Rituals of Play - Shaping Alternative Futures with Games and Occulture. Now available on YouTube!

With thanks to our sponsors, Game in Lab, for their ongoing support of research on tabletop and board games.

On 12–13 June 2025, the Manchester Game Centre hosted Rituals of Play, a two-day symposium curated by the Dark Arts Research Kollective (DVRK) in partnership with the new Dark Play research cluster. The event brought together academics, indie creators, artists, and performers to explore how games and occulture intertwine through ritualized play, gothic and horror aesthetics, subcultural practices, and speculative design.

How might games enable us to reimagine historical events or construct alternative worlds? How do speculative mechanics, narrative structures, or world-building practices inspired by occultural frameworks foster critical engagement with political, social, and cultural issues? How might games work to envision futures that are just, inclusive, and revolutionary? Underlying this political and social potential of games beyond reductionist rationalisations, how might games unpick the structures of reality, puncturing anthropocentric and Enlightenment notions of time, space, causality, giving way to experiences of haunting, irruptions of the past in the present, and the fragmenting of time in a multiplicity of directions?

Artwork by Isa Ali Abdulla Ali Saleh Alsaba

Highlights

Keynote: Playful Occultism
Jeff Howard’s keynote reframed the occult not simply as imagery, but as method in game design. He explored how symbolic systems (sigils, tarot, arcana), ritual gestures, and liminal experiences can shape mechanics and player engagement. Ritual, Howard suggested, provides a structured container while also opening space for unpredictability, weirdness, and enchantment.
Immersive Experience - Museum of Lost Futures
This special session invited participants to design and enact rituals of play to explore the construction of memory.

Subculture and Counterculture
Discussions focused on DIY and indie creators, asking how marginal and subcultural practices navigate visibility and sustainability.

Speculative Futures
Many talks and performances addressed how ritualised play and occult frameworks can help us imagine alternatives, from ecological resilience to speculative futures outside consumerist paradigms.

We’re pleased to be able to share many of the presentations from the event over on our YouTube channel. Here you can learn about the ways large language models create and collapse worlds, glitch ghosts lurking in Pokémon, the creative practice of some of the UK’s best indie game designers, and more…

Rituals of Play revealed that games are not just pastimes or cultural products, but ritual spaces: places where players can rehearse resistance, process the uncanny aspects of experience, and explore what lies beyond the ordinary. Across the event, participants considered how to mobilise games to address contemporary challenges: cultural sustainability, wellbeing, inclusion, and future-making.

What’s Next?

Building on the symposium, we are creating a Rituals of Play ‘Zine to collect essays, art, games, and reflections. We invite contributions that expand on the themes of the event and push the boundaries of what games (and rituals) can be.

Call for Contributions

We invite contributions to the inaugural Rituals of Play ‘Zine, to be published by the Manchester Game Centre and DVRK in December 2025.

Themes

We welcome work that explores:

  • Occulture as Method – using ritual, symbolic systems, and liminal experiences in game design and play.

  • Ethics and Responsibility – navigating appropriation, cultural respect, and emotional safety in occult and spiritual practices.

  • Gothic and Horror Aesthetics – how the uncanny, the abject, and the horrific shape player experience.

  • DIY, Indie, and Subcultural Practices – perspectives from outside the mainstream, sustaining alternative creative economies.

  • Speculative and Transformative Futures – ritual and play as tools to imagine different worlds

Formats

Fragments and Reflections: academic, creative or hybrid forms of writing

Games and Rituals: prototypes, design documents, rule sets, or documentation of performance/immersive play.

Visual and Creative Works: illustrations, photography, collage, or experimental forms.

Interviews and Dialogues: conversations with creators, scholars, or gamers

Guidelines

  • Written submissions in an editable format

  • Visual work: high-resolution files (300 dpi)

  • All contributors should include a 100-word bio.

Deadline

31 October 2025 (midnight GMT)

Submission

Send your submission to: c.germaine@mmu.ac.uk

Contributors retain copyright of their work but grant the zine non-exclusive rights for publication (print and online).

Publication

The zine will be released in December 2025 in both digital and limited print editions.

Chloe Germaine