Funded PhD Positions with the Manchester Game Centre!

Games have massive global reach among diverse populations. The transformative potential of the game industry is therefore huge, but research is needed if this potential is to be realised. The idea that games address the challenge of climate change has been established through the study of ‘ecogames’. However, optimism about the potential of ecogames is undercut by research into the negative material impact of game development, raising the question: how can we make and play games sustainably?

Apply to join a team of three new PhDs working on a project that addresses this question through interdisciplinary research across Art and Design, English Studies, Philosophy and Cultural Sociology. The three PhD projects will investigate the ecosystem of game design, game artefacts, and game consumption.

They are funded by the AHRC North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership and will be hosted at Manchester Metropolitan University and Salford University.

The PhDs in Manchester will join the Manchester Game Centre, working in the School of Digital Arts, the Department of English, and the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy.

PhD 1 - Game Design for Post-Climate Futures

This particular PhD proposes game making as a research practice. It will be undertaken by a practitioner in game design, who will explore games as a transformative mode of art and investigate and test their affordances in radically reimagining climate futures. The student will gain supervisory expertise from within the games industry, and focus on the nonhuman processes at work in game design, specifically AI. 

The aims of the project are to explore game making as a research practice that can address the issue of sustainable play. The project will investigate how can game making be leverged as a transformative mode of art and seek to identify what are the affordances of games in radically reimagining climate futures. In relation to games’ transformative affects, the project will specifically investigate the role of nonhuman processes in game design, specifically AI.

The project will be met through 4 key objectives:

  1. Conducting a review of ‘ecogames’ with a practitioner focus on how critical discourse in material game studies and community created resources such as the Sustainable Game Design Playbook, alongside algorithmic critical theory, can critically and practically inform new approaches to design;

  2. Testing questions derived from this review using creative praxis and design thinking research methodologies; 

  3. Creating three significant works or prototypes suitable for playtesting/ (The creative portion of the thesis may be presented as a series of playable prototypes or as a final summative work that is subsequently evaluated following a final test event);

  4. Evaluating algorithm narrative features through iterative design and playtesting, considering their affect in relation to their ecological cost.

PhD 2 - Games as Ecological Processes

This particular PhD investigates games as artworks that simulate ecological processes, focussing on their narrative, structural, ludic and aesthetic elements. The project will develop game analysis techniques from leading-edge theoretical approaches at the intersection of the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and philosophy, drawing on more-than-human approaches from within the new materialisms and the emerging field of ‘material game studies’ (Germaine and Wake, 2022) to complement existing work on ecogames. 

The aims of the project are to demonstrate that games are artworks that simulate ecological processes and to develop analysis techniques that will further the study of “ecogames” within the broad context of Environmental Humanities research, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of how game mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics operate ontologically and ethically. 

The project will be met through 3 key objectives:

  1. Undertake a review of current work on ecogame analysis, applying insights from historical and contemporary writings on the environment, process philosophy, continental philosophy, and critical animal studies. 

  2. Develop modes of analysis to better understand how the mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics of games function to create transformative experiences for their players.

  3. Generate an ethical design framework for the evaluation and analysis of games, and to inform design and game-making practices. 

The studentships are fully funded by the NWCDTP, with fees paid plus an annual stipend at the UKRI standard rate (£19,237 per year for 2024-2025). Successful applicants will start in October 2025. This project is open to both Home and International students.

Chloe Germaine