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.

Join us or an evening of Blood Bowl Sevens at The Salutation pub in Manchester. We’ll provide pizza and cake, and the bar downstairs will be open for drinks and food. In keeping with sevens leagues, it’ll be a casual affair and, hopefully, fun. I might mention the Blood Bowl book I’m working on but apart from that it’s free…. 

Storytellers + Machines at the School of Digital Arts, Manchester, considers the unstable relationships between AI generative media and the storytellers and artists that adopt them. Importantly the series links the growing storytelling cultures related to generative AI to critical and philosophical concerns and traditions by bringing together a diverse set of voices from the arts, industry and academia. The event is led by members of the Speculative Technologies Research Group in SODA, a group that seeks to engage through creative practice and theory with emerging media technologies.

Manchester Game Centre member, Jennifer Cromwell,  will be speaking about 'Playing with gods: Egyptian Deities in board games’ at ‘The Gods of Antiquity in Contemporary Popular Culture’, an online seminar in June, hosted by the Centre for History of the University of Lisbon.

UK academics will share their latest research on tabletop games, followed by an open discussion. What the surfaces that we play on can tell us about gaming, gamers, and the communities that we build? How social gaming helps revive UK cities and communities? How can we use games to tackle the climate crisis? We will answer these questions and invite you to think together about new research avenues that might be useful and beneficial for the gaming community and the wider society.

Paul Wake, co-director of the Manchester Game Centre, will present a talk in the series “Current Research in Narrative Studies,” the research seminar of the British and Irish Association for Narrative Studies. These seminars are held in a hybrid format, with speakers and audience from the Association membership around the country, hosted at York by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies. 

In this seminar MMGC PhD students Alexander Brooke and Reiji Nagaoka will present new work in progress. Chaired by Jack Warren. The event is free of charge and open to the public.

Join Dr John Henry and Dr Connah Kendrick on the 3rd of April as part of the Get Curious event at the Science and Industry Museum and control a game with your heart rate. The game, named Cardia, promotes physical activity, and demonstrates how sensors and games can integrate to create new, disruptive experiences that engage players using widely available technology. The event is running from 09:00 – 16:00. For more information either email John Henry at john.henry@mmu.ac.uk or use the following link to plan your visit to the Science and Industry Museum: Plan your visit | Science and Industry Museum