This post is in part a celebration of Mick Chesterman’s recently completed PhD, “Pump up the Jam”, and an opportunity to share two of the game-related research outputs. The thesis explored how game making can be designed as an inclusive, collaborative learning activity through five iterative cycles of design-based research with home-educating families over several years.

Rituals of Play, published by the Manchester Game Centre and DVRK, gathers seventeen pieces from writers, designers, artists, and practitioners who work at the threshold of games and the occult. Their work explores games as magical practice, and magic as a form of play. The zine gathers material from the Multiplatform event in 2025 (and beyond). Scholarly essays sit alongside working rituals, grimoires, games, and visual and sonic experiments, with no firm line drawn between studying (or practicing) the occult, and playing games.

Edited by Professor Jeff Howard (Falmouth University) and Dr Chloé Germaine (Manchester Metropolitan University), a new edited collection, Games and the Gothic: Playing in the Shadows, under contract with Edinburgh University Press, will examine how digital, tabletop, material, and role-playing forms of play engage the Gothic tradition. Drawing on Gothic studies, game studies, and literary criticism, contributors will explore how Gothic aesthetics, temporality, and affect intersect with mechanics, player agency, and game worlds.

At the 2026 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Green Games Guide board member Carol Mertz delivered a talk asking a pressing question: what responsibility do tabletop creators bear for the environmental impact of the games they make?

We are pleased to announce that the third annual Games Workshop Research and Play Convention (note the new name) is taking place on Saturday 19th September 2026 at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester.

As part of her ongoing role as Academic Coordinator for the Sustainable Games Alliance, MGC Co-Director Chloé Wake has been building a global network of researchers and institutions committed to advancing sustainability in the games industry. The latest session in the Academic Global Action for a Sustainable Games Industry series is now available to watch — and features colleagues from the University of York.

Report on a recent workshop for third year students based on the Real Engine project developed by MGC member Matteo Polato and Jacopo Bortolussi. The project uses videogame design as a practice-based methodology for analysing and presenting archives in the humanities. This workshop was designed specifically for humanities students that do not have a background in game design, to empower them to approach their research, and how to communicate it to diverse audiences, in new and exciting ways.

Centre member Gabriele Aroni has a new article out in The Conversation: “When players become artists: the rise of in‑game photography”

The symposium ‘Anubis in Contemporary Popular Culture’ aims to examine the reception of ancient Egyptian gods through the case study of the canine deity Anubis. By adopting a focussed examination of an individual god, the symposium aims to explore the different ways that gods are adopted and adapted in diverse media and by different communities.

We're delighted to share that MGC co-directors Paul Wake and Chloé Germaine have joined the board of the Green Games Guide (GGG), the leading open resource for sustainable design in the tabletop games industry.

The GGG has just released version 1.1 of the guide, which expands its materials guidance to cover textiles, metals, and glass — examining labour costs, water use, recyclability, and the environmental impacts of production. Where materials can't be eliminated, the guide highlights lower-impact alternatives such as hemp, recycled cotton, and recycled metals. The update also features new case studies showcasing genuinely innovative sustainable design, from biodegradable packaging to games made with infinitely recyclable wood composite.

We're excited to highlight two complementary Research Associate positions at MMU's School of Digital Arts (SODA) that will interest the games and creative technology community.

The Emote VR Voicer project — funded by the AHRC — is developing a VR application that translates the emotional content of live vocal utterances into morphing 3D animated shapes. Using speech recognition, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis, it sits at a genuinely unusual intersection of AI, interactive design, and wellbeing research. Both roles are part of a small interdisciplinary team of artists, a psychologist, and AI researchers. Prior arts-sector experience isn't required for either post — curiosity and openness to collaboration are.