Worldbuilding and Ethical Game Design
This project explores creative worldbuilding and game design in the West Midlands, asking how games can foster understanding across diverse persons and communities and build ethical reasoning.
We are developing collaborative partnerships with local games designers and working with media education charity Rural Media to run creative worldbuilding workshops.
This project is led by Dr Jeremy Kidwell, Dr Bettina Bódi and Dr Dorothy Butchard at the University of Birmingham, with support from the Centre for Urban Wellbeing and Culture Forward. It is funded by the AHRC IAA User Engagement Fund at the University of Birmingham.
Game Design
We are building conversations with West Midlands game designers to understand how game design can encourage players outside the familiarity of their personal lifeworlds.
Creative Worldbuilding
With media education charity Rural Media, we are developing creative workshops that explore worldbuilding’s potential for social change and community engagement.
Ethics and Community
Our events and activities will understand games as proxies for ethical reasoning, identity formation and developing community.
Events
We’re hosting a series of events to explore different aspects of worldbuilding, play, ethics, wellbeing and community. All welcome! You can find details of our first event below.
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Worldbuilding and Play
Wednesday 1st April 2026. Explore the imaginative potential of worldbuilding and play for ethics, wellbeing, belonging and community.
Why gaming?
Interest in video game studies and game ethics has intensified in recent years. Our project responds to priorities identified in the Department for Culture, Media & Sport’s Video Game Research Framework (2024) by exploring the impacts and ethics of interaction with videogames.
Research concerning videogames and ethics has a rich history. On the one hand, darker themes like representation of violence and war, dark play, toxicity, and extremism, and cheating are commonly discussed. Yet games themselves are ethical systems inherently capable of enriching our moral lives and fostering empathetic and prosocial behaviour.
We aim to develop a network of West Midlands professionals embedded in the region’s gaming industry and build new community partnerships. Our work will pioneer humanities-led perspectives on gaming as a tool for citizen engagement, evaluating game design principles as ethical systems that can support community-building, encourage phenomenological horizon-crossing, and address moral or social dilemmas.
Our Activities
In Spring 2026 we’ll be focused on exploration, community-building and research.
Conversations
Starting dialogues with creative and design teams at game studios based in the Midlands.
Workshops
Developing creative worldbuilding workshops with Rural Media.
Events
Hosting monthly seminars on game design and worldbuilding.
About the Team
This project builds on foundational work completed by the project leads. This includes Jeremy Kidwell and Dorothy Butchard’s citizen science engagement events for the Sensing Space project at University of Birmingham (Feb 2024, March 2025), Bettina Bódi’s research in gaming and cosy media, and workshops on digital wellbeing co-hosted by Dorothy Butchard for the Centre for Urban Wellbeing and Centre for Digital Cultures (Sep 2024, May 2025). We will scale up these interdisciplinary contexts through engagement with game studios and designers who are engaged in ethical, inclusive and diversity-focussed worldbuilding practices.
Rural Media
Our project partners Rural Media develop film, media and digital arts that support rural young people and disadvantaged communities to find their voice, develop their creative talent and drive social change.