Multiplatform 3: Remake, Reuse, Replay! ***CFP Extended***

The Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre is pleased to announce that our annual conference - Multiplatform 3: Remake, Reuse, Replay will take place on the 7th and 8th of June 2023 at the Salutation, 12 Higher Chatham Street, Manchester. 

DAY 1 THE ‘REMAKE, REUSE, REPLAY’ GAME JAM 

Multiplatform 3 opens with the ‘Remake, Reuse, Replay’ Game Jam. The Jam will be introduced by presentations on game design and games for sustainability from Dr Gordon Calleja (University of Malta/Mighty Board games), Professor Esther MacCallum-Stewart (Staffordshire University) and Matteo Menapace, designer of the climate action game Daybreak. 

The game jam challenges participants to take existing tabletop games and to ‘remake’ them by creating new rulesets that breathe new life into familiar titles. The Jam explores new ways of playing games that challenge models of consumption and extend the lifespan of the products gamers consume. Participants will work in teams, each guided by a game designer, choosing a game from our library to work on. The rules are simple, take the components you have and make something new. Following the jam, one team will be declared the winner and (copyright permitting) all rulesets will be made freely available online under a Creative Commons licence. 

Tickets for the Game Jam will be open to the public and available soon. If you are interested in participating and would like to know more, please email mmgc@mmu.ac.uk.

 DAY TWO: ‘REMAKE, REUSE, REPLAY’  SYMPOSIUM 

Day 2 will open with a plenary address from Dr Darshana Jayemane (Abertay University). We will then dedicate the day to academic papers for which we invite submissions.  See our call for papers below. Send abstracts to mmgc@mmu.ac.uk by 5pm Friday 10th March.

Plus, we will be hosting an expert panel featuring academics and game makers from a range of backgrounds, including:

Holly Nielsen - AHRC Techne funded doctoral student, researching ‘British board games and the ludic imagination: c.1860-1960’ at Royal Holloway, University of London. Holly is also a freelance games journalist and game designer.

Valentino Catricalà - a scholar and contemporary art curator specialised in the analysis of the relationship of artists with new technologies and media at the School of Digital Arts (SODA), Manchester.

James Newman - Professor in Media at Bath Spa University. Over the past 20 years, he has written widely on aspects of videogames, players and fans, game sound and music, and media histories

CALL FOR PAPERS 

Today, some of the most forward-thinking sectors of gaming culture are looking to the past, whether by building new games out of old ones, using hacked hardware to critically reframe familiar genres, pioneering new forms of historical fiction, or exploring innovative approaches to recovering, preserving and presenting gaming’s own history. These practices are of more than historical interest; in the context of the climate emergency, they spur us to imagine how revisiting the past might help us to fashion greener futures.   

Multiplatform 2023 asks participants to consider how forms of remaking, reuse and replay figure in analogue and digital gaming cultures. In so doing, it aims to further ongoing critical conversations. In recent years scholars have explored the place of ‘recombination’, ‘bricolage’ and ‘asset flipping’ in amateur and professional game creation (Boluk and Lemieux, 2017; Werning, 2021; Nicoll and Keogh, 2019) and addressed the terms on which ‘nostalgia games’ and ‘games made of games’ repurpose pre-existing materials (Sloan, 2016; Nelson, 2018). They have charted developments in modding cultures (Pozo, 2018; Curtis, Oxburgh and Briggs, 2021) and considered how games shape historical imaginaries (Kapell and Elliot, 2013). A growing body of scholarship has traced games’ ‘afterlives’, asking how fans, critics and corporations, artists, archivists and curators commemorate, collect and (re)contextualise bygone games (Newman, 2013; Guinns, 2014; Swalwell, Ndalianis and Stuckey, 2017; Bosman and van Weiringen, 2022). And researchers have reckoned with gaming’s environmental impacts, asking how we might develop more sustainable modes of play (Abraham and Jayemanne, 2017; Abraham , 2022; Chang, 2019; Germaine, 2022).   

With this literature in mind, Multiplatform 3 welcomes proposals for papers and panels on topics including, but not limited to, the following:  

  • Sustainability, eco-games and green gaming   

  • Hacking and modding    

  • Crafting, grafting and bricolage    

  • Renovation, repair and recycling   

  • Game curation, preservation and exhibition   

  • Historical and allohistorcal games   

  • Asset stores, asset flips and asset poaching   

  • Remakes and demakes   

  • Emulation and piracy   

  • Reflective and restorative nostalgia   

  • Reception and canon formation   

Papers should be 20 minutes in length. We also welcome panel proposals.

Please limit abstracts to 350 words.

Send abstracts to mmgc@mmu.ac.uk by 5pm Friday 31st March 2023.

Chloe Germaine