Launching the MGC Annual Report 2025–2026
The Manchester Game Centre's Annual Report 2025–2026 is out today. It records a year in which the Centre grew to eight research areas, appointed its first International Research Fellow, published its first zine, and saw its research cited in Parliament.
Ten years after the MGC began as a cross-university network, the report shows a community of 54 members drawn from every faculty at Manchester Met, alongside 23 PhD researchers. Together we published 3 monographs, 3 edited volumes, 19 book chapters, 16 journal articles, 3 reports and a zine this year.
Read the full Annual Report 2025–2026 here.
Highlights of the year
Research in Parliament. Frazer Heritage's corpus-linguistic work on the manosphere informed written evidence to the Women and Equalities Select Committee, which cited his co-authored article for The Conversation.
A leading conference, hosted at home. In August 2025 we hosted SEGAH, the 13th International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health, coordinated by John Henry and featuring 47 papers from 14 countries.
A Leverhulme Centre bid. Our proposal for a Leverhulme Centre for Games and Society, led by Chloé Wake with Coventry University and hubs at Aalborg (Copenhagen) and Concordia (Montréal), was selected as Manchester Met's institutional submission for February 2027.
Games on the international stage. Members gave keynotes and invited talks in Brazil, Oxford, Copenhagen, Mainz and Vienna, and Sören Henrich discussed the therapeutic potential of Dungeons & Dragons with NPR.
Making games together. We hosted our first Global Game Jam site at SODA, and Multiplatform 2026, 'Poetry in Games / Games in Poetry', brought 40+ participants from Australia to Iran together with the Manchester Poetry Library.
Across our eight research areas
This year we welcomed DARK Play, led by Matteo Polato, as our eighth research area. It formalises our collaboration with the Dark Arts Research Kollective and explores gothic and horror games, occulture, hauntology and DIY game-making. Its first output, Rituals of Play, is a free zine of seventeen contributions spanning scholarship, design and art.
Elsewhere in the report you'll find:
Games and the Environment: three STRATEGIES reports for the Horizon Europe project, version 1.1 of the Green Games Guide, and the Sustainable Games Alliance Academic Network, now connecting around 200 researchers.
Games, Health and Wellbeing: DragonMind moving from technology readiness level 2 to 4, new findings from the CARDIA exergame, and the Rolling Well conference on roleplaying games and wellbeing with the University of Plymouth.
Games, History and Heritage: Jennifer Cromwell's edited collection Ancient Egypt in Video Games (De Gruyter), Paul Wake's 'peace game' Death Occurs Abroad, and a symposium on Anubis in popular culture.
Games, Narrative and Representation: Storytellers + Machines 2026 on 'the end of AI', and Frazer Heritage's new Routledge contract for Ludolinguistics.
Esports Research: our renamed strand hosted an international workshop on esports, NEETs and social inclusion.
Games, Education and Pedagogy: a classroom study of the roleplaying game Always on My Mind, and news that the Playful Learning Conference returns to Manchester Met for its tenth edition in 2027.
Tabletop Games and Embodied Play: the Games Workshop Research Day, Paul Wake's forthcoming Blood Bowl monograph, and game hacking as a research method reaching publication.
Our people
Our doctoral community continues to grow. Four new PhD researchers joined us in 2025–26, including two AHRC-funded projects on ecogames and on games as ecological processes, and four researchers completed their doctorates.
We also welcomed Dr Steven Dashiell as our first International Research Fellow, and hosted visiting researchers from Naples, Oslo and Leiria. Members told us the Away Day at HOME and the PGR showcase at The Salutation were highlights of the year.
Looking ahead
The year ahead centres on developing the Leverhulme Centre for Games and Society bid in 2027, a dual-site centre that would transform the scale and reach of games research at Manchester Met. We also look forward to hosting the tenth Playful Learning Conference in July 2027, new books from the DVRK Play strand, and continued work towards our Games and Climate Action impact case study.
We'd like to thank the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, AHEAD, Asmodee Research, and everyone who has played, made and thought with us this year.
Download the Annual Report 2025–2026 to read the full story. If you'd like to collaborate, study with us, or join the Centre, we'd love to hear from you.