Creative Methodologies: Practical Play and Media Multiplicities 

A conference organised by the University of Sunderland in association with the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association. 

Manchester Game Centre are pleased to share details of the Creative Methodologies conference, organised by Dr Stephanie Farnsworth at the University of Sunderland. Creative Methodologies: Practical Play and Media Multiplicities is a two-day event, examining methodologies of practice-based media research, from podcasts to games making.

The keynote speakers for this event are: Lance Dann (The University of Brighton), Chloe Germaine (Manchester Metropolitan University and the Manchester Game Centre) 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.

MGC Co-Director, Chloé Germaine will give a keynote presentation on the theme of Playing, Making, and Breaking: Research through Games.

Her work proposes game playing, hacking and making as forms of research. Playing, hacking and making games compose a research practice that has much in common with established modes of engaged research, such as action research, co-creative research, and creative research methods. Playing, making and breaking is about doing research with games in a collaborative sense. It is a practice that gives credit to games as co-actors within research, not just as research or communication tools. Games are more-than-human performances (Wake, 2022), experimental entanglements, and relational processes that might be used to co-create situated, contextual knowledge that respect multiple ways of knowing and that puncture the fantasies often sustained in academic research of objectivity and generalisable truth. This work on games as research practice is situated on the boundaries of game studies and game design research, which considers games themselves as objects of enquiry. As Hook and Coulton have argued (2017), game design research would benefit in moving towards approaches favoured in design-led research, especially critical and radical design. This entails considering the process of game design itself as a mode of creative research, one that (as in critical design) might open “the unavoidable plurality of the future” (Hook and Coulton, 2017, 185). The relevance of this speculative potential of game design as research to the present situation for academic research, and the urgent need to meaningfully address issues of climate (in)justice and ecological collapse, is clear.

To explore these different ways of doing research through games, Chloé will consider various game hacking and making projects with which she has been involved in the past few years, including action research with board games to explore young people’s climate imaginaries, making board games to provoke critical and dark play; and the co-creation of Rooted in Crisis, an ecohorror roleplaying game anthology. Many of these projects have been carried out with other game designers, researchers, and with myriad game players. The collaborative nature of research through games is tied to the nature of games themselves.