Welcome to the Games Institute

The Games Institute (GI) is a multidisciplinary research centre at the University of Waterloo focused on the study of games, gamification, interactive technologies and immersive environments (AR/VR).

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First Person Scholar

Weekly critical essays, commentaries, and book reviews on games.

FPS

GI Jam

A thrice-annual, multi-day event hosted by The Games Institute (GI). Each of the events are open to the public and are designed to appeal to a wide variety of playful people.

Game Dev Club

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Every Tuesday and Thursday from 6pm-9pm at the GI.

This is your opportunity to meet and collaborate with local game developers in a casual atmosphere.

Show off your latest projects, receive valuable play-testing feedback from like-minded peers, learn new tools and techniques, and network with potential collaborators.

The future of games will rely on new technologies and new ways of interacting with those technologies, but it will also rely heavily on psychological and sociological understandings of what we do when we play, on stories and narratives that reach far beyond what today’s games offer, and on extensive work in a wide range of fields, from health to education, into how games can guide us, change us, and help us.

- Dr. Neil Randall, Director of the Games Institute

News

Dec. 4, 2018Mark Hancock receives the 10-Year Impact Award at ISS
Mark Hancock, Associate Director of the Games Institute and Director of the UW Touchlab, was honoured with the 10-Year Impact Award on Tuesday, Nov. 27 at the ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces (ISS) in Tokyo.
Nov. 28, 2018Elise Vist at the Fan Studies Network North America (FSNNA) Conference
Elise Vist presented a paper at the Fan Studies Network North America (FSNNA) 2018 Conference at DePaul University in Chicago, October 25-27, 2018. Vist is an English PhD candidate studying fans, immersion, and queerness at the Games Institute, as well as the producer for First Person Podcast.
Nov. 26, 2018Lennart Nacke weighing in on violence in videogames on Kitchener Today
Dr. Lennart Nacke joined reporter Brian Bourke from Kitchener Today to weigh in on the societal value of games. Nacke was invited to join Bourke because interest in the negative effects of violent videogames is reemerging in the media following the publication of a meta-study showing the results of 24 studies looking at heightened physical aggression post-gameplay in youths from 9-19.

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Blog

Dec. 7, 2018Spotlight on Alexandra Orlando's YouTube channel
Alexandra Orlando, an alum of the Games Institute and a former Editor in Chief for First Person Scholar, maintains a YouTube channel for academically-oriented games criticism. When she's not working on video essays, she works as freelance writer.
Nov. 15, 2018Introducing the GI to Engineering Exchange Students from Mexico

How can games guide us, change us, and help us?

This was the question that left me speechless, simply because I wasn’t sure where to begin or even how to fully answer it. The question was the first of many posed by an eager group of Mexican exchange students visiting the GI.
Nov. 5, 2018Lindsay Meaning on analyzing game adaptations of literary works
Lindsay Meaning gave a Brown Bag talk on the process of adapting a literary text into a video game on Tuesday, October 16. Meaning is a second-year English PhD candidate whose research interests include video game adaptations and representations of settler-colonialism and imperial ideologies in roleplaying games.

According to Meaning, game adaptations are often looked down on - misconceived as "cashing in on a popular franchise". And when game adaptations of literary texts are studied, they are frequently analyzed for how faithful they are to the source material.