Professor Kristina Niedderer discusses All about Us, a game jointly developed by people with dementia, care experts, designers and university researchers, in today’s episode of the BBC World Service series People Fixing the World.
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We’re pleased to announce the publication of the book, Material Game Studies - A Philosophy of Analogue Play, edited by MMGC co-directors Paul Wake and Chloé Germaine.
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As its title suggests, Gordon Calleja’s Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design, published by MIT Press in 2022, offers an exploration of player experience and the ways in which game designers work to create those experiences. Calleja draws on interviews with thirty-two leading board game designers and critics, and the inclusion of the insights of these well-known designers (alongside a wide range of scholarly material) results in a book that is extremely readable, while offering in-depth discussions of games and game design, and practical in turning these discussions towards game making and game playing.
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Since the end of the Cold War, its imagery, atmosphere, and music have been repeatedly appropriated and reappropriated within contemporary popular culture. More than thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, these images continue to appeal to generations with no memory of the original tensions of the time. From the early Cold War imagery of games such as the Fallout series, or the mid-1980s backdrop of Soviet infiltration in Stranger Things, visual culture, music, and ideas from the period are constantly recycled in popular culture.
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Historia Ludens explores the multiple ways in which games, history, and historians intersect and interact. The chapters examine how games (primarily videogames, but not only) represent history, as well as how play can be introduced into teaching; as the editors note in their preface, “history can be understood as a form of playing” and “playing poses intriguing methodological and theoretical potential” (p. xiii). The sixteen chapters are divided into six sections, the order of which this review follows, but it is notable that these categories are somewhat amorphous and there are numerous points of contact between papers throughout the volume.
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MMGC member Jenny Cromwell will be joining a transnational panel of academics and game designers today to discuss the suitability of using Dungeon & Dragons for historical settings.
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An interdisciplinary team that included academics in design and health, along with radiographers at Sheffield Children's NHS Trust set about working with the digital studio, Dubit to produce a playkit to help children aged 4-10-years-old prepare for an MRI scan without a general anaesthetic. The initial R&D project funded by Innovate UK and led by MMGC member Dylan Yamada-Rice, a Senior Lecturer in Immersive Storytelling in the School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, produced a mixed realities playkit to help children prepare for different elements of the MRI experience. These are (1) physical play to learn about an MRI scanner, (2) augmented reality play to learn about the job of a radiographer, and (3) virtual reality play to explore the journey of having an MRI scan from entering the hospital to completion.
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Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre member Rob Gallagher has two new(ish) publications out: a chapter on the Hitman series in the edited collection Video Games and Comedy and an open access article on autobiographical videogames for Convergence….
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If you couldn’t make it to Multiplatform 2022, or just want to rewatch any of the fantastic talks, you can now find a playlist on YouTube with recordings from both days.
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Submissions are invited for a volume on Ancient Egypt in Video Games edited by Man Met Game Centre member Jennifer Cromwell.
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Man Met Game Centre co-director Chloé Germaine has recently published an original TTRPG, The Bureau of Irregularities, via the indie community publisher, The Gauntlet. The Bureau of Irregularities is inspired by and emulates the sorts of stories told in the British science fiction television show Sapphire and Steel (Peter J. Hammond, 1979 - 1982).
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Last month, Man Met Game Centre member Charlotte Gislam organised a postgraduate symposium focusing on the idea that board games can be made to explore research projects and provide creative ways to visualise aims, methodologies, goals, and findings.
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Léa Martinez, Game in Lab/Asmodee PhD student, works on the impact of board gaming on the development of cognitive functions and academic learning, in adults and teenagers. In the context of her PhD, she has developed an online survey about players’ experiences.
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Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre member, Jennifer Cromwell, has recently published research on the video game Persona 5 (Atlus and P Studio, 2016). The article explores the representation of the Ancient Egyptian world in the game and is available in the open access online journal, Thersites (Journal for Transcultural Presences and Diachronic Identities from Antiquity to Date).
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This week we made the first of a series of visits to St Peter’s RC High School in Belle Vue where we’re working with pupils on the Game in Lab/Libellud Foundation funded ‘Games Imagining the Future’ project. The project investigates the ways in which board games might be used to support young people’s understandings of the crisis; to evaluate games as a tool through which they can explore and share their ideas about the climate crisis; and to identify the ways in which games mobilise individual or collective action.
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The Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre are extending our call for papers for inclusion in Multiplatform 2: Corporealities, a two-day conference on bodies and embodiment in games, supported by Game in Lab and the Centre for Creative Writing, English, Languages and Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University.
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This video is a recording of a panel hosted by the Game Centre on current trends in LARP research with Michaël Freudenthal and Evan Torner, chaired by Chloé Germaine.
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