Multiplatform 2022: Corporealities

Multiplatform 2022: Corporealities, a conference on bodies and embodiment in games

22-23 June 2022 
International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester

About this event:

The Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre is delighted to invite you to Multiplatform 2022: Corporealities, a conference on bodies and embodiment in games supported by Game in Lab and the Centre for Creative Writing, English, Languages and Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. The conference will run over two days, the first of which will focus on analogue games and play, the second of which will focus on the digital.

Further Information:

The issue of embodiment in games encompasses political, social and material concerns, and requires us to pay attention to the positioning, mediation, and representation of bodies within analogue and digital games. Game Studies continues to address this issue in a variety of ways. The burgeoning subfield of queer game studies, for example, has applied insights from queer and trans theory to games and play (Marcotte, 2018; Pozo, 2017; Ruberg, 2019), while another vein of research has explored the relationships between gaming cultures, porn cultures and the forms of erotic play found online (Paasonen, 2018; Apperley, 2022). Other scholars have focused on representations of ability, disability, and able bodies in games, and on questions of accessible and enabling interface design (Boluk and LeMieux, 2017; Carr, 2020). Indigenous gamers and gamers of colour have explored how entrenched a normative understanding of the embodied player is in games, while offering means to challenge this entrenchment (Nakamura, 2017; Russworm, 2017; Laiti, 2021). Affect theory, post-phenomenology and new materialist thought have been mobilised to offer accounts of gameplay as an embodied practice that implicates players in networks of human and nonhuman actors (Ash, 2015; Keogh, 2017; Anable, 2018). AR, VR and XR technologies, gestural interfaces and performance capture rigs have been analysed in terms of their capacity to alter the terms on which physical bodies enter and engage with gameworlds (Parisi, 2015; Hjorth and Richardson, 2020). Elsewhere, studies of livestreaming have considered how streamers mediate their bodies and surroundings (Anderson 2017), while work on e-sports has addressed the bodily rigours of elite play (Brock, 2021).

Please find the call for papers below.

Confirmed Speakers Day One:

Michael James Heron is Senior lecturer in Interaction Design (games and graphics) at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. He also serves as the program administrator for the Game Design and Technology masters programme, which covers everything from the architecture of game engines to how to conduct critical research on roleplaying games. He also runs his own website Meeple Like Us where he investigates the intersection of games and accessibility within a board-gaming context.

Matteo Menapace is a game designer and educator, who designs cooperative board games and teaches people how to use games to explore complex issues. He is currently designing Daybreak, a game about tackling the climate crisis, with Matt Leacock (author of Pandemic). Matteo will facilitate a critical playtest of the latest Daybreak prototype.

Confirmed Speakers Day Two:

Susanna Paasonen is a Professor of Media Studies at the University of Turku. Her publications include Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (MIT Press 2011), Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play (Goldsmiths Press 2018), and Distracted, Frustrated, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MIT Press 2021).

Irene Fubara-Manuel is a lecturer in Digital Media Practice at the University of Sussex, and a media artist working in animation and game design. They write on race and sexuality in pop culture and are currently interested in African digital futures.

Zoyander Street is an artist-researcher and critic working at the fringes of indie videogames for over a decade. Led by ethnographic and historical research, Zoyander creates lo-fi glitchy games and custom hardware for festivals, galleries, and museums, using interaction design to harness the expressive potential of audience participation.