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.

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.

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.

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….

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.

In our final two visits to St Peter’s RC High School, we asked the students to hack Orchard and Ecosystem to remake the games with different rules, mechanics, and materials and tell new stories about the environment and climate change.

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.