Manchester Game Centre co-director, Chloé Germaine, will be sharing insights about the research being carried out in the Centre as part of the sector-wide response to the poly-crisis. From psychological benefits to promoting action on climate change, find out why game research is so important.

This event takes place on 15th November between 10am-3pm in Manchester Metropolitan University’s Lowry Building.

Chloé Germaine and Paul Wake are heading to Katowice in Poland on November 9th to present work and run workshops as part of the STRATEGIES project. Green Gaming Day is the culmination of the gaming week, part of Katowice 2024 European City of Science. Its aim is to educate and engage the public on the connected issues of sustainable gaming and cultural heritage. The event will draw on expertise from academics, industry and cultural leaders to explore how gaming media both contribute to and can mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis.

This event brings together expert participants from different fields: local educators, game developers, international scholars, local museums, business and institutions. There will be discussion panels and interactive workshops, as well as a chance to find out more about the European-wide STRATEGIES project: A Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries.

Join Gang Pan’s and Hamid Khalili's seminar about the fascinating world of architecture within video games, where spatial interactivity and storytelling converge. They will explore how video game spaces and places—where people collectively spend over 3 billion hours weekly worldwide—are crafted and experienced through the video game Kino-Eyes. The seminar offers insights into how spatial narrativity and interactivity are developed through the digital lenses of virtual cameras within game engines, telling the stories of spaces from the future, past, and present, across both fictional and real cities, buildings, interiors, utopias, and dystopias. 

2030 Sustainable Development Goals game

A thought-provoking multi-player facilitated card game that simulates what the world could look like in 2030. 

Come and join us in playing the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) game on the 6th of November in an event co-organised by the MGC and the Carbon Literacy Project. This event is open to staff and students at Manchester Metropolitan University.

We’d like to warmly invite you to this first (of hopefully many!) boardgame café event—a casual evening social for members of the Manchester Game Centre and friends to play board games. We especially want to invite our PhD students to join.

Fan practices have moved beyond fan communities, shaping political, economic, and cultural life. Social media has blurred the lines between popular and political communication, allowing both progressive and reactionary fandoms to influence the public sphere. The Manchester Game Centre and the Pop Screen Cultures Centre are hosting a symposium to explore these dynamics.

The Manchester Game Centre is pleased to announce a symposium dedicated to Games Workshop’s games and fictions. Join us at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester for a day of talks and gaming that will cover Black Library’s fictions, transmedia in Warhammer 40,000, Ancient Egypt in the Warhammer’s Old World, and a cultural history of Jervis Johnson’s fantasy football game Blood Bowl.

This event is free and is open to everyone. Places are limited.

Process Ecologies: Webinar 2: Matt Segall and Henry Somers-Hall 

Matthew David Segall, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness Department at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He is a transdisciplinary researcher, writer, teacher, and philosopher who applies process-relational thought across the natural and social sciences, as well as to the study of consciousness. His most recent book is titled Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead (Revelore, 2023). 

Henry Somers-Hall is a Professor of Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. His research focuses on the intersection between Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy and the French philosophical tradition, and he is particularly interested in questions concerning the structure of thought and its relation to time. Aside from the work of Gilles Deleuze, he has a strong interest in the French phenomenological movement, in particular, Merleau-Ponty’s own later philosophy of difference and the work of Sartre. He is the author of Hegel, Deleuze, and the Critique of Representation (2012), Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (2013), and Judgement and Sense in Modern French Philosophy (2022). 

Paul Wake and Chloe Germaine will be sharing the results of their project, Games Imagining the Future, at this year’s Essen Spiel, the world’s largest board game fair and trade show.

Join members of the MGC and the Department of Natural Sciences for an evening of playing and discussing Klaus and Benjamin Teuber’s new game Catan: New Energies.

Dr Ben Edwards (Reader in Heritage and Archaeology) has been building an accurate reconstruction of Roman Chester in the popular computer game Minecraft. On Saturday 29th June, Ben will be discussing this process at an online talk as part of the Chester Heritage Festival, which is open to everybody. Based on excavated evidence from within the walls of Chester, but also from the wider Roman town and amphitheatre, Ben has rebuilt the Severan-period fort and extra-mural settlement. Thanks to accurate landscape models, the Roman town is placed within a true reconstruction of the landscape around Chester on the 3rd Century AD, including the original course of the River Dee.

In this workshop presented at the Games Transformed Festival, we will explore connections of common-place understandings of the ‘nature’ and warfare in games. This workshop is part of Games Transformed, a day festival celebrating how playing, discussing and designing games can help us imagine, demand, and build a better society!

Manchester Game Centre researcher, Chloé Germaine, has been invited to present her work on roleplaying games at the international symposium: ‘Imagining Extinction in Video Games’. The symposium has been organised and is hosted online by The Centre for English Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies. It features leading international researchers working on the issue of games and sustainability.

Join us for an informal evening of Blood Bowl at The Salutation pub in Manchester. Come along and play whatever variety of Blood Bowl you’re in the mood for – whether that’s Blood Bowl, Dungeon Bowl, Sevens, Gutter Bowl, Blitz Bowl, or Blood Bowl: Team Manager. We’ll also bring along some Blood Bowl-adjacent games such as Guild Ball, DreadBall and Battle Ball. We’ll also provide pizza and cake, and the bar downstairs will be open for drinks and food.

Are you psychic? Can you commune with the spirits of the dead? Can you divine whether the person before you is conscious, or merely a machine capable only of simulating a mind?

Join the Manchester Game Centre and the Dark Arts Research Kollective as we delve into the murky world of mind games! This is a playtest and workshop-style session, hosted by Chloé Germaine, featuring a short talk and a chance to play and discuss the games, at Peste, Manchester, from 6pm. 

Come play the game Archaeology: The New Expedition and take part in a facilitated session where we’ll use the game’s artwork, mechanisms, and storytelling to explore museum practice, past and present, and colonial histories and legacies.

Izzy Bartley will visit the MGC on Wednesday 20th March to talk about her doctoral research on colonialism in board games. The talk will take place from 12-2pm in the Geoffrey Manton building, Manchester Met Uni. If you would like to join the session, please email the event organiser Jenny Cromwell (j.cromwell@mmu.ac.uk).

Manchester Game Centre member and Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture, Hamid Khalili will be giving a talk at the Martin Centre Research Seminars. His talk is titled, ‘The Architecture of Videogames: Tomorrow, Videogame Cinematics and Game Space Design’.

“Games Imagining the Future” was carried out by staff and students at Manchester Metropolitan University between 2021 and 2022 and included co-researchers from a secondary school in the region. The project set out to investigate how board games might be used to support young people’s action on climate change.

Wednesday 14 February 2024, 1 - 4pm

Location: School of Digital Arts (SODA) at Manchester Metropolitan University

Event Type: In-person

Price: Free, please register your place

Board games serve many important purposes outside of entertainment. They are a uniquely social activity that allows for people to gather around a shared space and learn about how both they and their social partners cooperate and compete with one another. For this reason, board games may be an important social activity for autistic people who thrive in structured, rules-based activities and often have heightened interests (which overlap with board game themes). In this talk we will report findings from a series of studies examining the overlap between autism and hobbyist board gaming. We will also be presenting some initial findings on some pilot work using Dixit for therapeutic purposes and lastly on a large data set which reports a wide array of board gamer demographics as well as motivations and preferences in the hobby. This may be of use for game designers as well as those interested in using board games for educational or therapeutic populations, in making choices targeted for specific populations.

Game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine are now ubiquitous tools in the digital arts and are widely used beyond videogame development in fields such as film post-production, architecture, and fashion. The workshop will explore how game engines shape our contemporary visual culture, and how media studies and media arts can analyse and critique their pervasiveness.

The Ecogames Ludography project, funded by Game in Lab and the Libellud Foundation, is an ongoing participatory project that gathers information, reflections, critiques, and hacks of environmental games. This information is available as an open access ‘ludography’, a living document that records the development and play of ecogames.

This workshop will give you a chance to find out more about the project, play games with environmental themes, and be part of the next update of the ludography. Games we’re investigating include: Forests of Pangaia, Oak, Oros, Earth, Hamlet, Petrichor and more…!