For the Horizon project STRATEGIES (Sustainable TRAnsiTion for Europe’s Game IndustriES) we are looking for an enthusiastic and experienced project manager to support research on how the European game industry can contribute to realizing the goals of Europe’s Green Deal.
Read MoreSTRATEGIES is the short name for the Horizon Europe funded project Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries. The project will support Europe’s game development industries in making vital changes to their business and production practices in support of reaching the emissions targets of the European Green Deal. Staff at the Manchester Game Centre will be co-leading this project with researchers at Utrecht University from February next year.
Read MoreLanguage, Equality, and Gaming – LEG project
Although significant work has being done to address inequalities in videogames, many analyses of videogame data typically stay at a visual level. One area which has received little attention is that of how language contributes to sustaining prejudices (though, see Heritage, 2021, 2022; Rennick & Roberts, forthcoming). While a number of videogame companies have Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) leads and EDI training for all staff, there are still all too often implicit biases (in the form of language) which persist, leading to unconscious bias still being included in videogames when dialogue is written, items are described, and in how characters are represented. For example, female characters might only ever occur with words which denote their mental abilities or intelligence, while male characters might regularly occur with words denoting their physical strength and muscles. Although such representations are less obvious, they are nevertheless equally problematic, and often EDI teams do not have the necessary tools nor training to identify these inequalities.
Read MoreIn June this year, Manchester Game Centre hosted its third annual symposium, Multiplatform. This year, the symposium asked players, gamers, makers, and critics to think about the sustainability of games, play, and the gaming industries.
Read MoreManifestations of Queerness in Video Games positions video games alongside queer fixtures, such as drag, cyborgs, sissies, flânerie, monsters, and the latent homoeroticism of wrestling. Together with Bonnie Ruberg’s (2019) Video Games Have Always Been Queer, Gaspard Pelurson’s monograph serves to become a foundational text in the now flourishing discourse of queer game studies. Video games are typically understood through mastery, competition, capital, and production; however, through queer thinking, they become sites of hope, failure, fragility, and erotics. Where Ruberg proves there is queerness in every game and every game can be queered, Pelurson presents queer manifestations, how you might find them, and how subversive, disruptive, and arousing they can be should you catch a glimpse.
Read MoreManchester Game Centre member Dr John Lean introduces the special issue of The Journal of Play in Adulthood that he has recently edited.
Read MoreThis 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…
Read MoreMGC member, Catherine Elkin, has developed a student project to support storytelling, communication and coding skills. This project aims to pair students interested in code with other students interested in storytelling to create text-based adventure games.
Read MoreGyaku Ryona is a voyeuristic subgenre that involves the beating up of one male character by another. Several channels have emerged on YouTube and garnered respectable attention, by using fighting games as their main platform. These channels compile videos of virtual and erotic one- sided fights between two characters, which are in turn watched and requested by viewers.
Read MoreOn 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 Interactive Games Research Group at York St John University
The Playable Media Lab from Bath Spa University.
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.
Read MoreGame 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.
Read MoreSet 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.
Read MoreThe Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre is pleased to announce that our annual conference - Multiplatform 3: Remake, Reuse, Replay will take place on the 7th and 8th of June 2023 at the Salutation, 12 Higher Chatham Street, Manchester.
Read MoreIn a recent article for the Analog Game Studies journal, MMGC co-director Chloé Germaine has revisited theories of ‘the magic circle’ in Game Studies with fresh insights from the world of live-action roleplaying games (LARP).
Read MoreProfessor 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.
Read MoreWe’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.
Read MoreAs 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.
Read MoreSince 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.
Read MoreHistoria 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.
Read MoreMMGC 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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