Digital geographies and musical geographies are proliferating. This talk considers a topic at the intersection of both: videogame music. It argues that, through attention to such music, geographical approaches to videogames, and to music, can be expanded.

The Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre is excited to host a panel on current trends in LARP research with Michaël Freudenthal, Jonaya Kemper and Evan Torner, and chaired by Chloé Germaine.

At this event, Kristina Neidderer will discuss the challenges and joys of codesigning All about Us, a boardgame that provides support to people will early to mid-stage dementia. Attendees will then get the opportunity to play the game.

Imagine the world's decision-makers have been pressured by the people they represent to take climate breakdown seriously. In Daybreak, each player controls one of 4 world powers: the US, China, Europe, and the Majority World. Together, they need to decarbonise all aspects of society, while protecting communities from climate shocks.

MMGC’s Rob Gallagher will be giving an online talk for De Montfort University Leicester’s Media and Culture Research Centre on March 9th. Titled “All Will Be Converted”: NPC Memes as Gamer Politics, it will explore what happens when terms, tactics and concepts from gaming culture seep into politics, asking why there seems to be such a significant overlap between gaming fandom and right-wing political subcultures.

Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre is excited to host three speakers who have been at the forefront of pressing conversations on the experience of marginalisation, discrimination, and exclusion in board game cultures.

In this talk, Dr Dylan Yamada-Rice will introduce their work in the research and design of stories and play. Through a whistle stop tour of some recent projects, she will show how experimental methods and interdisciplinary approaches are at the heart of her work.

Repurposing materials salvaged from gaming culture in service of queer worldbuilding and trans-futurist speculation, Tabitha Nikolai’s artistic practice spans costume design, nail art, participatory performance and the design of text adventures and virtual environments. In this conversation with Rob Gallagher (Manchester Metropolitan University) Tabitha will discuss the themes, ideas and reference points that run through her work.​

In this session, we explore how we put the Rise philosophy into action via the design principles of open-world videogames. Though not a game, Rise incorporates metaphorical features that are directly inspired by open world games, in particular The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and we will explore some of these features to explain how they influence students’ journeys through Rise. Using this extended metaphor, we will also discuss the emerging implications of this ‘open world’ delivery model for HE pedagogy elsewhere.

MMGC's Rob Gallagher will be giving the keynote at the Multiplay Network's 2022 conference on January 19th. Organised around the theme of Games, Culture and Identity, the conference marks the start of a new multidisciplinary network dedicated to researching digital games and play, based at the University of Sunderland. Sessions will bring together researchers, streamers and game developers to discuss topics ranging from personal game design to posthumanism. Titled ‘Digital Play and the Politics of Personhood’, Rob's keynote considers how terms, images, concepts and characters drawn from gaming culture are being used to contest and reformulate understandings of personhood and politics, from alt-right memes to autobiographical walking sims.

As part of the Festival of Social Science, we invite you to join us to play two new tabletop board games that challenge players to think about building and developing nation-wide infrastructures and their wide-ranging impacts. The games, designed and developed by Manchester School of Architecture students, were developed as part of ongoing research projects that question the delicate links between climate and infrastructure, and the challenges and opportunities these structures play in our current response to the climate crisis.

Heaven’s Vault (Inkle, 2019) is an archaeological science-fiction interactive storytelling adventure game. As archaeologist Aliya Elasra you explore the Nebula, together with your robotic sidekick Six, deciphering the ancient script and language of the ‘Ancients’, on the basis of artefacts and sites that you discover along the way.

In this seminar, Dr Jennifer Cromwell will discuss how archaeology – and archaeologists – are presented, as well as the prominence of philology (the study of language) and its centrality to the narrative. In so doing, she will explore how the game both challenges conventional gaming (and pop-cultural) portrayals of archaeology and its colonial framework, but also how it succumbs to them.

MGSN PhD student Gemma Potter is exploring crossovers between craft and digital gaming as part of doctoral program Transformation North West. At this event, Gemma will share her research approach through which she has co-created a series of grafted games in order to assess the potential of these crossovers for the manufacturing industry in the North West. Gemma will discuss her research before inviting you to think about how the grafting approach could be applied to other contexts.

The Manchester Games Studies Network is hosting two exciting research papers on contemporary indie videogames. ‘Dr Seán Travers (University College Cork), ‘Nihilism, Violence and Popular Culture: The Postmodern Psychopath in Toby Fox’s Undertale’ and Charlotte Gislam, ‘Learning Spatial Grammar in The Binding of Isaac.’

Manchester Game Studies Network co-director, Chloé Germaine, will be giving her paper on contemporary horror roleplaying games and the environment at GENeration Analog on the 5th August, 2021.

With a persuasive power of their own, games offer a unique opportunity to engage others at all stages of our research. In this session we will discuss the potential of games and play in terms of both research methods and as research outputs.

This event investigates the use of Dungeons & Dragons 5e to engage with the history of the early Islamic world. We ask what challenges are posed by the use of historical settings in roleplaying games.

This event explores the ways in which players create, encounter and interact with the environment in indie roleplaying games. This will be a panel discussion featuring award-winning roleplaying game designers from the UK and the US, including the creators of Cthulhu Hack, Cthulhu Dark and Trophy.

Interested in the history of Civil Rights? Want to learn about people and events connected with freedom fights? Come along and learn about the card game co-created with young people and play the game with us online!

It is hard to find a definitive answer to why people in the ancient world were so interested in knucklebones, but in this online presentation, Dr Ada Nifosi (Lecturer in Ancient History; University of Kent) will show some examples of their variety of uses in different contexts.

The Portico Library invites the public to a programme celebrating games and recreation through the ages. From Jane Austen’s depictions of the card-playing Georgian middle classes to Dickens’ festivals and dances, 19th-century literature describes the roles that pastimes play in our cultural lives, and the social, moral and intellectual aspects of game-playing.

Dr Ben Edwards will discuss the recreation of the Stone Age site Bryn Celli Ddu (Angelsey) in Minecraft, and how it enables teachers, kids and adults to explore the archaeology around the 5,000 year old site – one of the most impressive megalithic tombs in the UK.

In this online seminar, the creators of 'Diamond the Game' discuss how they developed a game to communicate the processes of Diamond Light Source, the UK's national synchrotron.

In this online session Mick Chesterman will outline his work and research on collaborative game making with mixed age and ability groups.

Join Professor Sylvester Arnab as he presents his findings on game-based research and practice towards solving a variety of real-world problems, discusses the latest advancements in the academic field and concludes on common misconceptions and pitfalls in the domain.

In this talk, Dr John Henry will explore the future of Serious Games for mental and physical rehabilitation. Serious Games have a long presence in time in academia and industry, with solutions focusing on improving healthcare experiences, restructuring physical and mental rehabilitation solutions, spreading awareness on key and trending topics, educating in the classroom, amongst others.