Blog

This summer, 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!

On 3^rd – 4^th 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.

Investigating Bias in LLM-Based Translation

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.

Lost in Translation

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

Hire Intelligence

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.

Hire Intelligence

Algorithmic bias in Streaming preferences

Built in Excel, this game is designed to explore algorithmic bias in the selection of streaming content.

Streaming bias

“HDWGH?” is an ASCII aesthetic text-based adventure game. -USER-, a [currently] unidentified consciousness in our post-apocalyptic futures, is trying to figure out HOW DID WE GET HERE?

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 21^st 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?

Categorize This!

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

The Lab is delighted to be collaborating with Meaning Machine on their successful MyWorld Collaborative Research and Development bid, Game Conscious™ Characters. This year long project will involve research and development in generative AI systems for in-game characters. The project will be delivered in partnership with Dr Richard Cole and Dr Chris Bevan at the University of Bristol.

In the words of Meaning Machine: “We’re on a mission to make game characters as dynamic and interesting as the worlds they inhabit – and this extended phase of R&D will make it possible. No more lore dumps, no more generic barks, no more “wtf are you talking about, barkeep?”. Death to lifeless NPCs! Long live Meaning Machine!”

Dr Cole said: “We are extremely excited to be working with Meaning Machine as research partner on this innovative grant. Our aim is to analyze just how meaningful games can be with Game Conscious™ Characters. We’re looking forward to recruiting research participants through the Lab, and sharing project updates.”

You can read more about the aims of the project on the University of Bristol press release.

The postgraduate work-in-progress workshop convened by the Lab on Friday 23 February was a successful enterprise, hosting talks on a range of topics. From law and localisation to accessibility and inclusion, philosophy and myth, an encouraging platform allowed postgraduates to discuss their work.

We first heard from Dody Chen who illustrated the ambiguous and evolving relationship between fan-contributors and localisers in Chinese video games. Chen delved into her investigations of social and streaming platforms and exemplified a practice-led methodology based in netnography and content analysis, drawing on her own roles as both streamer and academic. Jemma Lousie Stafford followed, presenting on her work researching the impact of localization on audience-perception of Chinese games. Lousie enquires of how localization influences in-game elements such as menus and character design, deploying methodologies ranging from scouring Steam reviews to interviewing players after their experience of playing her case-studies. Jemma took us through the challenges of differing localization approaches, self-censorship and genre expectations, encompassing a research area that will no doubt prove fertile and exciting.

Closing our morning session were a pair of talks on accessibility in Chinese videogames. Yunke Deng spoke on accessibility for visually impaired players. Deng’s work maps existing accessibility options for visually impaired players, surveying the needs of such players before aspiring to interview developers around the practicalities and possibilities for incorporating accessibility features. Xuancheng Yu then presented on game accessibility for the hard of hearing. Yu traced the history of sound development across gaming from accessibility to inaccessibility to renewed exploration and improvement. Yu delineated a series of useful means to increase accessibility such as closed captions, accessible game design and the essentiality of visual and tactile feedback for auditory prompts. Yu engaged with the application of subtitles in game environments with a focus on the Chinese market, and evinced a methodology via which her important work will proceed.

Beginning the afternoon’s programme was Anyi Liu with a talk on privacy infringement in virtual reality games. Focusing on communities such as VR Chat and Horizon Worlds, Liu navigated a number of areas in her presentation, delving into the contrasts between informational and spatial privacy, illuminating the already relatively mature bonds being formed via VR communities and the overlap and collision attendant on interactions between game rules and coded law, and how such mechanical barriers can affect both play and privacy. Our next two presentations each dove into dark patterns in games. Weiwei Yi spoke on the difficulties of regulating the aforesaid patterns, the challenges even of locating them and then defining their appearance. Her work examines how major game companies may comply or coerce via algorithms. Maria Sameen then demonstrated her analyses of dark patterns in mobile games and explored the establishment of a taxonomy of the dark pattern, a lexical field via which we can begin to understand the characteristics, principles and architecture underlying dark patterns, plus ways by which to detect them.

Edward Knight spoke engagingly on the trajectory of inclusivity in the games industry between 2014-24, attempting to delineate afroprogression via criticism of afropessimism that is rooted in observation of the incremental yet improved black representation and visibility in the industry. Knight framed this as a rigorous drive toward afrooptimism facilitated via analysis of content production and dialogue with a wide range of industry members.

Our final two talks returned us to intersections of ludology and history. Will Price gave a paper on the act of playing Bloodborne’s Old Yharnam as resistant history – offering up concepts such as dark proceduralism and cyborg historicism in delineating his theorization of history as a playful act veering between psychopathy, necrophilia and the rabitic.

Closing the day was Yifan Liu discussing her work on reception of Greek mythology in Hades.  Liu presented on potential coalescences between game-mechanics and reinterpretations of both classical myth and readings of myth (such as in her illumination of how Hades is reading Sisyphus plus Camus’ Sisyphus). Liu elucidated how the mechanics of a genre such as the roguelike could harmonize with an authorial attempt to commentate myth.

All in all, the workshop was a multidisciplinary showcase of current gaming research. It created a collaborative environment that the Lab hopes will prove productive for all the researchers as they continue their exciting work.

A particular thanks to Will Price for this thoughtful write up of the event.

This is part of a series of research/industry snapshots, capturing the work of those affiliated with the Bristol Digital Game Lab. For the second post in the series, we are delighted to showcase the work of Dr Lewis Alcott

If you remove Jurassic Park from popular media, how many members of the general public would be able to recognize a T-Rex? And how many palaeontologists were inspired to pursue their careers because of Jurassic Park? Films, TV, literature and many other forms of media have motivated members of the general public to engage with and learn about the natural world, so why can’t games? My research and outreach efforts attempts to explore the representation of the natural world in games, from the realism of geological formations such as volcanoes to the representation of climate change impacts of ecosystems.

This work originally grew from having more time than I had expected to enjoy and play games through the Covid-19 pandemic, finding myself playing God of War and googling some of the Norse mythology represented within the game and questioned how my own interest in games led to my career in Earth Sciences.

My recent work has focused on commercially available off the shelf (COTS) games and using them as a tool for learning and engagement. There are several instances where representation of scientific concepts are not ideal to say the least, so screening of games that demonstrate the potential to teach a wide variety of learning is required. However, COTS have been shown to have better engagement than traditional educational games, as these games have essentially by design been made to entertain.

There are several ways in which people can learn from games. There is the interaction with game mechanics that can teach specific skills, such as map reading. With games becoming more and more open world adventures, the requirement of what can be considered orienteering skills becomes a necessity that is directly transferrable to the real world. Games can offer a significant vocabulary, much greater than what would be considered based on the average age range of games such as those from the Pokémon franchise, allowing students and children to associate animations to relatively complex terminology. Over the past few decades, gaming and especially video games have become social hubs, with interactions between players, developing negotiating skills and describing ideas in game. A fourth means of teaching is through tangential learning, i.e. learning through self-engagement by exposure to a topic, has been noted as an effective means to incentivize educational material, much like how I learnt about Norse mythology through God of War.

My ongoing work focuses on the representation of my own and other researchers’ work in games as a way to promote public engagement of research. Alongside this, I explore how narratives have evolved over the last few decades with the growing engagement and perception of the general public with climate change.

Renewable energies represented within the Pokémon franchise. Left: Pokémon Brilliant Diamond (2021). Right: Pokémon Scarlet (2022).

Dr Lewis Alcott is a Lecturer in Geochemistry in the School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol. Outside of games, he is interested in researching the evolution of a habitable planet and anthropogenic environmental change.

January 2024

We’ll be starting the new year with the second event in the Antiquity Games Night series

Antiquity Games Night

The Lab is delighted to be supporting Antiquity Games Night – a new monthly online meetup where scholars, students & designers play antiquity games together, organised by Dr Richard Cole (University of Bristol) and Alexander Vandewalle (University of Antwerp/Ghent University). Think: ‘reading group, but with games’. All you need to do is sign up to the Discord via https://discord.gg/h2XPtJfGut. The second event will be held on Tuesday 30 January 2024. The AGN team will be setting up co-op sessions of Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition – Return of Rome. No experience required. We look forward to seeing you there!

February 2024

Postgraduate Work-in-Progress Workshop

On Friday 23 February, 11:00-17:00, the Bristol Digital Game Lab will be co-hosting a Postgraduate Work-in-Progress Workshop with gaming researchers at UCL. This in person event will showcase the game-based research being undertaken by current postgraduates while also offering a chance for students to share ideas, practice conference papers, and discuss their work in an informal, relaxed setting. All members of the Lab and those interested in game-based research are most welcome to attend and join in the Q&A. Please sign up via Eventbrite. Full programme: Bristol Digital Game Lab Postgraduate Work in Progress Workshop

Antiquity Games Night

Come along to the third Antiquity Games Night on Tuesday 27 February 2024. The AGN team will be setting up co-op sessions of A Total War Saga: Troy. No experience required. We look forward to seeing you there! All you need to do is sign up to the Discord via https://discord.gg/h2XPtJfGut

April 2024

Infecting The World With Games That Make You Think – Industry talk by Ndemic

Come and hear James Vaughan, creator of the mega hit Plague Inc., share the story of the game’s development and look at the impact of Covid and other real world events on both the game and 190 million players. The talk will take place at 17:30 on Wednesday 24 April at the University of Bristol. Book your place now!

May 2024

‘Concept’ game jam

Come along to our second ‘concept’ game jam of 2023/24, co-organised with the Centre for Creative Technologies at the University of Bristol and sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)!

Theme: Navigating Violent Geographies
Where: Humanities Exhibition Gallery Space (7 Woodland Road, University of Bristol)
When: Monday 13 May, 16:00-20:00

Civilians living in conflict-affected societies navigate insecure and often violent geographies, plagued by division, danger and distrust. Despite these challenges, civilians’ intimate local knowledge helps them develop a mental map of hidden markers and invisible boundaries and allows them to anticipate tension before it escalates. Under duress, they deploy creative strategies to get on with their lives. The aim of this condensed game jam is to think about how the mechanisms of gaming and play can help us understand this crucial, yet often overlooked and undervalued civilian agency at the micro-level.

The event will be introduced by Dr Roddy Brett (University of Bristol), principle investigator on the ESRC-funded ‘Getting on with it: understanding the micro-dynamics of post-accord intergroup relations’ project. For more about the inspiration behind the theme for this game jam, see the project description.

If you would like to attend the jam, please complete our sign up form. The event is open to both University staff, students, and the wider public.

Pizza and drinks will be provided, thanks to the generous sponsorship of the ESRC.

If you have any questions about this event, please contact the organizer, Dr Richard Cole (richard.cole@bristol.ac.uk).

Asses.masses UK Premiere – Mayfest

We’re sponsoring the asses.masses UK Premiere! asses.masses, by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim, is being put on as part of Mayfest, Sat 18th May – Sun 19th May at the Watershed, Bristol. It 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. No previous gaming (or donkey) experience required. Book your place now!

We’re also collaborating with the Pervasive Media Studio to put on a Lunchtime Talk on Friday 17 May, 13:00-14:00 ahead of the premier, where you can hear the artists talk about the creation of asses.masses in conversation with members of Lab.

June 2024

Conference: New Directions in Classics, Gaming, and Extended Reality

Booking now live! 

Programme and Abstracts

When: 3^rd – 4^th June 2024, 09:00-19:00 UTC both days

Where: Hybrid – University of Bristol / Online

Organiser: Dr Richard Cole (Lecturer in Digital Classics, University of Bristol)

From video games to virtual reality experiences, the Classical world continues to inspire developers and players alike. What does it mean, though, to explore antiquity in virtual spaces? How are such virtual worlds built, how are they experienced, and what do current technological developments mean for the future of Classics? Scholarship has begun to explore the contours of these questions. There have been several edited volumes (e.g., Thorsen 2012, Rollinger 2020, Draycott and Cook 2022), a couple of monographs (André 2016, Clare 2021), along with chapters and articles published in a variety of books and journals, reflecting the nature of gaming scholarship; namely, that this is a multidisciplinary field drawing on a range of methodologies. Such works have broken important ground, although coverage remains partial. Extended reality (XR) simulations, for example, have received far less attention. This is despite the growing use of AR and VR across the heritage sector (e.g., Yorescape, Lithodomos), the crossovers with gaming (e.g., Assassin’s Creed Nexus), as well as the potential for academic research and education (e.g., the Virtual Reality Oracle).

This conference will move to define future directions for research, building on the current state of the art. The aim is to foster a debate that is less reactive to new releases of games and apps, and instead focused on challenging questions around methodology, impact, and industry practice, while also remaining sensitive to the opportunities that these technologies raise for drawing links between the ancient and modern. This two day hybrid conference, hosted by the Bristol Digital Game Lab, thus takes the idea of extended reality, which typically refers to virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, and considers how – from the inception of video games through to the latest AR and VR applications – the history and culture of the Classical past have been twinned with the digital.

Call for papers: New Directions in Classics, Gaming, and Extended Reality

Sponsors: University of Bristol Faculty of Arts, Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition, Bristol Digital Game Lab, Centre for Creative Technologies.

Further events will follow in autumn 2024

The Bristol Digital Game Lab showcased a vibrant array of events throughout autumn 2023, providing a platform for scholars, students, and enthusiasts to delve into the multifaceted world of digital gaming.  

The Lab initiated the academic year with a thought-provoking online roundtable on October 24, where experts and major UK game lab leads gathered to discuss the implications of the Video Games Research Framework (launched by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in May) on individual research, and how game labs, centres, and networks could support its aims. The event featured two esteemed keynote speakers: Prof. Peter Etchells, who was involved in drafting the Framework, and Dr Tom Brock, the Chair of British DiGRA. 

Later in October, we judged the University of Bristol Computer Science Society 2023 GameJam, offering prizes for Best Narrative and Most Technically Accomplished. A very impressive range of entries, with over 70 students creating a total of 17 games! It was a pleasure to judge alongside the MyWorld Skills and Training team.

The Computer Science Society Game Jam 2023

Following this, on October 31, the Lab collaborated with Digital Scholarship @Oxford and organised a hybrid panel and roundtable titled “Music and Sound in Games.” Expert speakers from both industry and academia dissected the impact of music on gaming narratives, characters, and emotional engagement. The digital roundtable facilitated by Dr Richard Cole further delved into critical conversations surrounding this fascinating aspect of game design. 

The Music and Sound in Games hybrid roundtable.

November brought a Research Seminar in collaboration with the Department of Classics and Ancient History. Dr Dunstan Lowe, Senior Lecturer in Latin Literature at the University of Kent, presented on “History is not the Past”: Videogame Design and The Ancient Mediterranean. The seminar explored how video games portray ancient history, emphasising the diverse ways in which different genres and playstyles influence the conceptualisation of ancient worlds within digital games.

Dr Dunstan Lowe presenting his research seminar.

Towards the end of November, the Lab hosted an exciting inaugural event, the ‘Concept’ Game Jam, co-organised with the Centre for Creative Technologies and sponsored by MyWorld. The Game Jam challenged the 40 participants to explore how gaming mechanisms could shed light on the biases embedded in algorithms, especially in the realm of machine learning and AI. It stimulated creative thinking about the intersection of gaming and algorithmic bias and some teams came up with innovative working prototypes. We will be publishing the games developed, along with a film of the event, in the new year.

December started with the Antiquity Games Night, a novel monthly online meetup organised by Dr Richard Cole and Alexander Vandewalle (University of Antwerp/Ghent University). Scholars, students, and designers will gather to play antiquity games, fostering an engaging space that blends academic discussions with gaming experiences.

AGN Logo

Closing the year on a festive note, the Lab brought back its “Festive Gaming” event on December 14. This event invited participants to join in for an evening of social gaming, featuring the latest releases and playtests of upcoming games. The lineup included a fantastic lineup of local developers, including Catastrophic Overload, Meaning Machine, and Auroch Digital, as well as a former University of Bristol student group who developed the Escape from Pompeii board game as part of their Classics and Ancient History degree in 2023. Festive Gaming provided a platform for networking, exploration, and celebration within the gaming community. 

Festive Gaming 2023

In summary, the Bristol Digital Game Lab’s 2023 events were a testament to the diversity and richness of the digital gaming landscape. From scholarly discussions on research frameworks and ancient history to hands-on game jams and festive gaming, the Lab succeeded in creating a dynamic space that catered to a broad spectrum of interests within the gaming community. The Lab has expanded to a network with more than 150 members, gaining increasing recognition internationally.

Looking ahead to 2024, we will be hosting an ECR/Postgraduate work-in-progress event in January, followed by a series of industry talks with a headline from Ndemic Creations, a roundtable on accessibility, as well as a conference on New Directions in Classics, Gaming, and Extended Reality. We look forward to seeing you there!

Thanks to Dr Xiaochun Zhang for this wrap up to what has been an exciting year.