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).
First Person Scholar
Weekly critical essays, commentaries, and book reviews on games.
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
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
- Oct. 9, 2018Dr. Ali Mazalek to give a Brown Bag talk on human cognition and computational media
Dr. Ali Mazalek joins us today to give a Brown Bag talk on human cognition and computational media.
The talk will be from 1- 2pm in the Games Institute Collaboration space - refreshments will be provided. For more event details, click here.
- Oct. 5, 2018Justin Carpenter at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) Conference
Justin Carpenter, GI resident and First Person Scholar Editor, will be presenting a paper at this year's Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference in Toronto, November 15-18. His paper looks at how the games Mountain (2014) and Everything (2017) by Irish artist David OReilly challenge players to reconsider notions of consciousness, things, and nature.
Carpenter argues that both games are "meditations on games as a medium":
- Oct. 1, 2018VR Working Group attracting media attention for their research on Cybersickness
Séamas Weech, Jessy Varghese, and Michael Barnett-Cowan, members of the VR working group at the Games Institute, co-authored a paper entitled "Estimating the sensorimotor components of cybersickness" published in the Journal of Neurophysiology.
Their results caught the attention of many, many news outlets who were picking the story up and claiming that UW researchers are on the cusp of curing cybersickness. Here are just a few...
Events
- Oct. 30, 2018Ghouls and Rules, Gourds and Boards: It's Halloween at the GI!
Ghouls and Rules...
Gourds and Boards...
Trolls and Rolls...
Mice and Dice...
It's Halloween at the GI!
- Oct. 30, 2018Brown Bag Talk: Toben Racicot on Dungeons and Dragons in Stranger Things
Trauma and Demogorgons: Analyzing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in Stranger Things
Toben Racicot, GI resident and English PhD student, will give a talk in the collaboration space during our Halloween party. Come out to hear Toben talk about how the motif of D&D in Stranger Things informs how role-playing games are an unconventional tool for empowering and preparing players for future trauma.
Abstract:
Blog
- Oct. 17, 2018Rina Wehbe at the Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) 2018
Rina Wehbe, Games Institute resident and Computer Science PhD student, attended and mentored at the 2018 Grace Hopper Celebration (GHC) in Houston, Texas.
- Oct. 15, 2018Tina Chan for TEDxUW: Bandaids for Mental Health
Tina Chan, GI resident and Masters of Science candidate in the School of Public Health and Health Systems, was a speaker at this year's TEDxUW conference. She took the stage to share the story of how she came to develop the Panic Anxiety Stress Support (PASS) kit.
- Oct. 10, 2018Docu-video from VR Workshop with Gada Jane and SpiderWebShow Performance
September 14 and 15, 2018, four playwrights came to the GI for an intensive workshop on VR filmmaking. The workshop was hosted by Gada Jane, Research Associate at the GI, and Michael Wheeler, Co-Creator and Artistic Director of SpiderWebShow Performance.
The playwrights were Erin Brandenburg, playwright and director, Rosamund Small, playwright and writer, Nicolas Billon, playwright and screenwriter, and Ahmad Meree, playwright and performer.
Meet our people
Ian Milligan
Associate Professor, Department of History
Ian Milligan is a digital and Canadian historian. He’s currently exploring how historians can fruitfully use web archives and other large digital repositories.