Professor Alan Meades

I've worked at CCCU since 2002 and have run lots of different successful degrees including Games Design, Graphic Design, Web Design, and wrote the undergrad and postgrad games courses, foundation year, and the postgraduate taught suite. I am currently Suite Lead for the Games, Graphics, and Photography. I have a degree in Interactive Arts, Master's in Electronic Arts, a PhD in videogame communities, a PGCHELT, I'm a Senior Fellow of the HEA, and was nominated for a NTFS teaching excellence award in '22.

I have considerable experience in QA and course development, I'm currently Director of Quality and Curriculum Development for SCA&I. I've held Examiner roles at Bournemouth, Manchester Metropolitan, UCLan Futureworks, Salford, and Leeds Beckett Universities. I help other universities with course development, review, and quality assurance.

In 2015 I published Understanding Counterplay in Video Games (Routledge), exploring motivations behind cheating and game-breaking on the Xbox360. Since 2014 my research has focused on my childhood love of British arcade culture. I've rescued long-lost arcade games, interviewed arcade game designers, arcade owners, and industry veterans, and worked with SEGA and BACTA (the arcade industry trade body). I've delivered lectures about arcades around the world including Stanford University, New York University, The University of Malta, and institutions in Norway and Germany, and spoken on the subject at various international conferences.

All this arcade work has resulted in my latest book Arcade Britannia telling the social history of the British amusement arcade, published with MIT Press in October '22. I'm also working on a digital/VR recreation of 1980s amusement arcades, also called Arcade Britannia, that is due to be exhibited at London Design Bienalle 2023. I'm also Director of the Nic Costa Archive of arcade heritage, a fantastic collection donated by Nic Costa.

I'm also pretty good at Street Fighter II.

All of my interests and research dynamics feed into my teaching, which focuses around design theory, research methods for design, play and digital humanities… and at the end of a busy week I’m always up for a round or two of Street Fighter 2 in the design studio. I’m always happy to hear from people who might want to talk about any of my interests, please feel free to contact me via email.

If you'd like to find out more about the Games Design programme that I designed, wrote, and now lead take a look here, please watch the Games Design course video. 

Please view my latest project - a collaboration with students making a virtual recreation of British amusement arcades

The long-lost arcade machine: Street Fighter 2 whack-a-mole Ken Sai Mogura

Watch my Stanford University lecture.

• Workshop: British Arcades, History of Games 2022, Montreal, Canada, 11/11/22.

• Monograph: Arcade Britannia: a social history of the British amusement arcade, MIT Press, 25/10/22. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544702/arcade-britannia/

• Workshop: Japanese, American, and British Arcades, DiGRA 2022, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland 7/7/22.

• Paper: Coin Slots, Showmen and Sandancers, Sites of Gaming, University of Oldenburg, Germany, 21/6/19.

• Lecture: Arcade History and SEGA Amusements, SEGA Europe Ltd. Annual Review 2019, 16/5/19.

• Article: The George Wilson Collection, T&F Journal of Photography and Culture, Vol.12, issue 1. 03/19. https://doi.org/10.1080/17514517.2019.1582940

• Chapter: Meades, A. (2019), The American Arcade Sanitisation Crusade, in Transgression in Games and Play, MIT Press.

• Lecture: Arcade Photographs, Arcade Comics, Arcade Tales, University of Malta, 06/18.

• Lecture: Arcade Tales A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade, British Amusement Caterers’ Trade Association, 23/11/17.

• Article: Space Invaders, Pac-Man and the British seaside arcade, photography article in The Financial Times. 20/10/17. https://www.ft.com/content/af8f9b0e-b38e-11e7-a398-73d59db9e399

• Lecture: Arcade Photographs, Arcade Comics, Arcade Tales – A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade, Stanford MediaX Series, Stanford University, 7/3/17.

• Lecture: Arcade Tales – A Social History of the British Amusement Arcade, Public Lecture: Games and Culture Series, University of Kent, 12/16.

• Paper: From Kill Screen to Goat Simulator – Rhetorics of the Videogame Glitch, GLITCH2015, 12/15.

• Monograph: Meades, A. (2015), Understanding Counterplay in Video Games, Routledge.

• Paper: Digital Carnival: Misrule in Digital Culture, A Virtuous Circle colloquium, 06/15.

• Chapter: Meades, A. (2015), Boosting, Glitching and Modding: Assertive Dark Play in the Call of Duty franchise, in: Dark Play, Mortensen and Brown (Eds), Routledge.

• Chapter: Meades, A. (2015), Strategies of Remediating Landscape in: The Animated Landscape, Pallant (Ed), Bloomsbury.

• Lecture: Exhibition of the Lost Cabs: Digital Heritage and Arcade Restoration, Dreamland Visitor Centre, May 2014.

• Arcade Tales / Shutterbugs (game), The George Wilson Collection, Daphne Oram Building inaugural exhibition, Canterbury Christ Church University, May – August 2019.

• Still Under the Map, Games as Arts / Arts as Games, Falmouth University, 2016.

• Arcade Tales, Burton Gallery, Broadstairs, 2016.

• Exhibition of the Lost Cabs: Digital Heritage and Arcade Restoration, Dreamland Visitor Centre, Margate, May 2016.

• Under the Map – the Art of Transgressive Play, Burton Gallery, Broadstairs.

• Mobile Seven Visualisations, Orange Street Hall, Sounds New Music Festival 2010, Orange Street Canterbury.

• In the moment visualisations, Orange Street Gallery, Sounds New Music Festival 2009, Orange Street Canterbury.

• IAAYTSMM, 2 Days Later, Pharmacy Gallery, Margate, October 2006.

• Better than chess, Renewal, Sidney Cooper Gallery, Canterbury, April 2004.