Upcoming Public Appearances in Bristol

In the next few weeks, I’m sharing creative and academic work as part of three different Friday events in Bristol.

Pervasive Media Studio Lunchtime Talk, Friday 28^th April, 1pm

Every Friday, the Pervasive Media Studio offers free, informal lunchtime talks from people sharing projects, process, ideas and provocations around pervasive media and creative technology.

On Friday 28^th April, I’m presenting a Lunchtime Talk titled Designing Place-Based Games. This talk will be sharing practical insights into designing games that engage with place, drawing on findings from my PhD. However, it will also be informed by my more recent creative projects and my earlier MA research on creating a sense of place in video games. It will consider what focusing on ‘place’ means for the play experience and how different design techniques can influence these experiences across digital and non-digital media.

Join us online on YouTube Live, or in the Pervasive Media Studio on 28th April at 1pm. Pervasive Media Studio is located within Watershed in the city centre on Bristol’s historic harbourside.

First Friday, Pervasive Media Studio, Friday 5^th May, 5 – 6pm

Then, on Friday 5^th May from 5pm, I will be sharing work in the Pervasive Media Studio again. This time, my team and I will be sharing our new narrative puzzle game, Interment, for people to play and learn more about as part of First Friday.

First Friday is a monthly social event open to anyone. These events are somewhere between the last meeting of the week and the first event of your weekend. You might meet an artist or an engineer, a school teacher or a city leader. It is a place to connect with someone you might not otherwise meet, and hear about stuff you didn’t already know. All are welcome: from inside and outside the city, online or in the Watershed building.

Virtual Realities as Time Travel workshop, Centre of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, University of Bristol, Friday 12^th May, 9.30am – 5pm

Lastly, on Friday 12^th May, I will be presenting and taking part in the Virtual Realities as Time Travel workshop, hosted by Bristol Digital Game Lab.

This workshop will bring together speakers from the Virtual Reality Oracle project team and from across academic disciplines and industry to explore how users and producers of both immersive experiences and historical video games conceive of journeying to the past.

My presentation in this workshop is titled Time Travel as Wayfinding: Assembling Past and Present in Location-based Games. Here’s a summary of what I’ll be talking about:

As a so-called ‘immersive’ media form that typically centres upon people’s live physical locations and/or actions, how can location-based games connect us to different time periods? In this talk, I chart how relationships with the past emerge through the ways designers and players of location-based games engage with place. Drawing on two location-based games I developed and tested as part of a practice-based PhD project, which both focus on historic events, I reframe the concept of time travel away from being ‘transported through time’ using immersive media. Instead, I understand it as a process of wayfinding: a propositional and intersubjective form of navigation through which people assemble impressions of a place (and its past). I show how designers and players of location-based games negotiate the contingency and multiplicity inherent in live, physical, everyday contexts of location-based gameplay to produce diverse, complex and insecure impressions of historic scenarios. Ultimately, I suggest that the significance of location-based games as media for connecting with the past is in the relationships between navigation and narrative that are performed by designers and players. These relationships do not enable mimetic representations or experiences of the past, but create compelling opportunities for expanding and complicating notions of what went before, what exists today and how both are interconnected in place. 

It would be lovely to meet those with shared interests at any of these events. Do get in touch if you want any more information.