(Re)Making Games: A Showcase of our MA Students' Designs
(Re)Making Games: A Showcase of our MA Students' Designs

This year the Manchester Game Centre piloted its (Re)making Games: Creativity, Play, Communication MA (master’s) course for students of the Manchester Writing School and SODA.

The course explores the theory and practice of hacking and (re)making games as a research method and mode of creative practice. We introduced students to game making as a new methodology that combines creative and critical thinking with public engagement and impact at the point of research. For creative writers, the unit helps students develop new ways to explore narrative and storytelling through interactive fiction, video games and analogue games.

The games students produced were engaging, thoughtful, and exciting examples of intentional design and we wanted to share a few of them here…

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Chloe Germaine
Connecting through Game Research Interests at the First Annual UK Digital Game Lab Summit
Connecting through Game Research Interests at the First Annual UK Digital Game Lab Summit

On 24 February, the Bristol Digital Game Lab hosted the first annual UK Digital Game Lab Summit at Clifton Hill House. The aim of the event was to examine shared research themes, explore ways to engage with industry, and discuss the creation of a network of gaming research groups. Thanks to generous funding from the British Academy and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol, we were delighted to welcome the leads of eight UK-based game labs/groups, including:

The summit was conducted in five sections and began with an icebreaker in a series of small groups, starting with the first game that we ever played. This discussion branched into further conversations surrounding games studies as a discipline, and the utility of games both in academia and the gaming industry.

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Chloe Germaine
New Publication: Generation Analog 2021
New Publication: Generation Analog 2021

Game in Lab and the Analog Game Studies journal announced the publication today of Generation Analog 2021: Proceedings of the Tabletop Games and Education Conference, edited by Evan Torner, Shelly Jones, Edmond Chang, Megan Condis, & Aaron Trammell.

This publications, the proceedings of the first Generation Analog conference in 2021, includes articles about making, materiality, community, inclusion, mediation, and role-playing. You can download it for free here, or purchase a print copy from publishers, ETC Press.

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Chloe Germaine
Big History Games and the Challenge of Deep Time
Big History Games and the Challenge of Deep Time

Set against grand temporal backdrops, big history games are interested in exploring the evolution of life and the development of civilization, but only as stories of progress. They look back at the past, but in the way mountain climbers do, to appreciate how far they have come. Until recently big history games rarely engaged with ecological limitations on expansive growth, showing a much keener interest in the role of science and especially military technology. However, in the age of the Anthropocene, human history’s bookending by deep time is creeping back in focus.

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Jamie Rhodes
Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design
Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design

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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Book ReviewsgamesresearchnetworkBook review
CFP: Apocalyptic Nostalgia? Cold War Imagery in Popular Culture
CFP: Apocalyptic Nostalgia? Cold War Imagery in Popular Culture

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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gamesresearchnetwork
Historia Ludens: The Playing Historian
Historia Ludens: The Playing Historian

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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Book ReviewsJennifer Cromwell
Mixed-Realities Playkit to help children undertake an MRI scan
Mixed-Realities Playkit to help children undertake an MRI scan

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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gamesresearchnetwork