In June 2025, the Game Lab was invited to participate in Bristol Data Week, organized by the Jean Golding Institute. Data Week is a springtime platform pursuing research and interdisciplinary collaboration on the subject of data science and AI. Data Week unites academics, policymakers, industry experts and community members in the exploration of data technologies and their relevancy to real-world challenges and responsibilities.
The Lab’s response to the invitation was to organize a Conceptual Game Jam. The central enquiry of this jam, put forth by Dr Conor Houghton (Associate Professor in Computer Science, School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology), was the question: what would a Museum of Languages look like?
The topic incorporated ruminations which had struck Conor throughout his travels and research. “Just how difficult it was to encounter a language in a broad way” – how language could not be reducible to an accumulation of grammars and etymologies, but was rather an accumulation of interactions and hindrances, contours and inexplicabilities. Was it that language could only be understood via the inhabitancy of it? And how could this relate to the aspiration to memorialize languages in some visitable, communal, historically-responsible way? This was something Dr Richard Cole (co-Director of the Bristol Digital Game Lab) touched on in conversation also – just how could an environment convey learning a language while delineating factors such as linguistic preservation and the phenomena of historical misinterpretation?
Such queries seemed befitting for a game jam. As touched on by Conor, games abide by a logic comparable to languages, “games [are] a way of communicating language from the insides”. In absorbing the logic of a game’s language, its idiosyncrasies and messinesses, one is tutored in the way its world works. Was this process not comparable to the languages to be memorialized in a museum – a system revealed to contain as many lacunae and inexplicabilities as it does comprehensible order?
The jam took place over four hours of a June afternoon. Attendance was interdisciplinary, with members of each team coming from, to name but a few, ancient history, computing, language backgrounds, or from worlds outside the university such as school-teaching. Conor remarked that, in contrast to the interdisciplinarity of conferences, where a “putative point of mutual interest” could lead to scholars talking in sequence on their respective specialties, the grist of having to design the presentation slides, draw the diagrams, and in one instance, code a prototype, forced each participant into contemplating how their backgrounds complemented and butted against one another. Richard spoke of the variety of games that emerged – some contemplated the Tower of Babel as an emblematic design, others envisaged vaults of language, or interrogated what politics there were in the creation of any archive. These four hours were intellectually stimulating in a far-reaching yet accessible manner.
In his final reflections, Conor said that he left the jam moved by the participants’ enthusiasm, the way they conceptualized the feasibility of an actual museum of language, illustrating “how interested everybody is in language”. It would not just be a place productive in its safekeeping of languages, in its establishment of an educative centre for language-learning, but a demonstration that “everybody has something they could bring to such a museum and take away”. The breadth of attendees, and the unique passions each brought and contributed the jam, exemplified how a conceptual jam can induce observations on the world that exceed university spaces and impel us to imagine possibilities of a magnitude beyond ourselves.