The 2025 edition of Multiplatform, the annual symposium hosted by the Manchester Game Centre, will investigate the transformative potential of games as rituals to explore alternative histories and speculate on radical futures.
The event is a collaboration within Manchester Metropolitan University between The Manchester Game Centre and DVRK – Dark Arts Research Kollective.
Call for Papers:
Games have long had a deep connection to magic, the paranormal, and the occult. As Huizinga famously noted, “there is no formal difference between play and ritual” (1988: 10). Indeed, activities like shuffling cards, rolling dice,
and roleplaying create temporary ritual spaces in which to engage with chance, causality, and emergence – tools to model possible worlds and divine the future. Furthermore, contemporary games – both analog and digital – have become increasingly intertwined with occultural themes, incorporating concepts and imagery of the esoteric or the paranormal that go beyond the mere aesthetic inspiration to become sometimes actual philosophical, speculative and narrative frameworks.
Like other forms of occultural practice, games hold creative and transformative power that can challenge dominant histories, subvert entrenched dualisms, and give voice to marginalised epistemologies. This call for papers aims to examine the intersections between games, speculation, and temporality through the lenses of magic and esotericism. How might games enable us to reimagine historical events or construct alternative worlds? How do speculative mechanics, narrative structures, or world-building practices inspired by occultural frameworks foster critical engagement with political, social, and cultural issues? How might games work to envision futures that are just, inclusive, and revolutionary? Underlying this political and social potential of games beyond reductionist rationalisations, how might games unpick the structures of reality, puncturing anthropocentric and Enlightenment notions of time, space, causality, giving way to experiences of haunting, irruptions of the past in the present, and the fragmenting of time in a multiplicity of directions?
We invite submissions from scholars, practitioners, artists and game developers, that explore these ideas from multiple and trans-disciplinary perspectives. We also encourage submissions that bridge academic theory and creative practice, such as games demonstrations, workshops or artist presentations.
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
– The intersections between games and magic, esotericism and occulture;
– Games in the context of contemporary subcultures and countercultures:
– Recent weaponisations of games from right-wing personalities and creators;
– Games as contemporary collective rituals, and their potential for change;
– Gaming in the context of modern esoteric practices, technopaganism and chaos magick;
– Alternative histories in games: counterfactual narratives, or speculative retellings;
– Speculative mechanics and ritual dynamics: how game mechanics create new possibilities for time, causality, and agency;
– Radical futures in games via magic: utopian or dystopian visions, ecological futures, and imaginaries of resistance;
– Intersectional approaches to games and temporality: queer, feminist, anticolonial, or Indigenous perspectives on non-linear time;
– Practical methodologies for designing speculative games or playful rituals;
Submission Guidelines
Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words for academic papers, workshop proposals, or another form of presentation. We welcome submissions from academics, independent researchers, designers, artists, and practitioners.
Send submissions to C.Germaine@mmu.ac.uk
Deadline: March 28th, 2025