Game Design Research Evening

Foreword: Most of this blog post will be open, unabashed bragging about how talented and cool my students are. Read at your own risk. 😉

To celebrate the launch of my first research monograph, Sexuality in Role-Playing Games, we hosted a Games Design research evening. This allowed for not only the eating of pizza, drinking of soda, and making of merry, but also a chance for our students to show off what they do here. As it would turn out, not only do they make super rad games (as evidenced by the Global Game Jam results), but they can also write some pretty darn good papers.

The night featured six presentations done in a modified pecha kucha style- meaning we each had 16 slides set on a timer of 20 seconds per slide with automatic animations for a total of five minutes. Five minutes each to explain our research! Eek! How nerve wracking!

First up, me! To kick off the event I talked about my past research on sex and role-playing games and my future research on sexy board games.

Continuing the theme of sexuality and games, third year student Davide Fiandra presented his research on Luxuria Superbia. Notably, Davide will be presenting this paper for discussion at this year’s Adult Play Seminar in Tampere, Finland.

Next up was the ever patient Kelly who very politely agreed to participate in the event despite being short of time working on her own book proposal. She spoke about her work on hybrid-identity and made puns about EverQuest which everyone laughed at. The puns, I mean. Not her work, obviously!

Speaking about his recent DiGRA paper, third year student Christopher Winn impressed the crowd with his amazing knowledge of Powerpoint animations… and the narrative structure of MOBAs, of course!

Rounding out the end of the evening, MA student Daniel Thompson told us all about his past work creating games with Block Stop which blur boundaries between play and performance. He then spoke about how this developed his research interests.

Ending the presentation segment of the evening, MA student Rosa Carbó-Mascarell told us about her travels and viewing cities through the eyes of a psychogeographer. She also discussed how psychogeography influences her game design and research.

Overall, the event was well attended and those who came got a lot out of it. It was a wonderful experience to learn from students, watch students learn from other students, and (generally) to celebrate the cool things we spend so much of our lives doing.

A special thank you to everyone at Brunel University London who made the event possible. Photo credits go to the wonderfully talented and generous Chris Cox.

Until next time,

Ashley