The Bristol Digital Game Lab’s mission is to develop games for public service. We treat game making as the primary site of inquiry, where methodological, ethical, and design knowledge is produced, rather than as a post hoc vehicle for dissemination. This talk examines game development as research through two Game Lab projects that span heritage and health: CultureQuest and Spare Parts.

CultureQuest is a scalable, smartphone-based quest system that deploys Meaning Machine’s Game Conscious™ AI NPCs in cultural heritage settings to turn visitors into researchers. Visitors embody Iy-en-Amen-nay-es-nebet-ta, a deceased woman navigating the Duat, and converse with the Egyptian gods Osiris, Anubis, Maat, and Ra. NPCs are context-aware, collection-bounded, and co-designed with curators. The pilot was developed in collaboration with Bristol Museum and Art Gallery’s Egyptian Gallery.

Spare Parts is a work-in-progress non-linear, symptoms-led narrative game co-developed with support networks and digital artists. Addressing a persistent public health gap - paternal postnatal depression - the project uses participatory design to explore how interactive storytelling can catalyse conversations among fathers, partners, and mentors, translating lived experience into mechanics.

Where CultureQuest is a location-based, conversation driven interpretation, Spare Parts explores the capacity of games to bring about conversation. While both projects began with a concept game jam, CultureQuest focused on modelling fetch quests while Spare Parts arose from playing games and sharing lived experience. Juxtaposing these projects, we explore how different approaches to game design and co-creation are enabling us to build games for public service and inquire anew through game design as method.

Speakers:

Dr Richard Cole is Lecturer in Digital Futures at the University of Bristol and co-Director of the Bristol Digital Game Lab. His research focuses on how videogames, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence systems allow for and pose new forms of humanistic inquiry. Previously, he held the role of Lecturer in Digital Classics and worked as a researcher on the multidisciplinary Virtual Reality Oracle project at the University of Bristol. Richard has published widely on the role of video games and historical fiction more broadly in shaping public perceptions of history.

Dr Michael Samuel is Lecturer in Digital Film and Television at the University of Bristol and co-director of the Bristol Digital Game Lab. His research is positioned from the intersection of film, television and games and digital technologies. He has published on television, games and digital culture. He is currently writing about slow games and the American small town, games and heritage, and investigating the capacity of games to elicit empathy for those living with postnatal depression.