Multiplatform 2022: Corporealities conference graphic.
Multiplatform 2022: Corporealities, a conference on bodies and embodiment in games
22-23 June 2022
Online: Zoom
About this event
The Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre is delighted to invite you to Multiplatform 2022: Corporealities, a conference on bodies and embodiment in games supported by Game in Lab and the Centre for Creative Writing, English, Languages and Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University. The conference will run over two days, the first of which will focus on analogue games and play, the second of which will focus on the digital.
Due to widespread travel disruption expected in the UK between Monday 20th and Sunday 26th June, this event has been moved online. Participants will receive a zoom link with their tickets.
Further Information:
The issue of embodiment in games encompasses political, social and material concerns, and requires us to pay attention to the positioning, mediation, and representation of bodies within analogue and digital games. Game Studies continues to address this issue in a variety of ways. The burgeoning subfield of queer game studies, for example, has applied insights from queer and trans theory to games and play (Marcotte, 2018; Pozo, 2017; Ruberg, 2019), while another vein of research has explored the relationships between gaming cultures, porn cultures and the forms of erotic play found online (Paasonen, 2018; Apperley, 2022). Other scholars have focused on representations of ability, disability, and able bodies in games, and on questions of accessible and enabling interface design (Boluk and LeMieux, 2017; Carr, 2020). Indigenous gamers and gamers of colour have explored how entrenched a normative understanding of the embodied player is in games, while offering means to challenge this entrenchment (Nakamura, 2017; Russworm, 2017; Laiti, 2021). Affect theory, post-phenomenology and new materialist thought have been mobilised to offer accounts of gameplay as an embodied practice that implicates players in networks of human and nonhuman actors (Ash, 2015; Keogh, 2017; Anable, 2018). AR, VR and XR technologies, gestural interfaces and performance capture rigs have been analysed in terms of their capacity to alter the terms on which physical bodies enter and engage with gameworlds (Parisi, 2015; Hjorth and Richardson, 2020). Elsewhere, studies of livestreaming have considered how streamers mediate their bodies and surroundings (Anderson 2017), while work on e-sports has addressed the bodily rigours of elite play (Brock, 2021).
SCHEDULE
22 JUNE – ANALOGUE PLAY
10:30 Welcome
10:35 Keynote Address
Michael Heron (Chalmers University of Technology and Meeple Like Us) ‘The Inaccessibility of Fun’
11:30 Panel 1: LARP Design
Melissa Chatterton: ‘The Performance of Gender at LARP’
Christopher Lamb, Laura Mitchell and Lorraine McKee: ‘LARP design at the End of the World’
Hazel Dixon: ‘Embodied Games for Sex Education’
1:00 Lunch Break
2:00 Round Table: Romance across the Tabletop
Kiley Dunbar (author of The Borrow a Bookshop Holiday)
Emily Care Boss (designer of The Romance Trilogy RPG Collection)
Jacob Jaskov (designer of Fog of Love)
Chaired by Chloé Germaine
3:15 Finish
23 JUNE DIGITAL PLAY
9:30 Keynote Address
Irene Fubara-Manuel (University of Sussex) and Zoyander Street (Lancaster University) in conversation
10:45 Panel 1: Interfaces and Industry
John Henry: ‘Using Pulserate as Player Input’
Adam Cain: ‘The Interconnected Worlds of Fashion and Gaming’
Alex Brooke: ‘Towards Enhancing Game Telemetry with Facial Expression Recognition for Personalised Gameplay Experiences’
12:00 Panel 2: Bodily Representations in Games
Hugh Hammond: ‘We Do Not Know How A Body Can Play: Constructing Moving Bodies in Mainstream Videogames’
Christopher McMahon: ‘Naked Snakes: The dissonance of sex and sexuality in the narrative and play of the Metal Gear Solid series’
Steph Farnsworth: Corpo Creations: How Cyberpunk 2077 Explores Manufactured Mutants, and the Difficulties of Disability in an Inaccessible Posthuman Society’
13:15 Lunch Break
14:15 Panel 3: Intersections of Gaming, Esports, and Online Sex Work
Thomas Apperley will examine how bodies are monetized on Twitch focusing on ‘hot tub’ streaming.
Mayara Araujo Caetano will focus on the overlaps between streaming sex and/or pornographic games with online sex work, focusing on 3DXChat (SexGame Devil, 2012), an online multiplayer gaming environment.
Maria Ruotsalainen will discuss the way esport players’ bodies are commodified and monetized.
15:30 Keynote Address
Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku)
FURTHER INFORMATION:
For further information or questions contact Dr Chloe Germaine - c.germaine@mmu.ac.uk, Dr Paul Wake - p.wake@mmu.ac.uk or Jack Warren - jack.warren2@stu.mmu.ac.uk