We are pleased to announce that our second annual Games Workshop Research Day is taking place on Saturday 11th October 2025!

For its second outing the event will run all day from 9:30 until 20:30 and has three parts. The morning will be dedicated to talks about Games Workshop’s games, the afternoon will be a ‘playable exhibition’ in which we pair gaming with presentations, and the day will conclude with a social evening of sporting mayhem as we come together to watch Blood Bowl played live.

Join us at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester for a day of talks and gaming. This event is free and is open to everyone.  Places are limited. Please book your ticket by clicking the link below:

The Manchester School of Art presents a talk from Alex Kelly, theatre & games maker, writer, performer and mentor. Alex creates performance and participatory projects that connect the territories of theatre, games, conversation, installation and digital media. Since 2023 he has been making projects under the name Voyager 3.

The investigate.games research group based at YSJ is pleased to be organising the Interactive Games PGR Conference again for 2025. The event will feature keynote speakers from leading experts in the field, including Manchester Game Centre co-lead, Dr Chloé Germaine, who will be talking about her creative research, ‘Playing, Making and Breaking - Research with Games’, as a keynote address. The event also features the Manchester Game Centre research assistant, Samuel Ethan Jolly, who will be presenting his work on ‘Historical Ludo-Narratives: Turning the Past into Play’.

Join game designers Matteo Menapace, Paolo Pedercini (Molleindustria, CMU), and Manchester Game Centre researcher, Chloé Germaine, as we discuss our work at the intersection of games and ecosocialist politics.

We will explore how games can be made, played, and hacked ecologically. And we'll have lots of time for your questions! Our chat is part of Games Transformed, a festival of games and progressive politics.

Magic: The Gathering – The Eco Hack is a 3-hour hands-on workshop that uses the concept of ‘franchise hacking’ developed by game design researchers Dr Stefan Werning (Utrecht University), Professor Paul Wake and Dr Chloé Germaine (Manchester Metropolitan University). In this session you will join these researchers to design and playtest your own custom cards and decks for Magic: The Gathering, exploring its potential environmental themes and stories.  All materials will be provided.

This workshop features in the series of events taking place at the UK Games Expo, the UK’s largest hobby game convention. The convention takes place at the Birmingham NEC Fri 30 May to Sun 1 June, 2025.

Come along to this session at the UK Games Expo and explore the whole sustainability journey of games, through design choices, manufacturing, distribution, and, importantly, to think about how we consume and share our board games. There will be opportunities to share your experiences of how you have responded to the climate emergency as a board game designer, manufacturer, or player, and to meet members of the Green Games Guide board and the STRATEGIES [Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries] research project. 

On May 8th, researchers from Work Package 6, Dr Jane Mork and Dr Rachel Dunk, will be sharing their pioneering Carbon Literacy Training with the STRATEGIES consortium and partners.

SPARK #35: Eco-boardgames: Hacking and Jamming is a hands-on workshop that explores game-making and play practices as an intervention in addressing climate futures. In this workshop with Dr Jack Warren, we’ll play boardgames, hack them apart, and collaborate to remake them into something that imagines new stories about nature and climate emergencies. All materials will be provided.

This workshop draws on Chloé Germaine and Paul Wake's work about hacking board games to support climate action. They propose that the climate crisis is both a social problem and an imaginative challenge. As game systems are stories, hacking and jamming games offer alternative stories to the extractive and mechanistic understanding of nature that defines ecological and climate crises.

This workshop is organised in collaboration with the Castlefield Gallery and the Manchester Game Centre, an interdisciplinary research centre at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Magic: The Gathering – The Eco Hack is a 3-hour hands-on workshop in which participants will design and playtest their own custom cards and decks for Magic: The Gathering, exploring its potential environmental themes and stories.

The DoWell research group offers an expanded interdisciplinary workshop and lectures series this year to provide the opportunity for colleagues to explore an exciting range of different topics, including practices and approaches to co-designing in various health and care contexts. The format of the monthly sessions is more flexible this year, including online presentations and panel discussions as well as in-person workshops for colleagues to get hands-on experience and get involved in the different approaches to co-design. The workshops aim to provide a forum and time for colleagues to meet and get to know each other’s work, and to foster discussion and cross-faculty collaboration.

At DoWell –Design for Health and Wellbeing Research group– we pioneer the use of collaborative creative processes from craft and design to support people’s mental and physical health and to improve products, environments, services and interactions for health and care. We co-design our research into the social and societal aspects of health and wellbeing with the people who will benefit from our studies. Our research contributes to national and international action on mental health, disability, dementia and neurodiversity.

Everyone welcome. Please find the programme overview as below and register through Eventbrite.

We are looking forward seeing you all in the workshops.

Kristina Niedderer & DoWell group

Build a better future in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals Card Game

A thought-provoking multi-player facilitated card game that simulates what the world could look like in 2030 and encourages you to think globally about building the future. GoGlobal in your future ambitions.

Come along and play the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) card game. This session is open to students and staff from across the university. Just like the real-world the game works best when it includes people from as many different backgrounds as possible.

The 2030 SDGs game is a thought-provoking multi-player facilitated card game that simulates what the world could look like in 2030. The 2030 SDGs game highlights the importance of balancing the three pillars of People, Planet and Prosperity, bringing sustainability to life.

Participants in the simulation receive time, money and projects, deciding how to invest their resources and which projects to run in order to work towards achieving their goals. What will be the impact on the world of the projects they play? Will they create a prosperous, fair and sustainable world?

Professor Paul Wake and Dr Chloe Germaine will be speaking to sustainability researchers and educators at the University of York.

Their paper, which draws on the methodological innovations in participatory research with games, considers how “hacking” and “jamming” are modes of play that support effort to address behavioural and cultural change for climate action.

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.