April 2025 – The Bristol Mix

She could have been a war correspondent, but instead Gemma Whitwell, Assistant Director of Residential Wellbeing, has helped to direct more (mostly) peaceful operations. Gemma talks Residential Wellbeing, recalls the highs and lows of managing an airport, and describes her recent recruitment to the shore crew of Weston-super-Mare’s lifeboat station.

I’m Assistant Director of the Residential Wellbeing Service. We offer wellbeing support to our nearly 10,000 residential students – mostly first years, but any students who live in our residences and need an extra bit of support. Our students’ main focus is studying towards getting their degree or other award, but they’re also here to enjoy the social life and living independently, maybe for the first time. We want to ensure that they do, and that they reach their full potential at Bristol, in all aspects of their lives.

From beer to coffee

Different cohorts seem to face different challenges: one year we’ll see a big increase in students experiencing, say, anxiety and depression, the next year it could be eating disorders. The effects of the pandemic certainly haven’t finished making themselves felt: our current first-year students were around 13 during the first lockdown, and I think we’re still seeing that lack of social interaction play out. My heart really goes out to these bright young people who sometimes struggle with various demons.

When I was a student at the University of Leeds almost 30 years ago, our social lives revolved around the Students’ Union bar and other city pubs, and I couldn’t tell you where the gym was! My personal experience is that students are a lot more health-conscious these days: much more likely to grab a coffee or a green tea. They’re also a lot more environmentally conscious: they worry about climate change much more than I did.

Career moves

I wanted to be a war correspondent. I can remember when I was seven, watching Michael Buerk reporting from the Ethiopia famine and saying to my mum and dad, ‘I want to do what he does’. I studied journalism, which I loved – and I was lucky enough to interview Michael Buerk twice! – but when I started working on a local paper, I couldn’t see past doing the boring work to get to the good stuff.

I worked as a travel agent, then at the University of Bristol for a while, before I applied for a job with the ground transportation team at Bristol Airport. After two years I was promoted to airport manager, where I stayed for seven years.

If I’m ever finding a workday challenging at the University, I think back to my time at the airport, and it puts everything into perspective. As airport manager, I was responsible for the safety and wellbeing of the hundreds of staff working in and around the terminal building, and the 25,000 passengers who travelled through it each day. There were real highs and lows: brilliant shifts where everything was buzzing – and seeing Prince Harry with a massive hangover was fun – but some difficult shifts as well. I did CPR on four people during my time there – sadly I lost three and saved one. You don’t forget that sort of thing.

Boats, shouts and banter

I started volunteering with the RNLI at Weston-super-Mare in 2024 – a great charity to be part of. After six months of walking my dogs past the lifeboat station every Sunday morning and having the operations manager – who I’d worked with at the airport – asking ‘When are you coming to join us?’, I ran out of excuses and finally said ‘Yeah, go on then’.

I’m their Admin Officer and I’m also on the shore crew: we get the boats prepped and launched for the boat crew, then we wait until they come back in, ready to respond to any casualty need. I love the emergency response side of it, and the banter and camaraderie.

Gemma in full RNLI kit at Weston-super-Mare

We train every Wednesday night and Sunday morning. Weston Lifeboat Station has about 50 shouts a year, mostly between June and September, although we saw quite a few over this last winter. Attending a shout at 4 am in January is not for the faint-hearted! About half of them are related to mental health, so that links into my work at the University.

With courage, nothing is impossible

The golden thread through my career has been that I do everything in my power to make the customer journey as great as it can possibly be – whether it’s a passenger at the airport or a student at the University – and to make everybody’s life just a little bit better.

There’s another thread, too: when people tell me ‘that’s impossible’, I take it as a challenge. I’m proud of having pushed through a few things in particular: I wrote Bristol Airport’s Winter Weather Response Plan, for example, which they’re still using today.

I’m also proud of the headway we’ve made in introducing changes to the Residential Wellbeing Service. We’ve improved a lot of things, both for students and for our staff. And I’m very proud of the Residential Wellbeing team – they really do work their socks off.

Where academia meets the games industry, things are afoot. Dr Mike Samuel, Lecturer in Digital Film and Television and Co-Director of the Bristol Digital Game Lab, explains how gaming can be a vehicle for public good – and recalls the role of the Atari 2600 in his own upbringing.

The Bristol Digital Game Lab is a focal point for conversations between academia and industry about video games and culture – responding to a need, especially among our student body, for someone to broker those kinds of connections.

In the last year, we’ve held lots of conversations with industry (including with the lead writers behind 2023’s Game of the Year Award-winning Baldur’s Gate 3), as well as ‘game jams’ where we bring people together to discuss and even create games with industry professionals and external parties. For example, we ran a successful game jam with Dr Edward King exploring the potential for games to respond creatively to the theme of algorithmic bias. Most conversations feed into further research; others result in working prototypes. We never know on the day – that’s one of the great things about it.

We’re in an era of convergence, both in academia and in technology. It’s an exciting time to work in the intersection of different fields and consider the possibilities.

Let the games begin

My academic life began in film and television studies, but I’ve always loved and valued games. My Nan first introduced me to gaming when I was very young. She was a keen gamer, so on weekends we’d bond over the Atari 2600. Luckily, the rest of my family embraced games as well: for my sisters, it was The Sims and Rollercoaster Tycoon, and for my father, Vigilante8 and Grand Theft Auto.

I was the first generation in my family to go to university: I was born into the fallout of Thatcher, in a South Wales post-mining town. We didn’t have much money, but my parents made time for art and for movies, and for talking about them as well. I guess that was their way of enabling us to escape our surroundings and to take pleasure in images and stories. On reflection, it was very much a humanities upbringing.

That pleasure in talking about things has stayed with me. Some of our coders who come to our sessions are quite product-oriented: their end goal is to create a prototype – and that’s fantastic. But for me, the exciting product is the conversation itself, spending time with people and thinking through some of those bigger questions through the optic of games. It’s also beautiful to see some of those ideas articulated, whether or not they result in a new game.

Birth of a notion

Actually, we have started to create a game ourselves, about postnatal depression (PND). This has really been my baby (aside from my other babies, human or otherwise). It came out of a frustration: after I became a new father three years ago, I personally experienced depression. What little information and resources I did find were the traditional pamphlets with condescending language and mindfulness imagery – the sort of thing I’ve always been allergic to. So, I started out by asking myself: how would I like to find this information? I also had a wider interest in engaging men more in conversations about mental health, and to create a tool that they’re likely to use.

I started working with a talented digital artist, Dr Danny Bacchus, and with my colleague, Dr Richard Cole, and we had early discussions with third-sector mentors and found statistical research confirming that men are more willing to access information if it’s both visual and interactive. That’s the definition of a video game right there! And we’re clearly not alone; indeed, over the last decade, various games have engaged with mental health (see Firewatch, Depression Quest and That Dragon, Cancer, to name just a few), and others have been used in therapy (for instance, the use of first-person shooter games in post-traumatic stress treatments for army veterans).

Rather than writing a narrative for our game (as there’s no single narrative around postnatal depression), we settled on creating a spatial experience. Within everyday spaces (a park, a supermarket, a kitchen, a bedroom), players’ experiences are shaped by randomly generated symptoms which affect the gameplay mechanics, from altering player movement through spaces to distorting the visual elements.

Stills from the working prototype of the lab’s PND game

The long game

Now that we have a working videogame prototype, it’s time to work with partners and connections in the health sector and the third sector to test the product’s potential within the context of PND support and talking therapy, and to liaise with others to ensure its longevity as a resource.

There’s more we want to try – for example, immersive tech (if it’s not too immersive for a complex, sensitive topic like mental health). But most importantly, we see this game as part of the Bristol Digital Game Lab’s wider philosophical and commercial agenda as a source of inspiration and a platform for the creation of games as a public service. This is something I’m passionate about, and we’re definitely making it a reality.

You can find out more about the Bristol Digital Game Lab’s recent work – including the game jam on algorithmic bias – in their 2024 end-of-year summary and the accompanying video.

Month: April 2025

What I do: Gemma Whitwell