This year the Manchester Game Centre piloted its (Re)making Games: Creativity, Play, Communication MA (master’s) course for students of the Manchester Writing School and SODA.

The course explores the theory and practice of hacking and (re)making games as a research method and mode of creative practice. We introduced students to game making as a new methodology that combines creative and critical thinking with public engagement and impact at the point of research. For creative writers, the unit helps students develop new ways to explore narrative and storytelling through interactive fiction, video games and analogue games.

The games students produced were engaging, thoughtful, and exciting examples of intentional design and we wanted to share a few of them here…

MGC member, Catherine Elkin, has developed a student project to support storytelling, communication and coding skills. This project aims to pair students interested in code with other students interested in storytelling to create text-based adventure games.

On 24 February, the Bristol Digital Game Lab hosted the first annual UK Digital Game Lab Summit at Clifton Hill House. The aim of the event was to examine shared research themes, explore ways to engage with industry, and discuss the creation of a network of gaming research groups. Thanks to generous funding from the British Academy and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol, we were delighted to welcome the leads of eight UK-based game labs/groups, including:

• The Abertay Game Lab

• The University of Glasgow Games and Gaming Lab

• The Manchester Game Centre

• The History and Games Lab at the University of Edinburgh

• The Historical Games Network

• The MultiPlay Network

• The Interactive Games Research Group at York St John University

• The Playable Media Lab from Bath Spa University.

The summit was conducted in five sections and began with an icebreaker in a series of small groups, starting with the first game that we ever played. This discussion branched into further conversations surrounding games studies as a discipline, and the utility of games both in academia and the gaming industry.

Game in Lab and the Analog Game Studies journal announced the publication today of Generation Analog 2021: Proceedings of the Tabletop Games and Education Conference, edited by Evan Torner, Shelly Jones, Edmond Chang, Megan Condis, & Aaron Trammell.

This publications, the proceedings of the first Generation Analog conference in 2021, includes articles about making, materiality, community, inclusion, mediation, and role-playing. You can download it for free here, or purchase a print copy from publishers, ETC Press.

The Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre is pleased to announce that our annual conference - Multiplatform 3: Remake, Reuse, Replay will take place on the 7th and 8th of June 2023 at the Salutation, 12 Higher Chatham Street, Manchester. 

In a recent article for the Analog Game Studies journal, MMGC co-director Chloé Germaine has revisited theories of ‘the magic circle’ in Game Studies with fresh insights from the world of live-action roleplaying games (LARP).

We’re pleased to announce the publication of the book, Material Game Studies - A Philosophy of Analogue Play, edited by MMGC co-directors Paul Wake and Chloé Germaine.

MMGC member Jenny Cromwell will be joining a transnational panel of academics and game designers today to discuss the suitability of using Dungeon & Dragons for historical settings.