Jack Lowe
Digital Cultures Research Centre
Jack designs games that engage with place and interactive stories that encompass the worlds you inhabit. With an academic background in cultural geography, Jack specialises in designing interaction and content that creates a sense of place or incorporates physical locations and actions. …
Jack designs games that engage with place and interactive stories that encompass the worlds you inhabit.
With an academic background in cultural geography, Jack specialises in designing interaction and content that creates a sense of place or incorporates physical locations and actions.
Jack's practice-based PhD project, Engaging with Place through Location-Based Games, unpicked the relations between navigation and narrative that shape how people experience places with these media. He independently developed three games as part of this work:
- The Timekeeper's Return: A story-based treasure hunt for all ages using QR codes and live role-playing. Help time-travelling researcher Dr. Mia Augustina return to the present and discover hidden histories of locations in Canterbury's Cathedral Quarter.
- Canterbury in 3 Words: A digital treasure hunt that challenges you to discover and share stories about Canterbury, written using addresses on the what3words app.
- The Gates to Dreamland: A locative audiowalk about Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s journey towards publishing his final book: the obstacles he faced, his eyesight and bodily health failing, and the changes in perspective that entailed.
Jack is also a narrative designer for video games and other interactive media. In this capacity, Jack was part of the team who developed Interment, a short narrative puzzle game about the connection between the stories of our ancestors and the stories we make today. Interment won the Grand Prize at the Bristol Games Hub Global Game Jam 2023.
He also collaborated with Gideon Reeling, the commercial sister company to Punchdrunk, on the making 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.