Synergy

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This page introduces the research of Synergy the games research group, Newport School of Art, Media and Design.


Synergy operates as an interdisciplinary collective; artists, practitioners, and theorists who celebrate the edges, and thereby the connections between our multifarious media form. Our members are united along a common desire to explore in-depth the artistic potential of contemporary digital game form.

Our Central Objective
The group seeks to explore (through play), critique (through theory) and expand (through practice) the nature of the gaming experience.

The purpose of our project-led activity is to extend the reach of game form to a wider audience. Our goal is to initiate and conduct novel and innovative research that explores and shares new visions of games and game play.

Our Vision
All media has the potential to give us new ways of seeing, sensing and living. A recent anomaly in media evolution is the concept of interactive media types, primarily typified by game form. A prime area of interest in this development is the active nature of their consumption; you play games. Games have the opportunity to positively affect our culture of remoteness by involving players in the interplay between action and consequence. Other artistic media are subject to less condemnation and limitation than games -- not coincidentally, the media elevated to the status of "art" longest ago -- visual arts, drama and literature.

Games are media, combining visually led, screen-based arts with performance media, and it is our passion to evolve games into a mature, emotionally rich and expressive art form.

Beyond this, we are committed to analyzing, experimenting with and devising a body of work that explores gaming and pushes the boundaries of the medium through a more gender-conscious perspective in play, research, design and development, through appraisal of the ways such an issue figures into these larger processes.

Researchers

Dr Barry Atkins   Reader, Computer Games Design
Matthew Gravelle Senior Lecturer, Animation
Richard Hurford Senior Lecturer, Computer Games Design
James Manning Programme Leader, BA (Hons) Animation
Adam Martin Programme Leader, Interactive Media
Corrado Morgana Senior Lecturer, Computer Games Design
Caroline Parsons Programme Leader, MA Animation
Dr Mike Reddy Senior Lecturer in Computing
Emily Flynn-Jones PhD Researcher
 
Alumni

Sérgio Cerviño Researcher