sociocriticism, as well as practical experiments in the form of workshops. The RHÉTOLUD summer school aims to both transmit and co-construct tools for analyzing the representations that lie at the heart of rules and to collectively experiment with ways of inventing new ones. The event is aimed at both experienced and amateur game designers and authors, and anyone motivated by the desire to develop the artistic and aesthetic characteristics of the medium of games in an anthropological, political, and social dimension.

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• Provisional program:

June 1st : Welcome reception for participants.

Each day will feature a conference (open to the public), design and analysis workshops, and a roundtable discussion on the world of gaming.

June 2: Standards and gaming sectors.
Analysis and observation of gaming standards based on a corpus of board games and video games.
Round table discussion on the state of the gaming industries.

June 3: Procedural rhetoric and expressiveness in gaming
Game design workshop: stylistic devices as game mechanics
Round table discussion with creators and players: between intentions and perceptions

June 4: Rethinking game design practice: towards a new gaming language?
Game design workshop: between research and creation
Round table discussion with game authors: room for experimentation, field experience, creative constraints.

June 5: Meetings and feedback
Playable exhibition of the week's creations open to the public, and a friendly networking event with professionals from the gaming sector.


We would like participants to attend the entire event, which is structured around practical reflection and experimentation throughout the week. Please let us know if you are only able to attend part of the event.

Pre-registration is now open.

If you are a professional in the gaming sector (researcher, author, game designer, artist, student) and would like to participate in the summer school from Monday, June 1 to Friday, June 4, you can use the pre-registration tab, log in to sciencesconf, and pre-book.

Remember to register as soon as possible!