Nick Riddle at Bristol Mix has written a profile of Dr Michael Samuel, co-Director of the Bristol Digital Game Lab, focusing on his personal and academic relationship with videogames, his work with the Lab, and collaboration with Richard Cole and Danny Bacchus on the development of a game exploring postnatal depression. To hear more about the project, check out our recent post or get in touch with mike.samuel@bristol.ac.uk.
In summer 2024, the Bristol Digital Game Lab co-directors Dr Michael Samuel and Dr Richard Cole, along with digital artist Dr Danny Bacchus, were awarded seed funding from the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Narrative Technologies fund to explore the potential of a videogame to be used as a conversational tool for fathers living with postnatal depression.
In October 2024, we participated in an initial game jam led by Michael at the Department of Film and Television, University of Bristol. Conversations over the day revolved around a central research question and aim: what is the capacity of a game to engender empathy toward fathers experiencing postnatal depression, and be the catalyst for further conversation?
Given that there is no one size fits all experience of postnatal depression, we felt it was essential to approach the conceptualisation of the game objectively. It was important at the start to dedicate time to understanding some of the nuances of postnatal depression by contextualising the condition medically, historically, and culturally, including reviewing representations across literature, art and visual media. Quickly abandoning the immediate impulse to create a character and a story, we opted instead for a symptoms-led approach to the game’s conceptualisation and design, identifying common symptoms from literature and asking, how might they shape the game world, its mechanics and, ultimately, the player experience?
After a busy fourth quarter in 2024, during which time we developed a concept and a working prototype, the first quarter of 2025 was marked by both public-facing and research showcases. At a Narrative Technologies sharing event at the Watershed (23rd January) the three of us presented and took part in a panel conversation about the potential of games (and other interactive narrative forms) as a methodology for working through complex mental health conditions. In March (7th), Danny presented our prototype our prototype at the Pervasive Media Studio’s First Friday event, a monthly public social and showcase of creative work in the community. More recently (2nd April), Michael presented the game as part of a departmental research seminar in Film and TV. His research paper detailed some of the context and research that informed the videogame’s production, insight into the game making process, followed by a Q&A and demo for scholars and students to try. Feedback from these events has been highly encouraging.
Now that we have a working interactive prototype, the next stage is to consult with support workers in the third sector to identify additional needs and potential. Once funding is in place, we plan to run a series of playtests to gain valuable feedback and continue to develop the gain in response to ongoing feedback from professionals and those with lived experience of postnatal depression.
If you are interested in hearing more about the project, or would like to discuss how the Bristol Digital Game Lab could consult on the process of translating your research into an videogame, please contact Michael or Richard.
We’re delighted to announce that co-Director of the Bristol Digital Game Lab, Dr Richard Cole, has been awarded a University Enterprise Fellowship for academic year 2025/26.
Richard will make use of the Fellowship to develop the Lab’s pioneering work around games for public service.
Richard said, ‘This Fellowship is an exciting next step in our journey. It will help put into action a consultancy model that builds on our work advising academics making research-informed games, our collaborations with the third sector using games to explore complex problems, and the value we bring to games development through player insights.’
Read the full announcement on the University of Bristol’s Enterprise and Innovation Blog
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If we imagine 2024 as an open world game, and the Bristol Digital Game Lab as player, then there’s lots to celebrate in terms of achievements (although there have also been challenges!).
In 2024, we brought in over £300,000 of funding for research, impact, and commercialisation projects, significantly increased our party size to 250 members, and saw an uptick in successful postgraduate applications. In July 2024, we embarked on a major quest, Game Conscious™ Characters, with industry lead Meaning Machine, which will see us assess how players respond to First Person Talkers, a new genre of video game. Teaming up with industry legends Ndemic and Larian Studios meant we could offer insights into the impact and the writing of video games respectively, which we delivered through sold-out workshops to audiences in Bristol and beyond. We initiated expeditions inspired by the interests of Lab members. This includes the development of a video game to tackle the complex topic of postnatal depression, knowledge-exchange around the ethics and use of AI Tools for Game and XR Storytelling, ‘concept’ game jams for partners including Natural England and the Centre for Sociodigital Futures, sponsorship for the UK premier of asses.masses, an epic, 7+ hour, custom-made video game about labour, technophobia and sharing the load of revolution, a conference on New Directions in Classics, Gaming, and Extended Reality, which brought together 24 academic and industry speakers from eight different countries, and Antiquity Games Night, a monthly online collaborative play series.
Are you a budding adventurer looking to join a group? To gain a sense of what we do in the Lab, check out the following video and see below for a glimpse into 2025.
Next year will see the Lab exploring new worlds, starting with a Cabot-funded symposium on Can Games Teach? Games and the Environment. We’ll follow this with another Can Games Teach? event on Games and History/Heritage. We’ll also be running a series of player studies, so watch this space for paid opportunities to get involved in cutting-edge gaming research! Then there’s the XR game jam for the AI Tools for Games and XR Storytelling project, a postgraduate roundtable on Game Development, further industry workshops and research seminars in the pipeline, and showcases where we’ll feature the games we’re creating. We’ll also be defining and testing a broader service offering through the Lab, including consultancy, game jams, and player studies.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank Dr Xiaochun Zhang, co-founder and co-director for several years, for all her hard work. Xiaochun will continue to support the Lab from her new home at UCL. In September 2024, we were delighted to welcome Dr Michael Samuel (Film and TV) as new co-director of the Lab.
To sign up to the Lab’s mailing list and to become a member, please visit our How to Get Involved? page. To follow our updates on LinkedIn, search for #BristolDigitalGameLab. You can also reach out to the co-directors: richard.cole@brstol.ac.uk and mike.samuel@bristol.ac.uk for further information.
Are you an early-mid career creative technologist, designer, or creative working in immersive media or the games industry? We invite you to join a workshop series organized by the AI Tools for Games and XR Storytelling project at the University of Bristol, which aims to bring together diverse talents to explore the possibilities and challenges of integrating AI into the creation of compelling game and XR stories.
Through the workshop series, participants will have the opportunity to hear from experts in the field and learn new AI tools. We will collaborate, share insights, and prototype in order to push the boundaries of how AI tools can be integrated into immersive storytelling and games.
We are seeking a range of creatives from different backgrounds. This could include, but is not limited to: game design, narrative/experience design, programming, 3D modelling, sound design, interaction design, level design, and world building. If you feel you would have skills to bring to the workshop series, please fill out the expression of interest form below.
This project is funded by University of Bristol’s AHRC Impact Accelerator Account. It is led by Dr. Harry Wilson in collaboration with Dr. Richard Cole and Dr. Sarah Campbell and co-organised with project partners Eirini Lampiri, Ruth Mariner and Play Well for Life.
Key Activities:
Ethics Panel: 21st November 2024, 18:00-21:00
A deep dive into the ethical considerations of using AI in game and XR development. Focusing on safeguarding, ethics, accessibility, and inclusivity for smaller teams working with AI tools. This panel event is free and open to all. Sign up here!
AI Tools Workshop: 22nd–24th November 2024
This hands-on, in-person workshop at the MyWorld facilities in Bristol will allow you to experiment with different AI-driven workflows. You’ll have the opportunity to play, build, and co-create using AI tools in areas such as:
XR Game Jam: 15th–16th March 2025
Workshop participants and others interested in the project will be invited to an XR Game Jam in March 2025, where they will collaborate in small teams and use the AI tools explored in our workshops to prototype narrative-based games and XR experiences around a given theme. This event will culminate in the creation of a Toolkit for responsible use of generative AI tools in games and XR storytelling.
If you would like to attend the workshop series please apply by filling in this Google form. Deadline for applying: Friday 25 October 2024.
This s
ummer, the Bristol Digital Game Lab is pleased to welcome Dr Michael Samuel from the Department of Film and TV as a co-director.
Michael has been heavily involved in the Lab’s activities for a while now, participating in game jams and co-hosting interviews with James Vaughan of Ndemic Creations, the creator behind the gaming phenomenon Plague Inc., and Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim, the creators behind Assess.Masses at The Watershed.
Since 2023, Michael has pioneered the Department of Film and TV’s first video game unit along with Dr Lawrence Kent, Approaching Video Games.
This summer (2024), Michael, along with collaborators Dr Richard Cole and digital artist Daniel Bacchus, were awarded seed corn funding from the Narrative Technologies initiative to develop the concept for a game that explores postnatal depression in new fathers (read more about this in our other blog entry).
And, in November, Michael will be bringing the lead writers from Larian, who are responsible for Game of the Year 2023 Baldur’s Gate 3, to Bristol to lead an exclusive writing workshop for our students.
Welcome!
We are overjoyed to announce that we have been awarded seed corn funding as part of the Narrative Technologies initiative to develop a proof of concept for a game exploring the complex topic of postnatal depression.
According to the National Library of Medicine, ‘15% of new mothers’ and ‘10% of new fathers’ are affected by PND (Scarff, 2019, p.11). Meanwhile, studies indicate that men’s bodies experience profound change after a partner gives birth, mentally as well as hormonally. Within the first 12-16 weeks of their partner giving birth, new fathers experience similar structural changes in the brain (Kim et al., 2014) and a 34% drop in testosterone (Gettler and Feranil, 2011) which are understood as root causes in depression. However, as Ammar Kalia (2023) writes, while ‘new mothers are monitored for PND during routine NHS health visits. New fathers […] have no access to standardised care or routine checkups’. With limited NHS support in place, in recent years charities (such as Mind, Acacia, Pandas, NCT) have registered a high volume of new fathers turning to technology to find support and community, connecting with groups on social media for example.
Whilst pamphlets, websites, and social media continue to be ways of disseminating information about PND, the potential of video games and immersive experiences remains untapped. Beyond entertainment, video games have proven a powerful medium for engaging people in the complexities of the human condition, with games and interactive experiences increasingly exploring the nuances of mental health (depression, grief, anxiety, empathy) in artistic ways. Some of these games include Gris (2018), Celeste (2018), Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice (2017), What Remains of Edith Finch (2017), Firewatch (2016), That Dragon, Cancer (2016), Depression Quest (2013), and Dear Esther (2012). However, there is yet to be a game about PND. This project aims to address this gap.
At this stage of the project, we are going to use game development as a method of exploring the potential ways in which an art game about PND might engender empathy towards new fathers and their networks (partners, friends, family). The aim being to produce the concept to present to potential partners and stakeholders for further funding and development. Initially, this will be developed by the co-Directors of the Bristol Digital Game Lab, Dr Michael Samuel (Film and Television) and Dr Richard Cole (Classics and Ancient History) in partnership with Digital Artist Danny Bacchus (see below).
For the next stage, we aim to hold a game jam and several focus groups with local and national mental health support charities, as well as with partners and families, to navigate the topic with nuance and sensitivity.
If you would like to be involved in the future development of the game, or would like to discuss the project, please get in touch with the project lead, Dr Michael Samuel (mike.samuel@bristol.ac.uk).
References
Gettler, L.T. et al. (2011) ‘Longitudinal evidence that fatherhood decreases testosterone in human males’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108(39), pp. 16194–16199. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1105403108.
Kalia, A. (2023) ‘“I didn’t even know men could get it”: the hidden impact of male postnatal depression’, The Guardian, 22 May. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/may/22/i-didnt-even-know-men-could-get-it-the-hidden-impact-of-male-postnatal-depression (Accessed: 18 July 2024).
Kim, P. et al. (2014) ‘Neural Plasticity in Fathers of Human Infants’, Social neuroscience, 9(5), pp. 522–535. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/17470919.2014.933713.
Scarff JR. Postpartum Depression in Men. Innov Clin Neurosci. 2019 May 1;16(5-6):11-14. PMID: 31440396; PMCID: PMC6659987.
On 3rd – 4th June 2024, the Lab hosted a conference on New Directions in Classics, Gaming, and Extended Reality, organised by Dr Richard Cole (Lecturer in Digital Classics, University of Bristol) and generously sponsored by the University of Bristol Faculty of Arts, Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition, Centre for Creative Technologies.
The conference featured 24 presentations across two days, from both academic and industry speakers, representing eight different countries, and all working at the cutting edge of their field. Between papers, there were demo sessions featuring the innovative work of Zubr.co, The Newt in Somerset, Time Machine Designs, PRELOADED, and Education Evolved, as well as academic XR projects, including the Virtual Reality Oracle and the team behind Bristol’s The Uncertain Space. The conference culminated in a 12 player, hybrid co-op session of Age of Mythology.
You can check out the Programme and abstracts, Richard’s Welcome talk, the List of demos, conference Handouts, and the original Call for papers.
asses.masses, by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim, is an epic, 7+ hour, custom-made video game about labour, technophobia and sharing the load of revolution designed to be played from beginning to end by a live audience. This is gaming as performance; an immersive, cheeky and highly original work. Brave spectators take turns at the controller to lead the herd through a post-Industrial society, where asses are valued more for their hides than their potential. Confronting automation driven job loss, nostalgia as a barrier to progress, and the role of technology in adaptation, we are encouraged to find space between the work that defines us and the play that frees us. asses.masses is Animal Farm meets Pokémon meets Final Fantasy: as exciting in form as it is in content.
As part of the Lab’s sponsorship of the UK premiere of asses.masses at Mayfest 2024, we co-hosted a lunchtime talk at the Pervasive Media Studio with the artists in conversation with members of the Lab. You can catch the full recording of this conversation below.
On the 29 November 2023, the Lab hosted its inaugural ‘concept’ game jam, co-organised with the Centre for Creative Technologies and sponsored by MyWorld. The theme? Exposing Algorithmic Bias. The time scale? Four hours.
The idea for this game jam came from Professor Ed King’s project Challenging Algorithmic Racism through Digital Cultures in Brazil. In Ed’s words, “The project interrogates how cultural practices, including video game design, can be used to challenge the ways in which, despite their sheen of neutrality, new technologies often reproduce existing social biases and power hierarchies.”
From education and health to financial services and facial recognition, algorithms have become key components in scaling decision making. The danger, of course, is they can embed and augment existing biases, or even generate new types of bias within complex systems. This danger is only amplified by the application of machine learning and AI.
The aim of this condensed game jam was to think about how the mechanisms of gaming and play can expose these processes. Teams were not expected to create a fully fledged game within the time limit. Rather, the event was about exploring the potential of game design. We had over 60 people sign up to take part, and on the day eight teams worked on six games.
Below, you can enjoy a selection of the games and concepts that the teams worked on, as well as a video interview about the jam. For more about the inspiration behind the theme, check out Professor Ed King’s Intro to the jam or our Tackling algorithmic biases through gaming article.
Our idea was to investigate how large language models (LLMs) may introduce bias as they translate from Chinese to English. The game allows you to translate a story, one page at a time, from Chinese to English using an LLM. You then have to answer questions about the story, considering the bias that the LLM has introduced as you do so. You can play the game on Itch.io.
Our concept explores the algorithmic bias in system design and user interfaces. By putting humans into a scenario where they all experience algorithmic bias, we try to demonstrate to those who don’t experience it in their day-to-day lives how it works and feels, thus improving empathetic understanding. Furthermore, we have tried to expose the bias blindspot – where one sees themselves as less biased than others – to try and demonstrate functions of algorithmic bias without trivialising the issue by emulating it directly. By forcing people into a position where their assumptions are challenged by the fact everyone can experience algorithmic bias, we highlight the work that needs to be done to avoid it.
Lost in Translation design brief
AI concept art
Our game is inspired by Amazon’s failed 2018 experiment in using algorithms for recruitment, which was scrapped after the algorithm consistently prioritized male applicants and deprioritized terms like ‘women’s chess club.’ In this game, you play as a job applicant for a randomly generated position-your aim is to ‘game the system’ by convincing the algorithm to give you the job.
Built in Excel, this game is designed to explore algorithmic bias in the selection of streaming content.
In a post-apocalyptic world where the majority of humanity has uploaded their consciousnesses into the huge central dataset located in the North Pole after a mysterious global disaster around 2110. There are no longer other living witnesses or material evidence to prove what really happened in the 21st century. The uploaded intelligences lived a short time in the digital paradise that was promised them before their memories become fragmented, corrupted, erased by mysterious forces, and, eventually, disappeared, leaving only clusters of ‘memory balls’ that are stored in ignored corners in the dataset.
You, -USER-, are the only remaining coherent consciousness in the dataset. You are suddenly woken from slumber one day and tasked with the mission to collect these fragmented ‘memory balls’ scattered in the system, relive the memories stored in them, solve the embedded mystery with the clues you can find, and find out what led to the current pitiable situation of humanity. In the process, you will also find out who you really are, and eventually decide what your mission is, which may have a chance of reversing what has happened to humanity.
You travel, via the ‘memory balls’, to the mid-21st Century conurbation of McTownship, exploring its institutions, looking through the eyes of its citizens & feeling their frustrations as the algorithms wreak increasing havoc in their lives. Can you identify the biases? Can you help the citizens? Can you find a way to turn all of this around?
In this game, you play as a character whose job is to sort unidentifiable objects. The more you sort, the more it transpires that you are affecting the world around you. You realize that, by categorizing data, you have introduced a whole range of biases.
AI concept art
