DVRK PLAY: Subcultures, Countercultures, Occultures and games
Dark Play is a research cluster within the Manchester Game Centre at Manchester Metropolitan University. We investigate the cultural margins of play, exploring DIY and indie game-making, gothic and horror in games, and the role of occulture and ritual in contemporary play practices. Through collaborations with the DVRK (Dark Arts Research Kollective), we combine creative practice with critical research to understand how games reflect, contest, and reimagine the world.
Culture, Creativity and Inclusive Societies
Dvrk Play engages in inclusive cultural research by amplifying subcultural and countercultural voices often overlooked in mainstream game studies and industry practice. By championing DIY and indie game-making, we contribute to a more pluralistic and equitable idea of creativity. Our research also seeks to demonstrate how forms of dark play, such as gothic, horror, and ritualised play, productively express and explore fear, trauma, and contribute to cultural modes of resilience and resistance. We also think that speculative and ritual forms of play experiment with alternative models of community, temporality, and ecology - including centring more-than-human actors in games. Finally, we are concerned with tracing the implications of a “digital future.” By examining analogue–digital hybridity (e.g. RPGs, immersive theatre, indie digital games), research in dark play maps how creative practices respond to, and critique, technological change.
Research in Action
Our most recent activity in the centre was the creative-critical symposium, Rituals of Play, a major international event on games and occulture. Videos from the event are now available to watch online. We have also collaborated with DVRK on previous events, such as Mind Games: Occult Phenomena and Folk Psychology in Tabletop Games, which shared some forthcoming research on how tabletop games appeal not only to players’ abilities to manage and interpret social interactions, but to folk psychology, the shared ability to explain and predict the mental states of others, including animals, experienced in day-to-day life as an ability to mind-read. We are also home to Real Engine, an experimental game design project led by Yami Kurae, which focuses on the reuse of obsolete and malfunctioning media, and on how low fidelity can convey atmosphere, imagination and lore.
Rituals of Play is DVRK Play’s inaugural zine, published with the Manchester Game Centre in July 2026. Emerging from the Multiplatform 2025 event, it gathers essays, working rituals, grimoires, games, and visual and sonic experiments from contributors across scholarship, game design, art, and magical practice — work that treats the game table, the magick circle, and the liminal space between as one and the same territory. The zine is free to read and download, and we'd love to hear what you make of it. Read Rituals of Play →
Staff and PGR Students working on DVRK Play
Dr Matteo Polato is an artist and media scholar whose work on games and occulture includes the exploration of hauntings, hauntology, urban legends and video games, as well as how DIY and low-fi game-making can function to support grassroots and community creativity and democracy.
Emma Speakman is a PhD student researching ecohorror video games, focusing on how AAA horror games both perpetuate and combat ecophobia.
Dr Chloé Wake is a reformed gothic scholar whose work on games remains tied to the dark fantastic, gothic and weird. Her research on dvrk play includes publications on the Eco-Weird Tabletop, how horror RPGs navigate climate crisis and how the “magic circle” of play functions as occult technology.
Professor Paul Wake is a scholar of analogue play with interests in Games Workshop, gothic tabletop gaming, and grimdark. He co-convenes the annual Games Workshop Research day for the MGC.