Experimental Game Cultures

🎮 Ludic Method Talk: Games and Fanfiction
Guest Lecture with Evgenia Amey
📅 Monday, 22nd June, 18.00–19.30

💻 Online via Zoom (link in bio)
Department for Cultural Studies in cooperation with Experimental Game Cultures
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For some players, a games doesn't end when they stop playing: rather, this serves as an opportunity to continue the story in writing. Writing game fanfiction has become a pasttime for enthusiastic players all around the world, transforming consumers into what has been called prosumers - people who are not only recipients, but active creators.

In her talk, Evgenia Amey will explore the world of game fanfiction, its culture and its practices.

Evgenia Amey is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Jyväskylä and the University of Eastern Finland. She has previously worked in the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies. Her research combines cultural and media studies, tourism studies, cultural geography, and fan studies. Topics she studies include media tourism, place and literature, digital reading cultures, (in)game books, and game-based fanfiction.

LUDIC METHOD SOIRÉE With Dr. Chloé Wake:
Grotesqueries of Capitalism … and other ludicrous approaches to play

Experimental Game Cultures
hosted by Thomas Brandstetter & Margarete Jahrmann

Tuesday, 14 April 2026, 18:00
Online via Zoom: https://dieangewandte-at.zoom.us/j/65353903004
Talk in English

- Online via Zoom -

Dr. Chloé Wake will present her work on critical game design and will be available for discussion afterwards.

Grotesqueries of Capitalism and other ludicrous approaches to play examines the intersections of play, consumption, and critique through the lens of Happy Shoppers, a critical card game that hacks the Victorian parlour game Happy Families to make explicit the ideology embedded in set-collection mechanics and expose the hidden costs of consumer culture. Drawing on Mary Flanagan's framework of critical play, Zygmunt Bauman's account of the consuming subject, and Linderoth and Mortensen's aesthetics of dark play, this talk argues that discomfort and absurdity can function as productive tools for critical inquiry. The talk uses the design methodology of Happy Shoppers — hacking and subverting a familiar game structure — to demonstrate how games can challenge the ideologies embedded in everyday consumption without offering easy answers or moral resolution.


BIO

Dr. Chloé Wake (née Germaine) is a Reader in Environmental Humanities in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University and Co-Director of the Manchester Game Centre. Her research sits at the intersection of game studies, critical theory, and environmental humanities, with a particular focus on how games model and naturalise ideologies — and how they can be designed to challenge them.

She is co-author, with Paul Wake, of Curious Games: Game Making, Hacking and Jamming as Critical Practice (Behavioral Sciences, 2025), which develops the methodology of game hacking and jamming as a form of critical-creative research. She is also co-editor, with Paul Wake, of Material Game Studies: A Philosophy of Analogue Play (Bloomsbury, 2022). Together, they design games under the guise of Frank and Alex Games. Happy Shoppers is their most recent collaboration.