Rituals of Play is our theme for Multiplatform 2025, the annual MGC symposium dedicated to analogue and video game studies. This year’s event is a collaboration with DVRK - the Dark Arts Research Kollective - at Manchester Metropolitan University. We are also proud to partner once again with game in lab, a program that supports the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge about board games on an international scale. This DVRK edition of Multiplatform will explore the intersections between games and occulture, investigating the transformative potential of games as forms of rituals to explore alternative histories and speculate on radical futures.
Games have long had a deep connection to magic, the paranormal, and the occult. As Huizinga famously noted, "there is no formal difference between play and ritual" (1988: 10). Indeed, activities like shuffling cards, rolling dice, and roleplaying create temporary ritual spaces in which to engage with chance, causality, and emergence – tools to model possible worlds and divine the future. Furthermore, contemporary games – both analog and digital – have become increasingly intertwined with occultural themes, incorporating concepts and imagery of the esoteric or the paranormal that go beyond the mere aesthetic inspiration to become sometimes actual philosophical, speculative and narrative frameworks. Like other forms of occultural practice, games hold creative and transformative power that can challenge dominant histories, subvert entrenched dualisms, and give voice to marginalised epistemologies. This call for papers aims to examine the intersections between games, speculation, and temporality through the lenses of magic and esotericism.
How might games enable us to reimagine historical events or construct alternative worlds? How do speculative mechanics, narrative structures, or world-building practices inspired by occultural frameworks foster critical engagement with political, social, and cultural issues? How might games work to envision futures that are just, inclusive, and revolutionary? Underlying this political and social potential of games beyond reductionist rationalisations, how might games unpick the structures of reality, puncturing anthropocentric and Enlightenment notions of time, space, causality, giving way to experiences of haunting, irruptions of the past in the present, and the fragmenting of time in a multiplicity of directions?
The Museum of Lost Futures, an Immersive Game Experience, June 12th, 5pm - 7pm
At Multiplatform, you will also have the opportunity to take part in The Museum of Lost Futures, originally designed by the Fractals Cooperative to explore haunting, reproductive justice and abolitionist practice.
The work builds on Avery Gordon's idea that haunting is how abusive systems of power make their impacts felt, especially when they are supposedly over and done with, or when their oppressive nature is continuously denied. In this project, then, we wanted to explore people's individual relationships to haunting in relation to reproductive (in)justice, and carceral systems.
Invited Speakers
Jeff Howard, Associate Professor of Games and Occulture at Falmouth University
Jeff will deliver a seminar on “Playful Occultism” that explores manifestations of the occult in relation to play and games. This relationship will take a twofold form: the influence of the occult on games and the aspects of play in occult practice. The session will explore case studies from the many tabletop and videogames that are influenced by the occult, arguing that one meaning of the occult involves games with hidden depth, analogous to what Doris Rusch would refer to as “deep games.” In some of these cases (especially solo role-playing games and LARPs), any sufficiently deep simulation of ritual is indistinguishable from ritual, causing the magic circle posited by early game studies scholar Johann Huizinga to break. At the same time, Howard argues that many forms of contemporary magical practice can be understood productively through the lens of play, from the influence of Crowley’s chess games on his astral visions to the elaborate metaphorical systems of Andrew Chumbley’s Sabbatic Craft and Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian Gnosis.
Jeff is the author of two monographs: Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives (now in its second edition) and Game Magic: A Designer’s Guide to Magic Systems in Theory and Practice. He translates theory into practice as a core team member of Apocalypse Studios, where he consults on worldbuilding and systems design. He is also the creator of “Howard’s Law of Occult Design,” published in 100 Principles of Game Design. Howard has presented on games and the occult at a variety of international conferences, including Berlin Occulture, Trans-States, and ESSWE9. In addition, he has been an invited speaker at Viktor Wynd’s Last Tuesday Society, where he has spoken about folk magic and folk games. With Steve Patterson, he is the winner of the RENSEP (Research Network for the Study of Esoteric Practice) award for best Tandem Analysis Paper for “To Reveal the Hidden Kingdom of Eld: Andrew Chumbley, the Cultus Sabbati, and Imaginal Space in Cornwall.” Howard studies Sabbatic Craft at the intersection of the Left Hand Path and the Typhonian current. Through his scholarship and creative practice, Howard is an ambassador for the power of play as a transformative and transcendent practice.
Rob Donkin, Games Designer, Bad Viking
Rob has been making games for over 15 years, starting out with simple Flash games and gradually working his way up to more ambitious projects like the indie hit, Strange Horticulture. He works with his brother, John, and together they have published over 30 titles in a wide range of genres. They are currently working on a follow-up to Strange Horticulture called Strange Antiquities.
Stanley Baxton, Games Designer and Indie Developer
Stanley is narrative games dev making experiences that are satirical, horrifying, or queer, and sometimes all at once. He makes games for exactly 3 people to lose their minds. Last year he won the Banana of Discord at IFComp.
