British DiGRA

BCMCR is the Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research at Birmingham City University – They have two talks coming up in the near future

Game Cultures: Fans and Mods – 4th March– 16:00 – 17:30

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/game-cultures-fans-and-mods-tickets-94796074611

Dr. Esther MacCallum-Stewart (Staffordshire University) ‘On a scale of 1-5, what floor are you on?’ Emergence, Fun and Transformative Play by Fans, for Fans

This talk presents the early stages of research about the ways in which people create games to play in order to diffuse negative or boring situations. These games may not have a point, may be transient, impractical and serve no purpose outside their immediate context. Nevertheless, they persist.

Dr. Adam Chapman

Modding for/by the People: Games Culture and the Constitution of the Authentic 

Academic attention to historical games has seen a significant increase in the past decade. However, whilst historical game studies has paid a significant amount of time considering the games themselves, less time has been spent considering the ways in which history is also constituted by game cultures and player communities. This paper argues that discussions of historical games must be partly grounded in the communities of practice and the (often unspoken) discourses of games culture. This idea is explored by examining a distinct phenomenon: historical ‘modding’, i.e. the modification of games with (or for) historical settings. Such modding often means a negotiation between the ‘official’ version of history offered by games development companies/publishers and the iterative, often corrective and revisionist, modifications made by organic modding communities. 

BCMCR is the Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research at Birmingham City University – They have two talks coming up in the near future

Game Cultures: Games of Ethics and Politics – 26th February  – 16:00 – 17:30

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/game-cultures-games-of-ethics-and-politics-tickets-94795695477

Meghan Dennis A Model of Looting Incentivization in Video-Games

The relationship between video-game players and the environments they inhabit through play is a complicated one, shaped by internal and external factors. Decisions made during the development process as to the inclusion of cultural landscapes and objects of cultural patrimony, and the treatment of both through ethical and unethical positioning within a video-game’s narrative and through world-building choices, impact how a player manipulates elements of potentially unfamiliar or foreign cultures. There is nowhere this is more visible in video-games than through the incentivization of looting and artifact theft.

John Sear (Independent Game Designer) Blurring the lines: Where does the theatre begin?

John Sear, designer of real-world games, will talk about the world of Immersive Theatre. This will include a post mortem of his recent game A Moment Of Madness, a fascinating mix of immersive theatre and escape room in which players take part in a covert stakeout, attempting to undercover evidence of political scandal. John reflects on the practicalities of designing experiences for real-life spaces, and working with actors to make his games come to life.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/labour-organizing-in-games-and-the-future-of-work-tickets-93486156611

Fri, March 27, 2020 – 12:00 PM – 6:00 PM GMT

Games labour has been a topic of sustained interest in this hybrid tech/creative sector, and with increasing globalization of production, transnational teams, and decentralized platform-based work conditions, the future of gameswork only becomes a more pressing issue. At the same time, the emerging global labour movement in games spearheaded by Game Workers Unite as well as efforts to form unions in other tech fields indicate the rise of a potential new wave of collective organizing in a henceforth highly individualized creative field. What are the challenges faced in labour action in games, what lessons can be learned for other forms of tech work, and what are the implications for more inclusive and sustainable futures?

To address these questions, please join us for a series of roundtable discussions tackling the future of work in creative tech work. Labour activists and critical scholars will grapple with pernicious challenges and powerful opportunities including intersectional approaches to labour organizing, dealing with decentralized and globalized contexts of production, and the material realities of coordinating immaterial workers. Through these conversations, we aim to set out an agenda for collaboration and collective action for fairer and more just work in games specifically and the digital industries more broadly.

The event schedule is below. Please note that the event will be recorded. Attendees with specific dietary requirements should contact the organizer.

12:00-1:00- Lunch and informal introductions

1:00-1:10- Opening remarks

1:10-2:10- Intersectional Approaches to Games Work and Labour Organizing

Chair: Alison Harvey

Roundtable participants: Kevin Agwaze, Rebecca Davnall, Marijam Didžgalvytė, Helen Kennedy

2:10-2:25- Tea break

2:25-3:25- Global Views on Organizing Decentralized Workers

Chair: Ed Vollans

Roundtable participants: Ergin Bulut, Daniel Joseph, Aphra Kerr, Anna Ozimek

3:25-3:40- Tea break

3:40-4:40- Material Concerns in the Organization of Immaterial Labour

Chair: Oz Gore

Roundtable participants: Tom Brock, Paolo Ruffino, Jamie Woodcock

4:40-5:00- Closing remarks by Alison Harvey and Oz Gore

5:00-6:00- Refreshments

This event is supported by the CAMEo Research Institute for Cultural and Media Economies, University of Leicester.

• Wednesday, February 12, 2020
• 16:00  17:00
• Room 307, Geoffrey Manton Building, Manchester Metropolitan UniversityRosamond Street WestManchester, England, M15United Kingdom

In this seminar Dr Chloé Germaine Buckley will explore the philosophy of games and the potential of play to disrupt players’ common-sense perspective of the world. Various “turns” in modern philosophy, including materialist and speculative philosophies, suggest that humans need to think beyond an anthropocentric perspective. Instead of seeing matter and nature as passive resources for human conception, we need to recognise nonhuman vitality and agency.

Various analogue forms of gaming, especially live-action roleplaying games, produce experiences for players that accord with this ethical task. LARP might be a form of training, one which requires a willingness to “play the fool”, that chastens the destructive human will to mastery. In this seminar, Dr Germaine Buckley will challenge accounts of play that characterise it as a humanist mode, that place human agency front and centre: humans construct and deconstruct the world through play. In contrast, this seminar will suggest that LARP asks its players to account for the unhuman nature of reality, to consider that fact that it is the world that makes us.

https://www.manchestergamestudies.org/events/2020/2/15/games-and-philosophy

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/immaterial-vr-immersion-and-narrative-tickets-72369351679

IM/MATERIAL EVENT #3: VR, IMMERSION, AND NARRATIVE

4 October 2019, 14:00-17:00

Sir Alwyn Williams Building, University of Glasgow

Video games have long been used to tell stories, and the medium offers unique affordances for doing so. From the emergent narratives of titles such as Journey (thatgamecompany, 2012) and No Man’s Sky (Hello Games, 2016) to the meticulously crafted stories of Firewatch (Campo Santo, 2016) and What Remains of Edith Finch (Giant Sparrow, 2017), games are often said to offer immersive and interactive storytelling opportunities. However, games also present unique challenges for storytellers, challenges that relate to these very same properties.

Players, fully immersed in a game world with which they may interact at will, are empowered to wrest authorial control from the game’s designers and writers. The author of a novel may assume that the reader will encounter the story in the order intended, but this is not the case in a game where the player may explore the world at will. The director of a film may frame a camera shot to ensure that key narrative beats are granted the necessary on-screen prominence, but this is not a given where the player enjoys control over the in-game camera.

For VR games, many of these issues are exacerbated, and further challenges and concerns begin to emerge. How immersive an experience can a VR game offer if the player character’s movement is limited to teleporting from one spot to another? Does current-generation hardware offer sufficient fidelity when it comes to interacting with the game world? Should we be concerned about the accessibility of VR, particularly as the technology begins to be used more widely in education?

These are some of the questions we aim to tackle here.

SPEAKERS

Jon King (Sony, London Studio – Blood & Truth)

Rhoda Ellis (University of Dundee)

Chris McLaughlin (Moon Mode)

Mal Abbas (Biome Collective)

MODERATOR

Matthew Barr (University of Glasgow, British DiGRA)

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/immaterial-vr-immersion-and-narrative-tickets-72369351679