On 5th February 2025, Dr John Lean delivered an invited talk to the Computer and Information Science research group at Northumbria University. Titled ‘What can game design tell us about learners' agency in higher education?’
Read More
In September 2024 we were delighted to welcome Aasa Timonen as the Manchester Game Centre’s first International Visiting Research Fellow. Read Aasa’s account of her stay in Manchester in this short blog…
Read More
In this talk at Essen Spiel, Paul and Chloe shared the results of the Games Imagining the Future project and revealed how it led to the development of STRATEGIES. They also looked ahead to the ways in which this current research hopes to support the board game industry in its aims to support ecological thinking and a transition to a more sustainable and just society.
Read More
From the 30th October to the 1st of November, esports enthusiasts, industry professionals, scholars and researchers from all around the world gathered at the Staffordshire University London for the ERNC2024. As the esports ecosystem continues to evolve, the conference explored themes such as the dynamic intersections between gaming cultures, competitive play, sustainability, diversity & inclusion, and spectatorship within the esports ecosystem. The presentations, panels, and keynote talks provided innovative ideas and valuable insights for the future of esports!
Read More
MGC environment and gaming lead, Dr Wahida Khandker, is the Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Process Ecologies Network, which explores different conceptual approaches to nature across the arts, science, and philosophy. Games and Game Studies are areas of interest within the network, especially the ways in which games function to simulate ecological processes and are themselves relational and entangled processes.
Read More
Despite rapid and sustained growth in the last ten years, the esports industry entered an era where the financial health of esports organisers and teams is less than guaranteed. To address these concerns, Riot Games announced the introduction of regulations concerning team spending in LEC, the League of Legends league covering Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Following the 2008-2009 Global Economic Crisis, UEFA–the quasi-monopolistic continental football federation in Europe–introduced its financial fair play regulations, which later evolved into financial sustainability norms following the economic downturn post-COVID 19. UEFA desired to protect clubs from bankruptcy by introducing strict norms. The regulations guide not only the clubs’ spending but also their structure and governance.
Read More
New publication alert! “On the Pre-Perception of Gamification and Game-Based Learning in Higher Education Students: A Systematic Mapping Study” Simulation and Gaming...
Read More
Dr John Henry and a team of researchers at the Department of Computing and Mathematics at the Manchester Metropolitan University and members of the Manchester Game Centre are investigating how sensor driven experiences can determine play and empower new interactions.
Read More
For the Horizon project STRATEGIES (Sustainable TRAnsiTion for Europe’s Game IndustriES) we are looking for an enthusiastic and experienced project manager to support research on how the European game industry can contribute to realizing the goals of Europe’s Green Deal.
Read More
Manchester Game Centre member Dr John Lean introduces the special issue of The Journal of Play in Adulthood that he has recently edited.
Read More
Professor Kristina Niedderer discusses All about Us, a game jointly developed by people with dementia, care experts, designers and university researchers, in today’s episode of the BBC World Service series People Fixing the World.
Read More
As its title suggests, Gordon Calleja’s Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design, published by MIT Press in 2022, offers an exploration of player experience and the ways in which game designers work to create those experiences. Calleja draws on interviews with thirty-two leading board game designers and critics, and the inclusion of the insights of these well-known designers (alongside a wide range of scholarly material) results in a book that is extremely readable, while offering in-depth discussions of games and game design, and practical in turning these discussions towards game making and game playing.
Read More
Since the end of the Cold War, its imagery, atmosphere, and music have been repeatedly appropriated and reappropriated within contemporary popular culture. More than thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, these images continue to appeal to generations with no memory of the original tensions of the time. From the early Cold War imagery of games such as the Fallout series, or the mid-1980s backdrop of Soviet infiltration in Stranger Things, visual culture, music, and ideas from the period are constantly recycled in popular culture.
Read More
An interdisciplinary team that included academics in design and health, along with radiographers at Sheffield Children's NHS Trust set about working with the digital studio, Dubit to produce a playkit to help children aged 4-10-years-old prepare for an MRI scan without a general anaesthetic. The initial R&D project funded by Innovate UK and led by MMGC member Dylan Yamada-Rice, a Senior Lecturer in Immersive Storytelling in the School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, produced a mixed realities playkit to help children prepare for different elements of the MRI experience. These are (1) physical play to learn about an MRI scanner, (2) augmented reality play to learn about the job of a radiographer, and (3) virtual reality play to explore the journey of having an MRI scan from entering the hospital to completion.
Read More
Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre member Rob Gallagher has two new(ish) publications out: a chapter on the Hitman series in the edited collection Video Games and Comedy and an open access article on autobiographical videogames for Convergence….
Read More
If you couldn’t make it to Multiplatform 2022, or just want to rewatch any of the fantastic talks, you can now find a playlist on YouTube with recordings from both days.
Read More
Submissions are invited for a volume on Ancient Egypt in Video Games edited by Man Met Game Centre member Jennifer Cromwell.
Read More
Last month, Man Met Game Centre member Charlotte Gislam organised a postgraduate symposium focusing on the idea that board games can be made to explore research projects and provide creative ways to visualise aims, methodologies, goals, and findings.
Read More