October 2017: ‘Hospitality’

Greetings all to the spookiest month of the year. As much as we love horror, costumes, pumpkins and their associated spices, we decided we wanted to be a little more welcoming. This October, we invite you to do more than just trick or treat, we want to invite you in, let the mask slip and enjoy some of our best ‘hospitality’:
Hosting others can be anything a precious memory, a rare treat, a regular encounter, an inconvenient interruption, a social obligation, or a reluctant duty. What does it mean to host in a game? Is hosting a hostile act or a hospitable one? And where do the conventions of play fit when being a guest in another person’s space? This month we want to know what games you have saved for company, which locations are most hospitable and which hosts you most remember? Can play be inviting or have you ever felt alienated by it? Tell us all about the different ways that hospitality fits or fails in different forms of play.
Make yourselves at home and I’ll be right back in a jiffy with some snacks and a game I invented call Jenga-charades. No seriously you’ll love it, you’ve gotta try it. By the way you do you have any medical allergies? It’ll probably be fine. Stick around! Take until the end of October to submit your work to email us your submissions or tweet them to @thecybersteam or @critdistance with the #BoRT hashtag. Happy blogging!
Suggestions for the Round Table:

  • Blogs of the Round Table is not curated. If you write it, we’ll publish it, as long as it’s connected to the topic and has been written specially for BoRT or up to one month prior.
  • Think of the BoRT topic as a starting point. Connecting your piece to the topic can be as creative as you want. We’re interested in writing about play, so be playful when you approach the round table!
  • This BoRT post is the home of the discussion: as we receive new submission blogs, we’ll update the ‘BoRT Linkomatic 5000’ so new blogs are reflected on this page immediately. We’ll also use the @critdistance Twitter account to post regular updates, so follow us!
  • As a knight of the round table we encourage you to leave a comment on a blog to which you respond with a link to the response piece and give the original writer a ‘right of reply’. Keep the conversation going!
  • If your work contains potentially disturbing content, please include a suitable warning at the start.
  • You can submit as many articles as you like throughout the month, and it doesn’t matter if they are commercially published, paywalled or available for free but we will need a transcript for paywalled content to be approved.