The next session of Play/Pause is in collaboration with Gothica (a UoB based postgrad reading group), and will be focusing on video game depictions of the gothic.

Reading and preparation for our first seminar of the new year!

PLAY/PAUSE presents Schedule Outline 9.00—10.00                                               Registration 10.00—10.30                                            Introduction 10.30—12.00                                             Panel 1 12.00—13.00                                             Lunch (provided) (demos available during break) 13.00—14.30                                             Panel 2 14.30—15.00                                             Coffee break (demos available during break) 15.00—16.30                                             Panel 3 16.30—16.45                                             Break 16.45—18.00                                             Keynote Verity McIntosh—UWE Bristol  Panel Overviews  Panel 1: Sensory Immersion and Intimacy  Aaron C Gaudette (www.aaronsee.media) – Normalised Representation and Personal […]

Email playpauseuob@gmail.com for reading In this week we will use two (short!) chapters from Lonwood and Guins’s (Eds.) Debugging Game History: A Critical Lexicon (2016) to consider the links between ‘procedurality’, the topic of our 2018 symposium, and ‘immersion’, the topic of our upcoming symposium on 22nd May 2019. Procedurality, writes Ian Bogost, is ‘the […]

On Thursday 7th March, the PLAY/PAUSE session invites attendees from across the College of Arts and Law to share research ideas and praxis around videogames and virtual reality to consider how these mediums are inspiring interdisciplinary work; we hope that the seminar will provide ground for discussing future collaboration, sharing research and thinking about the […]

Thursday 7th February 2019 Arts 250 (Fage Library), 6-8pm This week’s seminar will be looking at the future – of both game and VR studies and also of PLAY/PAUSE. We hope that you can attend this seminar with some ideas of what concepts, theories, and themes that you would like to explore in later seminars, […]

We are very excited to announce that Verity McIntosh will be the keynote speaker for this years PLAYPAUSE symposium, Immersion|Dissonance. Verity is a Senior Lecturer in Virtual and Extended Reality at UWE Bristol, and Programme Lead for a brand new MA in Virtual Reality. Launched in January 2019, this industry-led, practice-based masters offers students the opportunity to spend a […]

Thursday 24th January 2019 Arts 250 (Fage Library), 6-8pm As a new semester begins, we wanted to explore the processes behind the videogame and VR products that we discuss. We wanted to talk more about on game development and our – as gamers, fans, scholars, developers – perception of the development process. In preparation for the seminar, […]

PLAYPAUSE are excited to announce our second symposium, Immersion|Dissonance which will be taking place at the University of Birmingham on Wednesday 22nd May 2019. See below for information about the conference and this year’s call for papers. PLAYPAUSE 2019 SYMPOSIUM – Wednesday 22nd May 2019, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT. IMMERSION|DISSONANCE ‘The Ocean is an environment in which […]

‘All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ – Samuel Beckett All games involve failure. We can fail a game by losing to another player or even to the system itself. Espen Aarseth defines videogames and other ergodic literature as works in which ‘nontrivial effort […]