Analogue Games at Manchester Metropolitan University
Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre members are dedicated to the study, promotion, and development of Analogue Games in academia, including work on board games, table-top roleplaying games, live action roleplaying games, and other forms of non-digital play, and including hybrid games that use both digital and analogue components.
Our work in these areas aims to bring about a step-change in the study of analogue games, which remain relatively under-researched and receive sparse coverage in the curriculum. We work with a growing academic community across the UK and beyond producing significant research on analogue games and game cultures, and host events on this theme to encourage collaboration, identify and develop new trends in analogue game studies, and to bring together academic, industry, and player communities.
During 2021 we partnered with Game in Lab, a division of Asmodee Research dedicated to the support and dissemination of scientific and social research on board games. The 2021 Game in Lab RPG Cycle hosted events exploring roleplaying games in France, Italy, Canada, the United States, Japan and the UK. MGSN were Game in Lab’s UK partner, devising and delivering two exciting events that brought together players, designers and academics to explore various aspects of roleplaying games.
‘Dark Forests and Doomed Adventurers’ was a round table event that featured indie game designers and academics exploring the ways in which players create, encounter, and interact with the environment in indie roleplaying games. You can watch the video here and listen to MGSN members playing the folk horror roleplaying game, The Shivering Circle, here.
‘Dice on the Nile’: Roleplaying History’ investigated the use of Dungeons & Dragons 5e to engage with the history of the early Islamic world, with panelists considering the challenges posed by the use of historical settings in roleplaying games. You can watch the discussion here and listen to a game session with the group in a special podcast made especially for the event.
Our collaboration with Game In Lab will continue in 2022 as we work to develop analogue game studies networks here in the UK and beyond.
Material Game Studies: A Philosophy of Analogue Play
MMGC co-directors Paul Wake and Chloé Germaine are co-editors of the collection, Material Game Studies for Bloomsbury. The volume advocates for, and defines, ‘Material Game Studies’, creating a dialogue between scholars with diverse interests, including card and board games, role-playing games, art and performance, game design, ecology, animal studies and digital technologies. Essays in the volume apply insights from the material turn in philosophy and critical theory to the study of play and games. This is important for scholars working in Game Studies, which has hitherto been concerned primarily with the digital, but also for scholars interested in how play and games shed light on materiality itself. The contributions reflect an international discussion, bringing together work from the UK, Europe, Australia, the United States and Canada.
Contents
Introduction: Material Game Studies, Chloé Germaine and Paul Wake (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
Section 1: Provocations
1. Thinking the Things We Play With, Miguel Sicart (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)
2. Analog Games as Infrastructure, Aaron Trammel (University of South California, USA)
Section 2: Materials
3. Component parts: Board games as architecture and performance, Paul Wake (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
4. A Queer Touch of Fantasy Role-Play, Jack Warren (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
5. Lead Fantasies: The making, meaning and materiality of miniatures, Mikko Meriläinen, Katriina Heljakka, Jaakko Stenros (Tampere University, Finland)
Section 3: Ideologies
6. 'Men Should Try Playing the Woman's Part to See What it Feels Like. Remember ~ It's Only a Game…': The Representation of Gendered Experience in Chance-based Board Games, Holly Nielsen (Royal Holloway University, UK)
7. Deterritorializing Game Boards: Mapping Imperialism in RISK and Modern Board Games, Jonathan Ray Lee (University of Washington, USA)
8. Nature' Games in a time of Climate Crisis, Chloé Germaine Buckley (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
Section 4: Cultures
9. Contested Spaces, Velvet Ropes, Exclusion Zones: The Pleasures and Dangers of Face-to-Face Play in Analogue Gaming Spaces, Tanya Pobuda (Ryerson and York University, Canada)
10. 'Hands, Face, Space' - The Material Turn and COVID -19, Esther McCallum Stewart (University of Staffordshire, UK)
Section 5: Hybridity
11. The Cult of New (Stuff): Kickstarter's Digital/Material Tensions, Paul Booth (DePaul University, Chicago, USA)
12. The Logic of Analogue Adaptation, Nathan Altice (University of California Santa Cruz, USA)