Events

This panel highlights emerging scholars in Black game studies. Panelists will present recent and/or ongoing work, sharing a glimpse of the emerging research questions animating the field. Topics include Black worldbuilding in and across games (Fletcher), perceptions of Black male exceptionalism in gaming cultures (Dashiell), and the relationship between avatar representation and Black user experience in social VR (DeVeaux). This event is part of the “ADE for Game Communities: Enculturing Anti-Racism, Decolonization, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ADE) in Games Research and Creation” series from the ADE Committee of the Games Institute, University of Waterloo, and is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

The Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology (WIN) is pleased to present a Distinguished Lecture by Prof. Gehan Amaratunga, Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Cambridge.

This seminar is titled "Quantum Dots to Light" and will be held on Monday, September 25, 2023 at 11:00 AM in QNC 1501.

Registration is required!

Meditation has been shown to reduce stress, increase balance and stillness, increase awareness, and even expand acceptance and compassion for yourself and others.  Each week will vary slightly. “Practices” include breathing, mindfulness, body awareness, earthly grounding, spacial awareness, centring, and more.

Sessions are facilitated from a well-being perspective. No religious affiliation is needed. Everyone is welcome to participate. All experience levels are welcome from advanced practitioners to those who are trying meditation  for the first time.

Why not give it a try! Gift yourself with a few moments of stillness to reset and recharge. It’s as true for  people as it is with technology as well as people...we can all benefit from shutting down for a few moments and recharging.

This session is open to all members of the FoE community. Please bring your own meditation pillow or mat to sit on.

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To find out more, attend the information session on October 5 at 12:00 p.m. at the ECE conference room (EIT 3142). Register for the session here https://bit.ly/467pelW

The importance of liquid fuels in transportation is well established, yet, there are presently no viable options for their cost-effective production from renewable feedstocks.  During the past 15 years we have been developing in my lab a system for the conversion of gas mixtures of hydrogen (or CO) and CO2 to oils or alkanes. The two-stage system comprises anaerobic fixation of CO2 and conversion of the CO2 fixation product (for example, acetate) to lipids, from which biodiesel can be produced. In another application, the CO2 fixation product is converted to alkanes. Our work includes both the engineering of the microbes and development of a process to achieve gas to liquid conversion in prototype systems. These systems are scalable, make no use of land (beyond what is needed for generating renewable electricity for hydrogen production), do not compete with food and are cost competitive based on high level cost analysis. I will present the essential features of this process in my talk; full details can be found in the 5 papers cited.

With recent waves of layoffs, high-profile workplace harassment cases, and a notoriously short career length for gender minorities and people of colour, the transition of new workers into the game industry involves navigating a spate of barriers to equity and success that have been understudied in academic research. The First Three Years is an ongoing longitudinal study of graduates of game programs in Canada and the United States, following the journey of 207 students as they move into the game industry. In this workshop, our research team will summarise the primary challenges students have identified in their game programs. This summary includes equity and diversity issues inherent in common curricular practices such as the efficacy of capstone courses and internships, the inclusion of crunch-like practices in the classroom, the systematic failure to inform students of actual workplace conditions, and the mismatch between student preparation and industry hiring practices. Afterwards, participants will address whether/how these problems manifest in their own institutions, and what solutions might improve equity outcomes for students seeking careers in games.

This event is part of the “ADE for Game Communities: Enculturing Anti-Racism, Decolonization, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ADE) in Games Research and Creation” series from the ADE Committee of the Games Institute, University of Waterloo, and is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Explore the social location of men in society and how has that impacted our society, the way we grow and move within a community, and the way we show up (or don’t show up) for those who need us, such as marginalized groups or those with less power.

An enduring appeal of interactive entertainment media such as video games is that they invite the user to co-create the on-screen experience. More than an invitation, these experiences demand near-constant attention from players—and do so on myriad dimensions, including cognitive (problem-solving), emotional (affective reactions), apparatus (control or interface intuitiveness), exertional (physical activity) and social (attending to social agents). Individually and combined, these sources of demand are mediators for understanding the relationship between formal features of interactive media and intended (or unintended) outcomes of usage.

This presentation will present and review an interactivity-as-demand model based on prior and ongoing research into video games and virtual reality technologies, with specific implications for game design and player psychology.

Speaker Bio: Nick Bowman (PhD, Michigan State University) is an Associate Professor of Emerging Media at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. His research focuses on the uses and effects of interactive and immersive media, with specific interests in social media, video games, and metaverse technologies. He has published more than

125 peer-reviewed manuscripts and co-authored more than 200 competitively selected conference presentations. He is the editor of Journal of Media Psychology and associate editor for Technology, Mind, and Behavior. Recently, he completed a term as the Fulbright Taiwan Wu Jing-Jyi Arts & Culture Fellow and the National Chengchi University in Taipei, where he was researching the cognitive, emotional, physical, and social demands of virtual reality experiences, including video gaming and digital advertising campaigns. He is a lifelong gamer, part-time mechanic, and an excited-yet-skeptical futurist.

Meditation has been shown to reduce stress, increase balance and stillness, increase awareness, and even expand acceptance and compassion for yourself and others.  Each week will vary slightly. “Practices” include breathing, mindfulness, body awareness, earthly grounding, spacial awareness, centring, and more.

Sessions are facilitated from a well-being perspective. No religious affiliation is needed. Everyone is welcome to participate. All experience levels are welcome from advanced practitioners to those who are trying meditation  for the first time.

Why not give it a try! Gift yourself with a few moments of stillness to reset and recharge. It’s as true for  people as it is with technology as well as people...we can all benefit from shutting down for a few moments and recharging.

This session is open to all members of the FoE community. Please bring your own meditation pillow or mat to sit on.

What if we could make complex social and cultural questions playable? And what if we could do so through interactions with familiar digital interfaces set in alternative presents and near futures? The work I will discuss sits at the intersection between the design traditions of speculative and critical design on the one hand, and the philosophies and best practices of game design, playful media and interaction design on the other. It turns out, though, that an arranged marriage between these traditions produces unusual offspring. In this talk, grounded in examples including outsourcing religious tolerance to technological solutions, Indigenous Hawaiians undertaking space travel, matrimonial websites from the near future, and flirtatious AI chatbot therapists, I make the case for paratopian design, which is neither utopian
nor dystopian, but proposes paradigm shifts that invite us to reconceptualize and reconsider the building blocks of "here" & "now".

This event is part of the “ADE for Game Communities: Enculturing Anti-Racism, Decolonization, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ADE) in Games Research and Creation” series from the ADE Committee of the Games Institute, University of Waterloo, and is supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Rilla Khaled is an Associate Professor of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. She directs the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Research Centre. Her work focuses on how playful media can improve daily life, and spans designing award-winning games, creating speculative prototypes of near-future technologies, working with BIPOC communities to materialise inclusive futures, establishing foundations for recoverable, materials-based game design research, and articulating boundaries for experimental uses of AI.