Events

All our events will be posted here and on our blog. You can also follow our activities on X or LinkedIn by searching for #BristolDigtialGameLab. If you would like to hear about our events directly, please sign up to our mailing list using the following form.

For 2024/25, we are advertising events slightly differently. Rather than events per month, below you can find events and opportunities tied to ongoing Game Lab projects and initiatives.

Workshops

Your Choices Matter: How Larian Writers Tell the Player’s Story

On Wednesday 6 November 2024, the Bristol Digital Game Lab is delighted to be hosting a game writing workshop with the writing team from award-winning Larian Studios, creators of Baldur’s Gate 3 (Game of the Year, 2023). In a workshop led by writers Adrienne Law and Chrystal Ding, attendees will learn how Larian approaches writing role-playing game (RPG) dialogue that lets players craft their own stories through the choices they make. Use this form to signup.

Can Games Teach? Games and the Environment

We’re delighted to be supporting Dr Lewis Alcott’s Can Games Teach? project. We’ll be kicking off a series of research events on the project’s theme, starting with Games and the Environment, Wednesday 22 January 2025. With recent game releases including environmental topics as wide ranging as marine pollution, volcanic hazards, and sustainable cities and ecology, it is clear that both commercial and ‘serious’ games offer the potential to communicate science. The Can Games Teach? series hopes to better understand this. Our aims are: (1) to discuss how games can be used to inspire people of all ages to discuss and learn about the environment, (2) how they can be used directly in education from primary school to higher education, (3) how games can be used as a part of research for both outreach and pedagogy. Come and join us for a day of lightning talks, roundtable discussions, and guided play sessions. Sign up sheet to follow.

Postgraduate Work-in-Progress Workshop

Our annual postgraduate work-in-progress workshop will take place in early 2025.

Game Nights

Antiquity Games Night

The Lab supports Antiquity Games Night – a monthly online meetup where scholars, students & designers play antiquity games together, organised by Dr Richard Cole (University of Bristol) and Dr 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. No experience required. We look forward to seeing you there!

For September 2024, we’ll be playing Dawn of Defiance (Traega Entertainment) in co-operative mode. Dawn is a survival game inspired by Greek mythology and reminiscent of Valheim, ARK Survival Evolved and Minecraft. We’ll kick off at 20:00, Monday 30 September.

Player Studies

As part of the Game Conscious™ Characters project, lead by Meaning Machine and funded by a MyWorld Collaborative Research and Development grant, we will be running a series of player studies on ‘first person taker’ games, powered by generative AI. We will be recruiting research participants over the coming months, so watch this space!

Game Jams

‘Concept’ Game Jams

Building on the success of our Exposing Algorithmic Bias ‘concept’ game jam in 2023, we’ll be running a series of game jams on this theme with groups of young people across Bristol as part of the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures research project ‘Caring for Futures’. We’ll be sharing the outcomes of this work in due course, as well as our broader findings around using game jams as a creative methodology.

XR Jam

The AI Tools for Games and XR Storytelling project will be hosting a series of upskilling workshops in autumn 2024, followed by an XR jam in early 2025. Full details to follow.

Research Seminars

TBC

Industry Talks 

TBC

If you have any ideas for future events that we can help out with, please just let us know! For reference, please see details of our 2022, 2023, autumn 2023, and 2024 events.