Multiplatform 2024: Queer Games and Playful Protest

Multiplatform is the annual symposium for the Manchester Game Centre. We are a cross-university research group at Manchester Metropolitan University with research interests in Analogue Games, Digital Arts, Esports, Games and the Environmental Crisis, Games, History and Heritage, Games and Storytelling, and Serious Games.

Multiplatform 2024 has a dual focus on analogue and digital games and is themed around a concern with queer and dissident games and gaming practices. In addition to a day of academic and industry talks on the theme of queer gaming, we will also be hosting the UK Game Lab Network annual meet-up and launching our retro gaming archive, which contains computers and consoles from the past 40 years, together with a range of games. The activities will also include an introduction to the Archive and its future.

• Tuesday 11th June: Academic and industry talks, panels, and workshops (all day)
• Wednesday 12th June: UK Game Lab Network Meet-up (AM) and the Manchester Game Centre Archive Launch (PM)

See below for our Call for Papers!

Jess Metheringham, Dissent Games

Jessica Metheringham is a game designer and campaigner. In 2019 she founded Dissent Games, making games on political and cultural themes. She is the Chair of Unlock Democracy, and campaigns on democratic issues including voter ID and restrictions on protest. She has previously worked in Parliament, for the Electoral Commission, and for Quakers in Britain. Her games include Disarm the Base (about the peace movement), Library Labyrinth (showcasing 60 women in history and literature) and the forthcoming Trickle Down (the economy).

Jess will be running a workshop, ‘Dissent Through Play’. This workshop explores the messages communicated through games, and how to use these to challenge norms and propose solutions. How can we speak truth to power through fun? Who are we targeting with games, and what are we trying to demonstrate? How do overall themes and specific game mechanics contribute to the message? Participants will discuss the different ways in which games can influence opinion, educate players, and build relationships. 

We live in a time characterised by intersecting and violent crises. Increasingly, game creation and play are shaped by hegemonic interests, characterised by normative modes of production and consumption, what Janine Fron et al have called ‘the hegemony of play’. However, there has always been a resistant and queer energy in games. As Bo Ruberg argues, games ‘have always been queer’, aligning games and queerness through a shared ethos ‘to imagine alternative ways of being and to make space within structures of power for resistance through play’.

Inspired by a long history of queer game makers, queer play communities and practices, as well as the more recent contributions of scholars working in queer game studies, Multiplatform 2024 invites papers that explore how games, game-making and play dismantle traditional assumptions about gender and sexual identities, challenge traditional academic approaches to these topics, and promote inclusion, diversity and equality.

We are also interested to explore the intersection of dissident play practices and queer game studies. In this aim, we evoke the word queer to name a way of being, doing, and desiring in addition to its use as an umbrella term for people and experiences that do not conform to mainstream norms of gender and sexuality. In this sense of the word ‘queer’ we see generative synergies between queer gaming and those who want to harness the dissident potential of play in multiple ways, from intervening in rights discourses and climate justice, to supporting activism on a range of issues.

Multiplatform 2024 therefore welcomes proposals for academic papers, talks by designers, creatives and players, and panels or workshops.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Queer approaches to game-making
• Game-making tools and practices
• LGBTQ+ histories in gaming
• Queering the game archive and/or queering game histories
• Queer representation in games
• Queering the language of games
• Queering mechanics and systems
• Community building through games
• Queer Theory and Game Studies
• Queer Environmentalism and Games
• Subversive or dissident play practices
• Game Making as protest and/or activism
• Queering VR/XR technologies
• Inclusive play in TTRPG and LARP communities
• Queering Board Game Design
• Hacking games, counter-gaming, playing wrongly and other ‘critical play’ practices
• Too Close Reading and other queer interpretive practices
• Queering the material networks of play

Paper abstracts should be 200-400 words. Please include a short bio (50-100 words) and your contact details. We welcome panel proposals, as well as proposals for individual papers.

Please send your proposals to: by March 29th, 2024.

Host or Publisher Arts & Humanities Research & Innovation