The San Jenaro Co-Op is a loose affiliation of independent games developers, writers, illustrators, editors and designers. This interview explores their values, their output, and how they’re changing indie games design.
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A podcast episode, featuring members of the MGSN talking about their work and research into games and gaming. From gambling and the gothic to AI and LARPs.
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In their latest book, Video Games Have Always Been Queer, Bonnie Ruberg lays out the case for the fabric of play and gaming being essentially queer. That title is, as internet speak suggests, something of a BIG MOOD and can serve as a rallying cry and a reminder: video games have always been queer.
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In this edition of Games Lab, Dr Stephen Curtis examines the ways in which the Bard and his works have been used as the inspiration or setting for games, both card/board and digital. As well as a brief summary of the general state of Shakespearean games, Stephen discusses what the process of ‘gaming’ Shakespeare can offer to critical discussions of the plays and poems that make up his work.
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In this edition of Games Lab we were joined by Dr Jennifer Cromwell, who explores the extent to which 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origins manages to unite the worlds of gaming, digital humanities, and Egyptology.
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Marx at the Arcade, like Luigi in his haunted mansion, clears out the cobwebs and names the spectre haunting gaming. Woodcock’s text ties together several, hitherto disparate, branches of research and commentary into and of gaming. The text brings together modern labour movements, games criticism, and history under the umbrella of Marxist analysis.
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Absent Presences is a Gothic conference taking place at Manchester Metropolitan University on the 27-28th of June. The event wishes to shed light on the neglected aspects of Gothic studies, from representation of marginalised groups both in text and in authorship, to under-explored media types such as new media and online video.
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Transgressions in games are multifaceted, with boundaries that shift depending on the player and the game. Transgression in Games and Play edited by Kristine Jørgensen and Faltin Karlsen recognises this nature of games and play to offer a truly compelling anthology.
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Submissions are invited for the online journal EAI Endorsed Transactions on Serious Games. The journal offers a very broad platform for publishing scholarly articles on all aspect of serious gaming (see list below) and the Editorial Board is equally keen to hear from academics who can contribute to the reviewing process within any of these thematic areas.
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My title is a provocation: at one level, Dungeons and Dragons is a game, a role-playing game with numerous rules and supplements. At several other levels, D&D is much more than a game. I’m not interested here whether role-playing games are actually games in the same way as other games or in the definition of games, which, as Wittgenstein demonstrated in his Philosophical Investigations, are actually very difficult to define, given the variety of objects and practices that are referred to as games. Nor do I want to discuss here the social practice that is playing D&D (fascinating though this is). Instead, what I’m interested in here is the way in which cultural objects expand beyond their original medium into other media, and how that process affects how we approach the original text, often decentring them.
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In this edition of Games Lab we were joined by Dr Laura Mitchell, who outlined the appeal games have for business, particularly in the context of increasing motivation and productivity through affective experience.
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We’ve never lived in a better worse moment for politics in gaming. Worse in the sense that mass layoffs, union busting, and the leftover gg trash pockmark the landscape like a bad skincare routine, and best in that now is the moment where taking a stand is starting to show its payoff. Game Workers Unite is gaining steam, Queer indie devs and Queer Game Studies are making bigger impacts on the industry and academia, and theorizing the politics of games is a scaffolding taking the shape of a space in which we can all find room. Coeval to this dialectical change is Liam Mitchell’s Ludopolitics: Videogames Against Control published in 2018 by Zero Books.
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In this edition of Games Lab we were joined by Dr Dawn Stobbart from Lancaster University to talk to us about videogames and horror. Dawn has a forthcoming book entitled Videogames and Horror: From Amnesia to Zombies, Run!, and in this seminar we were treated to an exploration of both horror and terror in videogames, and the differences that they both present.
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On entry the initial room is dimly lit with a glowing neon sign advertising the subject of the exhibition: Videogames. There is sufficient light to navigate and read but enough darkness so that each screen, projection, and CRT monitor pops with colour, drawing each visitor to its glow. The track ‘Nascence’ from the soundtrack of Journey puts the listener into a state of awe while around each corner more iconic videogame music entices further exploration. This is the space containing the V&A’s Design/Play/Disrupt exhibit.
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Justin Achilli led development of Vampire: the Masquerade and Vampire: the Requiem at the turn of the millennium, reinventing the groundbreaking tabletop RPG twice over. Both games represent the Vampire 'franchise’ at its most literary, as Achilli explained when interviewed during research for an upcoming textbook chapter on Vampire and its evolving Gothic…
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Olivia Hill - Tokyo-based video game producer, author and radical leftist - is also a veteran tabletop game designer, who I interviewed during the research process for an upcoming textbook chapter on the Vampire roleplaying games from White Wolf. Olivia’s responses roamed far across the process of developing tabletop games and the history of the Vampire line, and I share them here with her consent.
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Games Lab is a new fortnightly seminar series from the MGSN in which we invite Network members and associates to speak about their work. The inaugural seminar was led by Network member Hwa Young and Dr Emma Murray, a Senior Lecturer in Criminal Justice from Liverpool John Moores University, both of whom presented an overview of their collaborative project Probationary: The Game of Life on License.
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Playing Smart by Julian Togelius is the latest addition to MIT Press’s Playful Thinking Series. Readers familiar with the series will have an idea of what to expect – namely engaging, thought provoking, and fairly brief books.
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For such an exhaustive study, it’s a refreshing read. Perron has done the grueling archival work of scraping archived websites and hand translating the emergence and course of the perception of Survival Horror.
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