MAKE/PLAY

Description

Presenting: Approaching Game Development as Research, from Heritage to Mental Health

Abstract

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’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.

Period	27 Nov 2025
Event type	Conference
Location	Dundee, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National