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…!

On 30 May 2023, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport launched the Video Games Research Framework as a best-practice supporting tool for research into video games.

In response to the Framework, the Bristol Digital Game Lab is hosting an online roundtable on Tuesday 24 October, 13:00-14:30 to discuss the Framework, in particular how game labs, centres and networks can support and build on its aims and ambitions. 

In this seminar, centre member Jenny Cromwell (Reader in Ancient History, MMU) together with three undergraduate students (Kira Baxendale, Samuel Jolly, and Aieyan Khan) will discuss different aspects of board games set in ancient Egypt.

Learn about the latest trends in XR development with PICO experts, and try PICO’s VR headset!

PICO is a leading VR company with independent innovation and R&D capabilities, focusing on VR all-in-one technology. PICO is committed to building an integrated XR platform that inspires the community and empowers developers, creators, and businesses. 

This event will be hosted by Dr Gabriele Aroni, Senior Lecturer in Games Art and is open to all SODA students and Man Met staff. Snacks and beverages will be provided. Places are limited!

Manchester Game Centre co-director, Chloé Germaine, will be giving a presentation at the inaugural symposium for the Society of the Study of the Eco-Weird on Saturday 30th September. The Society for the Study of the Eco-Weird is an interdisciplinary academic organization aiming to bring together like-minded scholars. The society and the event are organised by Brian Hisao Onishi, at Penn State Altoona and Nathan M. Bell, Dallas College.

Join Manchester Game Centre researchers, John Henry and Connah Kendrick to test a new game that is controlled by your heart rate!

John and Connah are looking forward to welcoming you in a trial that will see you play Cardia with an additional heart monitor device to help us test the accuracy of the hardware we are using to play the game. You will also complete a short questionnaire. John and Connah are looking for 15 participants to take part on the day.