Category Archives: Blog

Video gaming has become a recreational staple for a global audience (Shafer & Carbonara, 2015), transforming the experience of leisure into an engaging virtual activity which was only exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic (López-Cabarcos et al., 2020). The psychological impact of video gaming has been explored through a variety of lenses, with addiction (André etContinue reading “The Acceptability of Serious Games for the Management of Mental Health: A Brief Review of Published Work – by George Farmer & Raul Szekely”

I have been unpacking, opening boxes, removing their contents and flattening what has remained, piling cardboard together in an effort to make this new house a home.  My partner and I, individually and together, wandering around this new space we find ourselves in as we contemplate where items are to live, becoming accustomed to ourContinue reading “The Domestic Life of the Gamer: Exploring ‘The Cave’ in McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory (2007) by G. Mc Guinness”

Modern representation of ancient tales is common within contemporary media. One of the most frequently depicted are those of historical Greco-Roman gods and heroes. From Zeus and Achilles to Hercules and Bacchus, characters of this era are found as titular figures of film and tv but also video games. The way these characters are designedContinue reading “Ancient Characters in Modern Video Games with Alexander Vandewalle – by Lewis Alcott”

I am a geoscientist meaning I strive to understand how the world works. Narrowing down further, I am a hydrologist, so I want to know how water moves and is stored on or below the Earth’s surface. Focussing even more, I work in flood risk, so I use this understanding to predict where risk mightContinue reading “The realm where games and models meet – by Chris Skinner”

On Tuesday, May 30th, MultiPlay hosted an hour-long event called “Poké Lab,” which was chaired by Stephanie Farnsworth and featured four short but highly engaging academic talks that were centered around a multidisciplinary investigation of the game, Pokémon. (The Poké Lab event is the first of five events taking place in the “Massively MultiPlay” series,Continue reading “Massively MultiPlay Week 1 Recap: Poké Lab and Psychology in Games – by Amy Ahn”

Pokémon, the largest media franchise on the planet, developed by Game Freak, is all about battling, trading, and breeding your own monsters to either fight by your side or defend you. The games have a long history of making sure that each creature in the game has some cool facts about it when you firstContinue reading “Pokémon Conservation: Gotta Save em’ All! – by Lucas Hernandez”

The Pokémon franchise has always liked to use places from the real world as an inspiration for the setting of its main games. Although the first four regions are heavily based on Japanese regions and islands, the more recent games are inspired by western countries. As to this day we count the United-States, France, theContinue reading “Learning about the world through video games: the Iberian Peninsula in Pokémon – by Amélie Soubie”

Introduction Avatars are our escape points into imaginative worlds. Their capacity to transport us into another realm allows players a certain freedom, and so it becomes a bold choice to give players a protagonist that is facing a chronic and terminal illness. But this becomes the foundation of Cyberpunk 2077’s story, as the game andContinue reading “Corpo creations: How Cyberpunk 2077 explores manufactured mutants – by Steph Farnsworth”