media

Food is never just food, it “matters. It has weight and it weights us down.” (Belasco, 2008, p. 2). Critical food studies recognizes that food is more than the sum of calories and its nutritional value and it cannot be divorced from its larger social context.

Culture is always indivisible from the socio-political and economic reality of the people that live in it. Art mirrors reality and becomes a way of transforming it. A crash course into the Argentinian game scene and how a bunch of kids who couldn’t pay for imported games grew up to build a blooming industry.

Their wide-ranging discussion takes us through the core themes of the book and beyond, including women’s leisure, the role of games and play in feminism and vice versa, transgressive play, feminist protest, and the potential of gaming circles.

We discuss whether this is (or should be) the last generation of consoles, what the meaning and role of difficulty and adaptive difficulty is in games, and why Soma (Frictional Games, 2015) is such an intriguing game from a philosophy of mind perspective.

We discuss creepypastas in, about and as games, and what empathy means, how it relates to and works within games, and why it’s important to think about. Hosted by Dom Ford, who is joined by Nina Patricia Houe and Miruna Vozaru.

When is a bunch of pixels an object rather than a picture of an object? Can I unpack these digital objects into a series of homes and apartments? Find out now, as we discuss Jesper Juul’s latest playable essay on videogame objects, and Witch Beam’s charming new game Unpacking.

Ever wondered what’s going on with doors? We try to collect all the different doors in Stefano Gualeni’s recent playable essay, and talk about the sedentary VR escape-the-room spy game I Expect You To Die 2.

We see how the early stages of the UK (and international) videogames industry came to be by following Alex Wade’s account of eccentric media mogul and fraudster Robert Maxwell, and talk about the weird and wonderful hit game, Inscryption.

Why do we study games? What is the field of ‘game studies’? How does research into games help us better understand the changing nature of games in times of chaos, such as the global pandemic?

Media, Art and Design (MAD) is an interdisciplinary research group focusing on experience design and practice-based research in domains such as media, the creative and cultural industries, art and museums. We recently completed the Horizon 2020 project GIFT, that created a design framework for hybrid museum experiences.