Knowledge Transfer

The Centre for Contemporary Play

Mission

Knowledge Transfer

Staff

Links

News and events

The Centre for Contemporary Play seeks to act as a resource for games studies academics, practitioners and journalists. This will provide a comprehensive overview of current activity, publications, conferences as well as funding and research opportunities. We are involved in a number of knowledge transfer activities:

National Videogame Archive
The National Videogame Archive is a joint project between the National Media Museum and Nottingham Trent University which aims to celebrate that culture and preserve its history for researchers, developers, game fans and the public.

Announced in September 2008, the archive is working to preserve, analyse and display the products of the global videogame industry by placing games in their historical, social, political and cultural contexts. This means treating videogames as more than inert, digital code. At the heart of the National Videogames Archive is the determination to document the full life of games, from prototypes and early sketches, through box-art, advertising and media coverage, to mods, fanart and community activities.

GameCity
In 2006 the first GameCity festival was launched in the centre of Nottingham. Led by Nottingham Trent University, the festival brings together the global videogame industry, leading educationalists, partners such as BAFTA and the Arts Council in a truly unique partnership.

GameCity seeks to be recognised as an exciting, unpredictable platform where amazingly interesting things will happen from a world-record breaking Zombie gathering in 2008 to the LEGO Star Wars director, Jonathan Smith, demonstrating the Wii lightsaber for the first time in public.

Nottingham Media Academy
Nottingham Media Academy comprises the following organisations:

Nottingham Trent University
New College Nottingham
Confetti ICT
Broadway Cinema and Media Centre.

The academy enables students from different backgrounds to engage with media education in Nottingham and develop skills and creativity throughout the city.

Interactive Technologies: Education, Health and Disability conference
The aim of the conference is to bring together academics and practitioners to showcase practice and to mainstream research ideas and outcomes. It will introduce a wider audience to key findings and products from research and will illustrate how practice feeds back into and informs research. Joint academic-practitioner papers are welcomed; the conference will create a forum for two-way communication between the academic and practitioner communities. Call for papers for the 2010 conference.

Are there morals in cyberspace?
A pilot study examining the psychological consequences of engaging in certain behaviours in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). Research conducted by Monica Whitty and Garry Young, funded by a Nuffield foundation grant.

Game development and the popularity of games are rapidly increasing. However, psychologists have spent little time examining whether there are certain aspects of a game (including how it looks, the rules of the game, and what behaviours ought to be constrained or allowed in the game) or certain role playing behaviours or interactions that are deemed inappropriate or upsetting for players. The Nuffield Foundation have supported Monica Whitty and Garry Young at NTU to undergo a project looking at the psychological consequences of engaging in certain activities within MMORPGs that might be deemed immoral, illegal, upsetting or relationship transgressions offline. The pilot study is due to be completed by the end of May 2010.

MSc Cyberpsychology
This MSc in Cyberpsychology is the first of its kind in the UK. Psychology at NTU has a number of psychologists who have expertise in cyberpsychology, for example in the areas of: