Supporting game research

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  • Event
  • Past

  Multiplatform 2025: Rituals of Play - Shaping Alternative Futures with Games and Occulture

  The Manchester Game Centre and Game in Lab, in collaboration with DVRK – the Dark Arts Research Kollective, are proud to present Multiplatform 2025, a symposium exploring the intersections of games, play, and contemporary occulture. Held at the Burgess Foundation and the MMU Arts and Humanities Building on 12–13 June 2025, this edition focuses on the ritualistic and speculative dimensions of play and how they can help shape alternative social, political, and cultural futures. Bringing together academics, designers, engineers, and artists, Multiplatform 2025 examines how games are increasingly entangled with mysticism, esotericism, and ritual. From analog role-playing games to immersive digital experiences, the symposium explores how these practices enable forms of worldbuilding that go beyond narratives and offer new perspectives on play and society. Participants will have the opportunity to experience The Museum of Lost Futures, an immersive game experience, and to attend talks by leading figures such as Jeff Howard, Associate Professor of Games and Occulture at Falmouth University, and Rob Donkin, game designer of Strange Horticulture. Researchers, designers, educators, artists, students, and all curious minds are invited to register and delve into the mysteries of games and occult play.

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  • News

  Game in Lab celebrates its women researchers on International Day of Women and Girls in Science

  Since 2015, February 11 has been recognized as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. Celebrated by UNESCO since the adoption of Resolution 70/212 by the United Nations General Assembly, this day aims to promote full and equitable access to and participation in science for women and girls. On this important day, Game in Lab wishes to highlight its female researchers.

• 2025 Call for Projects

  Our international call for projects is currently open!
  Research proposals, spanning fundamental or applied research, are invited from both disciplinary and interdisciplinary domains, and from any institution dedicated to scientific research.

   

  Click here to learn more about our call for projects.

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  • Event
  • Past

  Generation Analog 2024

  Analog Game Studies and Game in Lab are proud to announce Generation Analog 2024, to be held on 24 and 25 July 2024. The online event is free and open to the public upon registration. All presentations will be recorded and made available after the event. Check out the presentations from previous years on AGS’s YouTube channel.    The theme of this year’s conference will be “HOME”, exploring games and home, play and home, playing at home, being stuck at home, playing with others, and playing alone at home. It will examine playing at home, play(ful) rooms, game rooms, gaming tables, home squares, home bases, home teams, home brews, house rules, and play as (sometimes) “safe as houses.” Finally, it will imagine alternative domesticities, materialities and economies, found families and gaming groups, and even queer(er) and more radical places, spaces, and possibilities of play.    Home is not only about shelter and stability but also a sense of personal, cultural and political connection and recognition, from our communities and a larger public…[and] the many ends that home may serve—the normative and the queer, constraint and liberation, isolation and community… Making a queerer home means recognizing the material, psychological, and cultural meanings embedded in the everyday practice of homemaking––neither to deny nor reify its power and primacy, but to question and expand its limits.    Here are some of the ideas that are expected to be discussed at this conference. Board games, role-playing games and even children’s games are all extraordinary spaces for exploring these questions, as they require a conversation about who is playing, how they are playing, why they are playing and what they are playing.    Researchers, teachers, artists, postgraduate students and curious intellectuals are invited to submit proposals for Generation Analog 2024. Designers, educators and researchers at all stages of their careers are also encouraged to apply. 

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  • Project
  • Underway

  Vincent Berry
  The emergence of “modern” board games in France (1950-2000): An analysis of the editorial offering

  In 2023, Game in Lab selected Prof. Vincent Berry’s research project to document the editorial offering of board games in France from 1950 to 2000. The aim is to study the evolution of the production and publication logic of so-called “modern” board games by analyzing thousands of games on the French market over five decades, in order to help promote board games as a cultural object.

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  • Project
  • Underway

  Clever Gustavo de Carvalho Pinto
  Playing in the Amazon: a strategy to develop scientific literacy with youth

  In 2023, Game in Lab selected Clever Gustavo de Carvalho Pinto’s project to assess the potential of modern board games and game design activities to develop the scientific culture and critical thinking of high school students in Amazonia. This project aims to develop popular and mediated access to scientific education in a population that may be deprived of it, while identifying possible connections between a scientific culture and a game culture.

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