Current Research Students

LAURA ARNOTT, ‘The cross-cultural translation and reception of Japanese digital game localisation’ (2018-)

Supervisory team: Dr Felicia Chan (Director of Studies, The University of Manchester), Dr Victoria Lowe (The University of Manchester) and Dr Paul Wake (External advisor)

Laura’s PhD investigates embodied performance and cross-cultural identity in Japanese role-playing games, re-conceptualising localised games as international cultural experiences through various diverse gameplay subjectivities. Laura is based at The University of Manchester and is co-supervised by Dr Paul Wake at Manchester Metropolitan University.

CHARLOTTE GISLAM, ‘ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND DYNAMIC SPATIAL STORYTELLING IN DIGITAL GAMES’ (2018-)

Supervisory team: Dr Paul Wake (Principal Supervisor) and Dr Chloé Germaine.

Charlotte’s AHRC-funded project explores the interactions of digital game’s non-human actants as active co-constructors of narrative alongside the player. The non-human actants considered are the game’s space and instances of artificial intelligence (AI) which are entangled within that same space: procedural content generation (PCG) and non-player characters (NPCS). The project argues that game space is generated through the interactions between space, AI, and player, and that this generation affects how narrative is produced and experienced. Digital game narratives are, as such, not simply the outcome of interactions between player and developer through the medium of a game, but instead the result of the complex and continuous intermingling of human and non-human agencies.

The project starts from an understanding of space from the theories of Micheal de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre which posit space as an active participant in its own production. In these theories space is also viewed in relation to the bodies (often human) which inhabit it, a viewpoint which appears to suit digital games due to their existence as entities created by humans for human usage. However, the project complicates this view of space in relation to games by accounting for the non-human entities and their role in the generation of both space and narrative. To do so Charlotte’s project incorporates Karen Barad’s Agential Realism as a way of reconciling the non-human aspects of games with the human-centred nature of game production and gameplay.

To explore these ideas of non-human agency within AI and space, Charlotte uses case studies which draw from the Gothic mode, specifically The Binding of Isaac (2011), Kentucky Route Zero (2013), and Bloodborne (2015). These games are presented in the Gothic mode via a combination of elements, including the visuals (setting, mise-en-scène), available player actions (actions which lead to an uncovering/revealing of secrets), and emotional state it attempts to produce in the player (dread, disorientation, discomfort, etc.). Charlotte argues that the Gothic provides productive case studies for her project as the mode sets out to disrupt traditionally understood boundaries between object and subject, affording a space where the non-human can be granted agency. As such, although the arguments from the project can be applied to games beyond those labeled as “Gothic”, it is a conducive genre for the reconfiguring of the player which this project puts forth.

Publications:

“Politics can wait until the Khan is dead”: A review of Ghost of Tsushima (2020)

Review of Ludotopia: Places, Spaces, and Territories in Computer Games (2019)

Review of Gaming the System: Deconstructing Video Games, Game Studies, and Virtual Worlds (2018) by David J. Gunkel

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JOSÉ SHERWOOD GONZÁLEZ, ‘MESOAMERICAN FUTURISMS: HOW CAN EXTENDED REALITY (XR) STORYTELLING CULTIVATE HUMAN AND MORE-THAN-HUMAN TRANSFORMATIONS? (2021-)

Supervisory team: Prof. Toby Heys (Principal Supervisor), Dr. David Jackson

Collaborating with digital arts organisation FutureEverything, this practice-based PhD investigates how extended reality (XR) can operate as an immersive methodology to cultivate human (and more-than-human) transformations. Reframing XR as a shapeshifting methodology to co-imagine Mesoamerican Futurisms, this practice-based PhD harnesses multiple perspectives of the past to re-envisage and disrupt more inclusive futures.

This transdisciplinary project draws upon decolonising theories from the ontological turn in Anthropology and Design (Escobar 2020; Fry 2020; Kohn 2014) and responds to the critical need for speculative research into how future cities can shapeshift and adapt to radical transformations in environments, cultures and subjectivities (Dunn 2021; Bell et al. 2020; Paradies 2020; Keane et al. 2017; Haraway 2016; Keating & Merenda 2013).

Cultivating XR as a research practice, I will experiment with comics, film and immersive XR installation, developing a multisensory language particular to the signs, symbols and iconographies of Aztec, Mayan and Nahua Futurisms. This will help to speculate and re-imagine Mexico City; incorporating indigenous knowledge(s) as a strategy to understand complex systems in relation to societal, environmental and political justice (Moreman 2011; Barad 2007).

Publications

Sherwood Gonzalez. J. (2022) ‘Story of Mirrors: Together They Cross The Border’, Ethno-graphic Collaborations: Crossing Borders with Multimodal Illustration. Trajectoria 3 https://trajectoria.minpaku.ac.jp/articles/2022/vol03/01_3.html

Sherwood Gonzalez. J. (2022 - forthcoming) ‘Story of Mirrors: One of Those Family Stories You Hear’, Studies in Comics 12 (1) pp. 123–130.

REIJI NAGAOKA, ‘REVIVING ALTERNATIVE FUTURE CITIES: COGNITIVE CLIMATE BEHAVIOUR IN AN URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL MULTIPLAYER ONLINE GAME’ (2021-)

Supervisory Team: Ulysses Sengupta (Director of Studies, Manchester School of Architecture), Dr Paul Wake (Manchester Metropolitan University), Dr Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay (University of Oslo)

Reiji's Leverhulme Unit for the Design of Future Cities (LuDEC) funded project explores climate-related collective player actions in a Multiplayer Online Environmental Videogame. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach to analyse collective player actions within a (simulated) urban context where interactive and collective player behaviours in a dynamic game environment have explicit climate implications and ecological impacts at a systemic level.

JACK WARREN, ‘PERFORMING REALITY: ROLE-PLAY, QUEER THEORY, AND NEW MATERIALISMS’ (2018-)

Supervisory team: Dr Paul Wake (Principal Supervisor), Dr Chloé Germaine, and Dr Andrew Moor.

Jack’s research is an entangling of role-play, queer theory, and new materialist philosophies. His project is a response to Jack Halberstam, who asks, ‘[u]nder what conditions can “new life” be imagined, inhabited, and enacted when within a gameworld?’ (Halberstam, 2017:190). Investigating this question, the project sets out to account for the experience and construction of virtual and actual realities within the digital gameworlds of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games. Taking World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004-) as its primary example, Jack investigates the affective elements of cross-reality slippage that role-players embody and project when engaged in play, and establish the implications these playful slippages hold for queer conceptions of embodiment.

Much scholarship surrounding digital role-play privileges the biobody and holds that technological interfaces and representations are a limiting and artificial factor in role-play that impede imagination, immersion, and embodiment. From this, the dualisms biology/technology animacy, inanimacy, original/representation, and actual/virtual have sprouted. Advocating for a shift from these dualisms, Jack’s project intervenes to develop a queer and materialist conception of role-play that moves beyond extant game studies arguments, one which recognises that humans are not the singular agential collaborators in role-play. Each co-constituent of role-play becomes a partner in errantry. This project then maps digital role-play onto Deleuzean conceptions of virtuality, proposing that virtual space is something more, and other, than just space created by computer game programming. Such an imposition allows this thesis to explore the blurry limen of reality that role-players embody to present moments where virtual and actual reality are disrupted.

Jack’s research also playfully connects the throngs of digital role-play to queerness, art, ecology, performance, games, literature, media, and theory. He is rhizomatic in his approach, following thinkers such as Karen Barad, Mel Y. Chen, Donna Haraway, and Rebecca Schneider who recognise the radical entanglement of all matter and meaning. From quantum field theory to reenactment, geology to bareback sex, Jack’s project is promiscuous and eclectic. 

Publications

Warren, J. (forthcoming). ‘Touching Fantasy Role-Play’ in Chloé Germaine and Paul Wake (eds.), Material Game Studies. London: Bloomsbury Press.

Papers

Warren, J. (2021). ‘Virtual Stones: Slippage and Sensation’, New Materialist Informatics conference. Online (University of Kassel).

Warren, J. (2020). ‘Playing Camp, Queering Play: How Juno Birch Plays The Sims’, Spelunking conference. Online (University of York).

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Mick Chesterman,

Supervisory Team:

Mick’s PhD studies involve families exploring systems thinking and ecological concepts through digital game making.

Thomas Dukes, ‘Castlefield Gallery and the Curatorial Project: forming new perspectives, from the past, through pLAY’ (2020-)

Supervisory Team: Dr. Steven Gartside (Principal Supervisor) and Professor Amanda Ravetz

Thomas Dukes, jointly appointed through a Collaborative Doctorate Award by Castlefield Gallery and Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University is exploring Castlefield Gallery’s archive, researching a 35-year history of the gallery’s exhibition history, taking a sharp focus on its support of the development of new work, growing artists’ practice and careers through exhibition making and affecting artist communities in the city, region and further afield.

Jamie Rhodes, The Phenomenological Experience of Stories (2020-)

Supervisory Team: Keith Crome (Principal Supervisor), Helen Mort, and Paul Wake

The Phenomenological Experience of Story Immersion is a multi-disciplinary PhD in philosophy and creative writing, by Jamie Rhodes. Never before has the power of stories to trigger ontological shifts in individuals, and consequently the societies they partake in, had such great an impact on such large populations. In striving to offer a contribution to world knowledge, I believe the phenomenological method could hold tantalising insights into why stories can be so influential and describe how they appear to alter our fundamental experience of reality.

COMPLETED STUDENT PROJECTS

JOHN LEAN, ‘TOTAL PLAY!: EXPLORING PARTICIPATION AND PLAY IN HIGHER EDUCATION’ (2019)

Supervisory Team: Professor Cathy Lewin, Dr Mark Peace, Professor Nicola Whitton

John’s PhD research connects the concepts of play and participation in the context of higher education. Education is often treated as a metaphorical game by students and educators; this thesis takes this metaphor seriously and asks how people actually play it.

Drawing upon a Deweyan pragmatist epistemology, and using a conceptual model incorporating Lave and Wenger’s (1991) ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ and Huizinga’s (1938) ‘magic circle’, John develops an understanding of play and participation as complementary situated concepts, which he then uses to analyse the ways in which students and educators participate in HE. Through his research, he develops the idea of ‘Total Play’ as a utopian vision of what HE participation could be; democratic, appropriative and empowering for both students and educators.

John’s methodology is exploratory and playful; he uses a combination of student interviews, teaching observation and autoethnographic to try and capture the different ways that participants play in the university. Though the use of games in education is increasingly common, he moves away from approaches that understand games as a tool to be used for learning and instead treat play as a mode of experience that contributes to both learning and our understanding of learning. In this way, his thesis makes a theoretical contribution to the philosophy of higher education, as well as a practical one around the use of play in the university.

NICOLA BRANCH, ‘TABLETOP ROLEPLAY AND WELLBEING : A THEMATIC ANALYSIS OF INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCES OF TABLETOP ROLEPLAYING GAMES’ [MA THESIS]

Supervisory team: Dr Hazel McMurtrie, Dr Carly Jim, and Dr Geoff Bunn.

Nicola's research for her Psychology Master's degree focused mainly on the effect playing Tabletop Role Playing Games can have on emotional wellbeing. Nicola has worked in schools for the last 13 years, as a learning support assistant, then a teacher then finally as pastoral staff and designated safeguarding lead working to support students in their mental health and wellbeing. This has allowed her to explore strategies to support students with special educational needs, as well as those with a history of trauma. Tabletop Roleplaying and board games have played a part in this area to get students working together, talking, sharing experiences and find a passion and ownership in gaming.

Whilst general wellbeing was the focus of her dissertation, there was also a spotlight on the role of tabletop RPGs throughout the Covid-19 Pandemic. Through a series of 1-1 interviews it was found that many of the participants found their gaming sessions to be a lifeline for their own wellbeing. The most notable aspects were the ability to mould and experiment with their own identity, the socialisation it offered and the opportunity for escapism in a fantastical world. The last aspect was most prominent during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns. Participants expressed that playing their ideal self, in a world where they could have a real impact helped to shift their locus of control from external, where life was massively regulated and out of their control, to internal, where they were the heroes in their own story. Subjects would frequently refer to their characters as both an aspect of their self, and also ‘the other’ which was particularly interesting as many of the more powerful acts were explained using ‘I’, but the description of the character themselves was always using the 3rd person. The research was supervised by Dr Hazel McMurtrie, Lecturer in Psychology, with course oversight by Dr Carly Jim, senior lecturer and joint program lead, and Dr Geoff Bunn, senior lecturer at MMU.

GEMMA POTTER, Making sense of craft expertise and creative value in digital gaming

Supervisory team: Prof Alice Kettle (Principal Supervisor), Dr Tom Brock, and Prof Martyn Evans

Funded by AHRC, Gemma's research seeks to investigate existing crossovers between craft and gaming and asks what value these overlaps could provide for Industry in the North West. Using a multi-stranded investigative designing approach that draws on her own artistic practice, her research begins by establishing the existing relationship between craft and gaming. Drawing on theories of embodied knowledge and skill acquisition, Gemma uses case studies of amateur craft and computer gameplay to establish four key areas of crossover including: material affordances; habitual practice; feedback systems; and minimising risk. Additional strands of the project explore what potential synergies could be developed that take these crossovers into account through a process of grafting existing games with craft processes. The potential impacts of these ‘grafted games’ is then assessed through application onto skilled actions of a clothing manufacturing setting in collaboration with a project partner Cookson & Clegg in Blackburn. Observations of participant interactions with the grafted games demonstrate a need for potential ‘gamified’ systems to taking into account the existing material understanding, and practices linked to craft processes. By establishing an approach of 'grafting' games with craft, the project also avoids the costly and lengthy process of developing new gamified systems, enabling a more immediate investigation into the potential impact of combining these individual elements.