In the next few weeks, I’m sharing creative and academic work as part of three different Friday events in Bristol. Pervasive Media Studio Lunchtime Talk, Friday 28th April, 1pmEvery Friday, the Pervasive Media Studio offers free, informal lunchtime ta...

Un cadre d’écoute trop rigide bride un geste auriculaire dans sa folie tympanique. Un jeu fonctionnel est aussi un jeu … Plus

Walking simulators are an acquired taste, but newcomers to the genre or veterans looking for something new to play should check out these games. Source: 15 Best Walking Simulators

The video above was produced by me for the Digital Geographies Research Group's Work in Progress YouTube series. The series shares recent or current work being undertaken by researchers on a wide range of topics that connect geography and the digi...

This Wednesday 20th October sees the launch of Interrobang?!,a genre-busting theatre-meets-online gaming experience that draws you into a real-time thriller, where you become the investigator in a shadowy murder case. It’s a unique experience full of i...

Here’s what you need to know about walking simulators and the psychological benefits of how games can offer a much-needed escape. Source: The Joy of Walking in Games | WIRED

---------------------------On 25th September, my new locative audiowalk game The Gates to Dreamland launched to the public. Created as part of the A Different LENS project in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our ...

---------------------------On 25th September, my new locative audiowalk game The Gates to Dreamland launched to the public. Created as part of the A Different LENS project in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our ...

---------------------------On 25th September, my new locative audiowalk game The Gates to Dreamland launched to the public. Created as part of the A Different LENS project in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our ...

On 29th September, the Mapping Space | Mapping Time | Mapping Texts Conference was held online by Chronotopic Cartographies, in partnership with the British Library. Chronotopic Cartographies is a research project at Lancaster University, developing di...

On 26th August, I took part in the 2020 RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum Twitter Conference. This conference was organised after many academic events were postponed or cancelled as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, meaning that postgraduate geographers h...

--------------------------The video embedded above is a recorded version of the digital short I presented at the Digital Geographies Research Group's Virtual Annual Symposium on 1st July 2020. The DGRG is a research group of the Royal Geographical Soci...

For the past seven months or so, I’ve been developing a location-based game as part of my PhD research. Building on early experimentation in the first year of my PhD, as well as The Timekeeper’s Return, the mixed-reality game I created for Canterb...

During November last year, a significant new feature became available for players of Pokémon Go who had reached level 40, the maximum possible level in the game: the ability to submit nominations for new Pokéstop locations. Pokéstops are the in-game mo...

Printing and cutting out QR code stickers in preparation for the eventI told myself that I’d get at least 7 hours of sleep before the big day, but who was I kidding?Instead I spent several hours printing and cutting out about 10 sets of 18 QR code stic...

After the relevant changes had been made after testing, and the final QR code texts were ready to upload to the Cathedral Quarter website, the only thing left to do was to continue promoting The Timekeeper's Return as far and wide as possible with the ...

___________________________________One year ago this autumn, I reached the culmination of an overwhelming three months of creative work and collaboration when I designed, wrote and directed The Timekeeper’s Return, a story-based immersive treasure hunt...

This post provides an account of the Geographies of Interactive Digital Narratives session that took place at the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) Annual International Conference on 29th August 2019. The session was co...

This is an embedded Microsoft Office presentation, powered by Office.--------------------------Below is the written component of the paper I presented in the Geographies of Interactive Digital Narratives session – which I also co-convened – at the Roya...

Earlier this month at the Digital Geographies Research Group Annual Symposium, whose theme this year was ‘Geographies of Gaming and VR’, I ran a workshop introducing those attending the event to the group of video games known as ‘walking simulators’. This was an opportunity for the academics to try a type of game that they were less likely to be familiar with, making use of six PCs/consoles in the room with the games Dear Esther, Gone Home, The Stanley Parable, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Firewatch and What Remains of Edith Finch installed. The workshop then prompted participants to think about what significance walking simulators might have when we think about the geographies of video games and digital media more broadly.Overall, I was pleased with how those who attended engaged with the material I’d provided. It was my first experience running a workshop of this kind, and I’m now more conscious of the kinds of considerations I’d need to make when running a similar event in the future.As expected for any workshop involving computer equipment, there were some technical hitches involving the hardware provided by the university hosting the symposium. In particular, I became aware just how important functioning sound equipment is for the experience of playing walking sims – e.g. listening to voice acting for communicating character, ambient sound for its atmospheric, transportative qualities, and music for emotion / mood / thematic cues. Earphones were provided by the university (admittedly not high-quality) but on a couple of the machines we were unable to get the sound to work properly at all.Technical issues aside, however, I was happy with how the workshop gave participants an understanding of what these games are, how they are different from the AAA titles we so often see advertised and discussed publicly, what their evolution has meant for the video games medium, and why they offer some interesting vantage points for geographers thinking about games using geographical concepts, including (sense of) place, landscape, interfaces, post-phenomenology, and more.Below is my presentation material. It starts with an 8-minute clip from a play-through of the game Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, alongside the text and slides from my introduction to the workshop. This is followed by links to a list of popular walking simulator games and brief reading list that were provided as handouts on the day.------------------------------------------Walking simulators could be described as video games in which the gameplay is based on purposefully exploring the environments represented onscreen to experience their affective power, rather than their landscapes being backdrops to the gameplay. Often avoiding many mechanics typically associated with the video game medium, such as those involving skill in button-pushing, win and loss conditions, combat systems and player death, walking simulator games invite players to explore rich virtual environments as an end in itself – to be immersed into the affectively and emotionally impactful scenarios that are present in their worlds.One of the immediate questions you might have, though, is ‘why are they called walking simulators’? Well, the term has actually been quite a controversial one. It began in online video gaming communities as a derogatory term, signalling that these types of games offered limited possibilities for player interaction, compared to games with complex mechanics that might require skill, dexterity or effort to master. The only mechanical input from the player seemed to involve moving between different points of interest in the environment and exploring what’s there, rather than having any observable agency in shaping the game world. Because of this, some have questioned whether walking sims can even really be considered ‘games’ at all.Despite its negative connotations, however, the ‘walking simulator’ term has largely been reclaimed by those who make, support and enjoy these kinds of games. On Steam, the leading platform for PC gaming, you can browse games tagged as ‘walking simulators’ alongside those tagged as ‘action’, ‘adventure’, ‘horror’ and so on. As they’ve become easier to find, buy, discuss and share, whole communities of people have been built around games in the walking simulator ‘genre’. Even for those who dislike the label, use of the term has become so pervasive that it’s become almost universal in the games community.Indeed, some would actually argue that the ‘walking simulator’ term is an appropriate one for understanding the kinds of experiences these games enable players to have. Games scholar Rosa Carbó-Mascarell, for example, has argued that walking simulators represent a digitisation of earlier Romantic and psychogeographical traditions of exploration, in which walking is said to induce a mindful connection with the spirit or sense of a place.In drawing together the series of events you encounter as you slowly navigate through the world, the gameplay of walking simulators would also appear to enact well-established conceptions of walking as a narrativizing practice that draws situated events into sequences.    It’s important to remember, though, that in nearly all cases these games involve more than just walking, particularly when you consider how players encounter information in the game world. In a paper published online earlier this year, Melissa Kagen describes the mechanic of ‘archival adventuring’ that’s used in many walking simulators, in which players piece together a version of events by navigating between carefully arranged materials in the game world, and forming their own interpretations of them. An archival perspective recognises how the player’s experience will necessarily be conditioned by how the information is organised by the game’s developers, the gaps that are intentionally left by designers for players to fill, and the game’s user interface, and not just how the player ‘walks’.Before I finish, I want to briefly address the influence these games have had in both the games industry and wider sector of interactive digital media. What’s especially interesting is that the vast majority of these games have been made by indie games developers. Without the same costs as most AAA games in terms of animation, voice acting, and complex UI systems, it turns out that the types of game that often fall under the ‘walking simulator’ label can be relatively inexpensive to create. However, they’re still able to reach a wide audience through popular platforms such as the Steam store that sell content made by a broad range of developers.Yet despite the limitations their developers have to work with, games tagged as walking simulators have been winning some of the biggest prizes in gaming. The wider industry has been forced to take note. Particularly for AAA titles that aspire to tell some kind of story, the bar’s been raised, as walking simulators have showed it’s possible to tell stories in a highly emotionally engaging way without resorting to cutscenes or series of objectives, which distance the player from the actual storytelling process.As a result, in recent years relationships between mechanics and narrative have been at the forefront of game design thinking and discussion, and this has led to some highly innovative examples of interactive storytelling that work with the affordances of digital technology in newly compelling and meaningful ways.------------------------------------------Brief reading list introducing walking simulators and their possibilities/controversies.List of suggested games labelled as 'walking simulators'.