DVRS Games Festival, the first festival focused around diversity in the gaming industry will be held at Manchester Met next month, from Thursday, April 10 to Friday, April 11, 2025.

It is a collaboration between the university’s School of Digital Arts (SODA) and POC in Play, the organisation geared towards increasing the representation of people of colour in the video game industry. 

The festival is co-funded and supported by the Manchester Game Centre.

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Student Internship 2025 - Game Design for Sustainability

We are looking for a motivated research intern to assist with data collection and compilation for STRATEGIES – Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries, a live research project exploring sustainability practices in game development.

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Recently, game centre member and researcher in games for health and well-being, Dr Sören Henrich, wrote for the British Psychological Society about how roleplaying plays a part in his academic life and research…

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Dr. Jeff Howard, Associate Professor of Games and Occulture at Falmouth University

For Multiplatform, 2025, Rituals of Play, Jeff will deliver a seminar on “Playful Occultism” that explores manifestations of the occult in relation to play and games.

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Rituals of Play is our theme for Multiplatform 2025, the annual MGC symposium dedicated to analogue and video game studies. This year’s event is a collaboration with DVRK - the Dark Arts Research Kollective - at Manchester Metropolitan University.

This DVRK edition of Multiplatform will explore the intersections between games and occulture, investigating the transformative potential of games as forms of rituals to explore alternative histories and speculate on radical futures.

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Are you a Postgraduate Researcher researching video games, board games, VR, or any other type of interactive play? Check out this call for papers from the Investigate.Games group over at York St John university…

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In partnership with MeCCSA, the University of Sunderland is delighted to announce a special symposium on Creative Methodologies: Practical Play and Media Multiplicities, a two-day event, examining methodologies of practice-based media research, from podcasts to games making. Our keynote speakers for this event are: Lance Dann (The University of Brighton), Chloe Germaine (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Nick Lewis (The University of Sunderland). 

This symposium aims to interrogate the wide range of creative methodologies in media research as a showcase for the multiplicities of media and cultural studies. This event incorporates a cross-disciplinary and inclusive approach to practice-based research. We welcome papers examining autoethnographies, participant-action-led games jams as a way of video game making, R&D as well as ludological and narratological approaches to game studies, peer reviewed podcasts, the utilisation of video game journals, AI approaches to methodologies. We are also open to proposals on creative methodologies we may not have mentioned as we appreciate the breadth and depth of media’s multiplicities. 

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Stories of Intangible Heritage and Cultural Practices (of Horseracing) through Place-based Immersive Interactive Experiences: National Horse Racing Museum

Closing date: 18 March 2025

Fully-funded PhD

This project celebrates the vibrant cultural practices, intangible heritage, and unique social rituals of horse racing through emergent immersive and interactive storytelling. It aims to explore how these practices can be made tangible and publicly accessible via bespoke, place-based immersive experiences within a museum context. Focusing on the National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket – the birthplace of horse racing, the global epicentre of the sport, and the financial hub of the racing trade in Europe – this practice-based research will delve into innovative ways of storytelling using immersive and interactive media. 

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We are excited to share the news that Game in Lab and Analog Game Studies are once again joining forces to host Generation Analog 2025, taking place online on July 16 & 17, 2025.

This year's theme is PUNK, exploring how games embody and express punk attitudes, spaces, and art.

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Games have massive global reach among diverse populations. The transformative potential of the game industry is therefore huge, but research is needed if this potential is to be realised. The idea that games address the challenge of climate change has been established through the study of ‘ecogames’. However, optimism about the potential of ecogames is undercut by research into the negative material impact of game development, raising the question: how can we make and play games sustainably?

Apply to join a team of three new PhDs working on a project that addresses this question through interdisciplinary research across Art and Design, English Studies, Philosophy and Cultural Sociology. The three PhD projects will investigate the ecosystem of game design, game artefacts, and game consumption.

They are funded by the AHRC North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership and will be hosted at Manchester Metropolitan University and Salford University.

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As part of the Manchester Game Centre’s research on games and the environment, we hosted a game night on September 19th in the Manchester Poetry Library. The game night welcomed researchers from the STRATEGIES project - a Horizon-UKRI-funded research project supporting the game industries to make a sustainable transition - and students and members of the public to play the new game, Catan: New Energies.

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Since 2018, the Game In Lab initiative has been doing fantastic work by supporting and funding over 25 board game research projects worldwide. Here at the Manchester Game Centre, we have benefitted from this support with two of our projects, Blood Bowl: A Cultural History and Play and the Environment: Games Imagining the Future. In addition, Game in Lab supports our annual research events and networking with scholars across the world.

We are pleased to share their recent announcement regarding the opening of the 2024 International Call for Projects, which will be accepting submissions until September 6th. All disciplines are welcome, from social sciences to AI and the arts, or any other relevant field.

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We are pleased to announce the launch of Paul Wake’s new research project: Blood Bowl: A Cultural History. Funded by Game in Lab, this project runs the length of 2024. This project contends that board games are significant historical texts that respond to and 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.

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From Death Race to Grand Theft Auto, driving games have long fuelled claims that players might be inspired to start mowing down pedestrians outside of the game.Starting with a story about a Toronto police officer linking a hit and run to a copy of Need for Speed found on the offender’s passenger seat, Ben talks Rich through the surprisingly longstanding history of links between video games and reckless driving. We encounter early arcade video games, clowns being run over at anti-car carnivals, and Adam West’s Batman doing British road safety videos. Crash! Bang! Wallop!What a podcast! 

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This week saw the launch of our Horizon Europe/UKRI-funded project STRATEGIES (Sustainable Transition for Europe’s Game Industries). The event took place at Utrecht University on the 17th and 18th of April, bringing together many of the colleagues from the NGOs, game companies, and universities that make up the STRATEGIES consortium. We were also delighted to welcome colleagues from two of Horizon-funded sister projects, PACESETTERS (Powering Artistic and Cultural Entrepreneurship to Drive the Climate Transition) and CRAFT IT 4SD (Craft Revitalization Action for Future-proofing the Transition to Innovative Technologies for Sustainable Development).

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On Wednesday 20th March people gathered at O! Peste Destroyed in Manchester’s Northern Quarter for an evening of mind games. The evening was a collaboration between the MGC and the Dark Arts Research Kollective, who have just launched their latest zine presenting their arts-based research approaches into occultural practices, fortean geographies and paranormal resonances. MGC’s Chloé Germaine hosted the event, launching a new research project into the intersection between games and the occult phenomena of ‘mind’.

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In anticipation of the 2024 League of Legends World Finals in London, the Esports Research Network is excited to announce that #ERNC2024 is to set to take place this October-November in London! Under the evocative theme ‘Where Worlds Collide,’ this year's conference aims to explore the dynamic intersections between gaming cultures, esports competitiveness, technological innovation, and the broader societal impacts of the digital and physical worlds merging.

Where Worlds Collide is a collaborative effort between The Manchester Metropolitan University and Staffordshire University.

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The Manchester Game Centre are delighted to announce our keynote speakers for 2024’s Multiplatform symposium! Our annual symposium is focussed this year on queer games and playful protest, examining the intersection of games and dissent in multiple forms. Find out more here. The call for papers closes on March 29th - see below for details on how to submit your abstract.

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Multiplatform 2024: Queer Games and Playful Protest

Tuesday 11th and Wednesday 12th June

Multiplatform is the annual symposium for the Manchester Game Centre. We are a cross-university research group at Manchester Metropolitan University with research interests in Analogue Games, Digital Arts, Esports, Games and the Environmental Crisis, Games, History and Heritage, Games and Storytelling, and Serious Games.

Multiplatform 2024 has a dual focus on analogue and digital games and is themed around a concern with queer and dissident games and gaming practices. In addition to a day of academic and industry talks on the theme of queer gaming, we will also be hosting the UK Game Lab Network annual meet-up and launching our retro gaming archive, which contains computers and consoles from the past 40 years, together with a range of games. The activities will also include an introduction to the Archive and its future. 

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