Multiplatform 2024: Keynotes Announced!

The Manchester Game Centre are delighted to announce our keynote speakers for 2024’s Multiplatform symposium! Our annual symposium is focussed this year on queer games and playful protest, examining the intersection of games and dissent in multiple forms. Find out more here. The call for papers closes on March 29th - see below for details on how to submit your abstract.

Jess Metheringham, Dissent Games

Jessica Metheringham is a game designer and campaigner. In 2019 she founded Dissent Games, making games on political and cultural themes. She is the Chair of Unlock Democracy, and campaigns on democratic issues including voter ID and restrictions on protest. She has previously worked in Parliament, for the Electoral Commission, and for Quakers in Britain. Her games include Disarm the Base (about the peace movement), Library Labyrinth (showcasing 60 women in history and literature) and the forthcoming Trickle Down (the economy).

Jess will be running a workshop, ‘Dissent Through Play’. This workshop explores the messages communicated through games, and how to use these to challenge norms and propose solutions. How can we speak truth to power through fun? Who are we targeting with games, and what are we trying to demonstrate? How do overall themes and specific game mechanics contribute to the message? Participants will discuss the different ways in which games can influence opinion, educate players, and build relationships. 

Gaspard Pelurson, Kings College London

Gaspard grew up in France and Belgium and first obtained his BA in English Studies at the University of the Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris III). He then completed his Masters in English Literature at the University of Cambridge in 2012 and MA in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex in 2013. While working as a Doctoral Tutor and a Research Associate at the University of Sussex, he received his doctorate in Media and Cultural Studies in 2018. He started as a Lecturer in Media at Leeds Beckett University from 2019 to 2022 and retains fond memories of the North. Gaspard serves on the editorial board of Convergence and Continuum. His first monograph, Manifestations of Queerness in Video Games, explores the integration of video games with queer culture, including drag, cyborgs, sissies, flânerie, monsters, and the latent homoeroticism found in wrestling. His primary research interests lie at the intersection of queer and game studies. Drawing from cultural studies, game theory, gender studies, and queer theory, his work views games as a multifaceted medium and a platform for critical societal reflections. Of particular interest are alternative and 'deviant' gaming experiences, the mapping of game spaces, and the interplay between gaming and everyday life practices.

Hanne Grasmo, Tampere University

Hanne Grasmo is a doctoral researcher at Centre of Excellency for Game culture studies, Tampere University. Her PhD-research centers around embodied role-play and sexual emotions, both in Nordic larp and in BDSM communities. Focus areas are role-play design, immersion, queer play and transformative play. Both personally and professionally she is interested in exploring borders, edges, brinks and unknown possibilities. Grasmo holds a MA in sociology, and have additional background from sexology, education, theatre and larp design. She has discussed and written about larp for more than 20 years, founded the Knutepunkt larp conferences, wrote the first book about Nordic larp (1998) and have recently published a monograph of her well know larp: “Just a little lovin’ larp script” (2021).

CALL FOR PAPERS

We live in a time characterised by intersecting and violent crises. Increasingly, game creation and play are shaped by hegemonic interests, characterised by normative modes of production and consumption, what Janine Fron et al have called ‘the hegemony of play’. However, there has always been a resistant and queer energy in games. As Bo Ruberg argues, games ‘have always been queer’, aligning games and queerness through a shared ethos ‘to imagine alternative ways of being and to make space within structures of power for resistance through play’.

Inspired by a long history of queer game makers, queer play communities and practices, as well as the more recent contributions of scholars working in queer game studies, Multiplatform 2024 invites papers that explore how games, game-making and play dismantle traditional assumptions about gender and sexual identities, challenge traditional academic approaches to these topics, and promote inclusion, diversity and equality.

We are also interested to explore the intersection of dissident play practices and queer game studies. In this aim, we evoke the word queer to name a way of being, doing, and desiring in addition to its use as an umbrella term for people and experiences that do not conform to mainstream norms of gender and sexuality. In this sense of the word ‘queer’ we see generative synergies between queer gaming and those who want to harness the dissident potential of play in multiple ways, from intervening in rights discourses and climate justice, to supporting activism on a range of issues.

Multiplatform 2024 therefore welcomes proposals for academic papers, talks by designers, creatives and players, and panels or workshops.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

  • Queer approaches to game-making

  • Game-making tools and practices

  • LGBTQ+ histories in gaming

  • Queering the game archive and/or queering game histories

  • Queer representation in games

  • Queering the language of games

  • Queering mechanics and systems

  • Community building through games

  • Queer Theory and Game Studies

  • Queer Environmentalism and Games

  • Subversive or dissident play practices

  • Game Making as protest and/or activism

  • Queering VR/XR technologies

  • Inclusive play in TTRPG and LARP communities

  • Queering Board Game Design

  • Hacking games, counter-gaming, playing wrongly and other ‘critical play’ practices

  • Too Close Reading and other queer interpretive practices

  • Queering the material networks of play

Paper abstracts should be 200-400 words. Please include a short bio (50-100 words) and your contact details. We welcome panel proposals, as well as proposals for individual papers.

 

Please send your proposals to: C.Germaine@mmu.ac.uk by March 29th, 2024.

Chloe Germaine