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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, 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
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:

• AI language models for NPCs (Non-Playable Characters) and character generation
• Asset/virtual environment modeling 
• AI-based motion capture for character animation
• Artistic AR trackers and physical asset integration
• Discovering approaches to AI prompt engineering
• AI for narrative design 

XR Game Jam: FEB 2025 (dates TBC)

Workshop participants will be invited to an XR Game Jam in early 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.

How to Apply:

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 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.