Megagaming and Professional Education – boring gaming or shallow teaching? Can it work?
Can games and gaming be used to teach complex social sciences in higher education in a way that doesn’t seem forced and cheesy? Do games designed to teach become a chore? Do they sap the fun out of playing? Listen to Alan’s journey as a geeky gamer, into life teaching at a university and his attempts to inject some of the pleasures of gaming into teaching students why people can make mistakes when working with vulnerable people.
Speakers: Matt Bambridge with guests (Mr Megagame)
Filmed during: MegaCon 2021
The Equality Act (2010) considers any long term condition that has a substantial impact on the person to be a disability. How aware are we that the majority of those disabilities are unseen? In this panel we will talk about unseen accessibility issues in megagames, and how we can make accommodations to make megagames an open environment for all.
Matt Bambridge aka Mr Megagame will be chairing the panel. He has dyslexia and has suffered from depression at various points in his life, so brings some personal experience to the panel.
Join Mr Megagame and guests Becky Campbell-Ladley, Jen Steel and Thom Kirkwood for an open conversation around the unseen issues that can affect accessibility in Megagames, and some suggestions around how we can make them more accessible for everyone.
As the crew of the submarine A.M. Rekkan you have mutinied against your captain in the middle of a war zone, what will you do next?
Under Pressure is a mini-megagame/parlour LARP for 8-18 players set in a fictionalised WW2-type world inspired by a visit to the real life USS Requin in Pittsburgh. The players will need to cooperate to keep the submarine running smoothly while also navigating the dangers of the open sea and negotiating with each other and any other vessels you may meet. It will be hosted on Gather.Town (which does not need any initial set up or knowledge). The game has already seen some initial playtesting, but we would like to test some more – we should be able to do a complete run through of the game with a feedback session at the end.
In Spring 2018, a group led by Dr Vikki McCall at the University of Stirling held a series of events with practitioners, older adults and policy makers from Scotland, England and Wales to consider challenges in housing and ageing over the coming decade. We used a megagame-style bespoke ‘serious game’ called Hopetown, designed by Jim Wallman of Stone Paper Scissors, to engage a diverse group of people in thinking creatively about the challenges in delivering housing for ageing, and how they might be overcome.
In this session Professor Alasdair Rutherford and Dr Vikki McCall describe the game and discuss how it was effective in producing a creative and participatory approach to identify challenges and explore potential solutions. They reflect on the role of serious games in this megagame style both as a research tool and as a way to engage diverse viewpoints from a broad audience in a collaborative process. They go on to talk about our future plans for using this game (including perhaps running it as a megagame!) to explore the issues further, and welcome the views and suggestions of the megagame community.
Patrick Doyle and Jack McNamee bring you a live episode of The Great Game podcast. The lads are from Australia and release regular podcast episodes about the megagames that they run and experience when we’re not all suffering through a global pandemic. They will be joined by Tristan Cliff of Melbourne Megagames and Jason Kotzur of Brisbane Megagames for the panel.
Join Patrick and Jack as they discuss all things megagame mechanics related for this special one-off live show, with a down-under twist!
Patrick Rose talks through the challenges and potential solutions in porting an in-person megagame to an online format. If you have an offline game or access to one that you’d like to bring online and run during the pandemic or even after, this talk is for you!
The core gaming audience is described as ‘heterosexual, white, and male’. Attempts to challenge this focus on female players which has created a barrier to inclusion. This session looks instead at the key components of game design practice as a pathway to greater equality and inclusivity.
Mr Megagame returns for the post megagame interview that he trailed previously on his Twitch channel. In this interview, Mr Megagame chats with Andrew Shiel Dods about the MegaCon 2021 run of Red Planet Rising. Listen in to this live podcast to hear about the crazy plays the players came up with, what didn’t go exactly as planned and what Andrew would change for the next run, if anything.
Mr Megagame returns for the post megagame interview that he trailed previously on his Twitch channel. In this interview, Mr Megagame chats with Johan Soh Olofsson from Gothenburg Megagames about the MegaCon 2021 run of Watch The Skies: Lockdown. Listen in to this live podcast to hear about the crazy plays the players came up with, what didn’t go exactly as planned and what Johan would change for the next run, if anything.
Megagames are brilliant one-off events where we often build a memorable experience of collective storytelling. In fact, one of the most important outputs from a megagame are the anecdotes told and re-told down the pub not just after the game, but whenever megagamers are gathered together. Over the years there have been many calls for sequel (or legacy) megagames, where the players get to see how the stories they started in their first game turn out over time. And Jim has run a few himself, with varying degrees of success over the years. But there are some elephant traps and things that designers need to take into account when designing a legacy megagame that don’t appear so much in the conventional game.
This session is a short workshop on creating legacy megagames, followed by audience discussion.
