GAMES, NARRATIVE AND REPRESENTATION

This research area is particularly focussed on how we represent social phenomena within games. A good portion of the research within this strand is interested in how different identities are constructed within games – both from ludic and narrative perspectives. The work in this strand often explores both narrative and representation – though individual foci are both welcome and encouraged too.

Staff and PGR students working in Games, Narrative and Representation

Kirsty Bunting is a Romance novelist and game-maker, exploring the use of narrative games in teaching creative writing, and its relationship to the consumption of fiction.

Melissa Chatterton is a PhD student in English, exploring the affordances of live action roleplaying games for nurturing queer identities and subjectivities.

Rachel Genn is a writer who creates immersive experiences to tell stories.

Frazer Heritage’s research examines corpus linguistic approaches to the representation and construction of identity within videogames, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality.

Satish Shewhorak has a background in animation and his research interests covers diverse character generation, procedural animation and identity representation in games.

Paul Wake’s research examines the intersection of games and narrative through, for example, the role of narration in adventure gamebooks, or the storytelling undertaken by game pieces and miniatures.

Jack Warren connects role-playing in games with queer theory and new materialist philosophies.

LANGUAGE, EQUALITY, AND GAMING

This internally funded project takes the video game Sea of Thieves as a case study for close linguistic analysis, focusing on how identities are constructed and negotiated within the text. Combining corpus linguistic methodologies (computer-assisted computational analysis of, for example, what words are statistically more likely to occur within a given collection of texts) with critical discursive analytical frameworks (systematic, qualitative frameworks for exploring how meaning is created in context), this project explores how identities are represented within Sea of Thieves, identifies areas of both praise and improvement, and develop a training package for helping videogame companies identify EDI issues within their own game’s language. The project will leverage already existing links between Dr Heritage and RARE, the studio who develop the game. The project will culminate in a training day based on the findings, which in turn will also allow for the identification of more routes to developing tangible impact. It is hoped that this work will lay the foundation for the development of additional research, which would seek to build a much larger corpus of videogames, which would be tagged and annotated, to deliver more extensive training for a greater range of videogame companies. It is hoped that by providing such training and a resource in the form of an accessible corpus, videogame script writers may become more acutely aware of their linguistic choices and may begin to dismantle implicit prejudices and proactively enhance the language used in online videogames to be more inclusive. Frazer has been interviewed about his work by Out Making Games.

Blood Bowl: A Cultural History. Paul Wake, English.

This project, funded by Game in Lab, contends that board games are significant historical texts that shape the cultures within which they are created. Moreover, it addresses the lack of critical historical analysis of twentieth and twenty-first century games, and in particular work on hobby games. Responding to these gaps in knowledge, the project will demonstrate the significance of board games in shaping the cultures out of which they arise and will address the lack of critical work on these games, through the researching and writing of the first book-length study of Games Workshop’s Blood Bowl (1986-present), to be published by the University of Michigan Press’s new Tabletop Games series, and the construction of a virtual archive relating to the game.

Romance Writing and Games: Always on My Mind. Kirsty Bunting, Paul Wake and Chloé Germaine, English.

In 2023, MGC colleagues co-designed a TTRPG, Always on My Mind, and presented it at the Romantic Novelists’ Association annual conference and at the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance Conference. In March 2024, Kirsty used the game as pedagogic tool in her writing classes and surveyed student participants for feedback, producing data for a planned publication. The group also hosted a playthrough of the romance gamebook, Star Rider and curated a panel of game designers and romance writers for the 2022 Multiplatform symposium. 

A Decade of Diversity: Games Representation. Satish Shewhorak, School of Digital Arts.

The research study is a census of the level of diversity in videogame characters between 2010-2020 analysing playable characters' apparent gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability in the 100 best-selling boxed games and critically acclaimed indie games per year. The project has been partially funded by Teesside University and supported by UKIE, the trade body for the UK games industry.

Multiplatform 2024: Queer Games and Playful Protest

We live in a time characterised by intersecting and violent crises. Increasingly, game creation and play are shaped by hegemonic interests, characterised by normative modes of production and consumption, what Janine Fron et al have called ‘the hegemony of play’. However, there has always been a resistant and queer energy in games. As Bo Ruberg argues, games ‘have always been queer’, aligning games and queerness through a shared ethos ‘to imagine alternative ways of being and to make space within structures of power for resistance through play’. Inspired by a long history of queer game makers, queer play communities and practices, as well as the more recent contributions of scholars working in queer game studies, Multiplatform 2024 invited papers and panels explored how games, game-making and play dismantle traditional assumptions about gender and sexual identities, challenge traditional academic approaches to these topics, and promote inclusion, diversity and equality. We were also interested in exploring the intersection of dissident play practices and queer game studies. In this aim, we evoked the word queer to name a way of being, doing, and desiring in addition to its use as an umbrella term for people and experiences that do not conform to mainstream norms of gender and sexuality. In this sense of the word ‘queer’, we see generative synergies between queer gaming and those who want to harness the dissident potential of play.