From Can Lit to VR Caves: A Spotlight on Games Institute Executive Director Dr. Neil Randall

Everyone associated with the Games Institute (GI) knows our Executive Director, Dr. Neil Randall (English Language and Literature), but how much do they really know about Neil?

While it’s easy to get Neil to talk at length about the GI and its partners, projects, and researchers, getting him to talk about himself is much more difficult. This is despite Neil's many accomplishments during his 39-year career at the University of Waterloo.

For example, as a games and technology journalist, Neil wrote over 700 game and product reviews long before games and technology journalism was the established industry that it is today. Also, did you know that Neil wrote some of the first books ever published about the Internet? An excerpt from one of those books, The Soul of the Internet, can be found at the end of this article.

No matter how well you think you know Neil, I am confident you are about to learn something new.

Neil received his master’s degree from the University of Waterloo in 1981 with his thesis The Novels of Robert Kroetsch: Explorations in Mythmaking. In 1985, he then completed his PhD at York University, defending his dissertation, Humour in all Seriousness: The Techniques and Effects of Humour in Six Canadian Novels.

So, how did Neil, with multiple degrees in Canadian literature, come to be an expert in technology, media, and game studies?

In the Spring of 1984, Neil was working on finishing his PhD, and he missed a memo (on a physical bulletin board) that the deadline to apply for funding had been moved up by a month. He was now a father, and without this scholarship that he had relied on in the past, he needed a new stream of income to help support his family.

Neil has been a fan of analogue war games since he was a teenager, and he enjoyed playing new digital war games being made for the Commodore 64. These games were a very niche topic to write about as it required knowledge of the long history of analogue war gaming, and of contemporary computing. Knowing he had this specific expertise, Neil cold-called the offices of Compute! (one of his favourite magazines), and offered to write reviews of digital war games for them. He mailed them his first review two days later and was a published video game journalist for the first time by June. From there, writing for magazines and newspapers quickly became Neil’s “secondary, if not primary, source of income”, and permanently linked him to “writing about games and computers in general.”

In addition to games and technology journalism, Neil was also publishing books for tabletop RPG players, such as Monsters of Myth and Legend with Greg Gorden (Mayfair Games), and several game books for the James Bond role-playing games (Victory Games), including Dr. No, You Only Live Twice, and Octopussy. If that wasn’t enough, he was also writing fantasy fiction, including some interactive choose-your-own-adventure-style novels such as Seven No-Trump: A Crossroads Adventure and Storm of Dust: A Crossroads Adventure in the World of David Drakes Dragon Lord.

Soon after he completed his PhD, Neil was hired as a professor in the department of English Language and Literature at UW, where “it became clear that there was a reason to bring this kind of professional magazine writing into the classroom.”

He saw a lot of value in teaching students more writing genres than just typical essays about literature. Neil designed and taught classes like “English 793H – Rhetoric’s of the Popular: Writing for Magazines” and “English 794E – The Language of the Computer Interface.” This led to him helping the department develop academic programming around technical and professional writing and, eventually, directing the Centre for Professional Writing at Waterloo from 1988-1991.

During his time as Director, Neil facilitated workshops for technical and medical writers and established corporate partnerships with IBM Canada and Bell. He brought in $300,000 of funding (in 1989 dollars) which provided him with the vital experience he would later use when developing partnerships and securing funding at the GI.

Despite having his hands full at Waterloo, Neil kept writing about games and computing for newspapers and magazines; most notably PC Magazine with a readership of 1.2 million in the 90s. Neil also wrote regular columns for Game Players magazine, Compute!, The Globe and Mail and many more.Furthermore, he was enlisted as a consultant and co-founder of CD-ROM Today magazine and Game Player's PC Strategy Guide, which became PC Magazine, and is now PCMag.

It occurred to Neil that someone should also be writing guides about the internet itself, so once again, he picked up the phone and called an editor, which is how he ended up writing a book titled Teach Yourself the Internet, published in 1994. This led to many other books on the topic, including The World Wide Web Unleashed in 1995, and The Soul of the Internet in 1997.

By the end of the 2000s, with an ever-growing portfolio of books, guides, and articles, Neil felt he should address what many saw as the central contradiction of his career: “I was a humanities prof who was writing about computers.”
 

Neil met with another humanities professor doing similar work, Dr. Karen Collins. At the time, Karen was an Associate Professor in Communication Arts working as a social scientist in interactive audio, games, and digital media (now at Carleton University). The two decided that if they were going to study games and technology as scholars in the humanities, they should create a formal organization or structure to legitimize the sort of interdisciplinary work that they wanted to continue investigating.

They agreed that the best path forward would be to create a research institute that would be fully interdisciplinary and open to scholars from any faculty or department working on interactive and immersive technologies. The first two people to join them were human-computer interaction and design expert Dr. Stacey Scott from Systems Design Engineering (now at the University of Guelph) and artificial intelligence and health informatics researcher Dr. Chrysanne DiMarco from the Cheriton School of Computer Science (now Professor Emeritus).

Together, they received the approval of the UWaterloo Senate to open the GI in May 2011. Part of what made, and continues to make, the GI so unique is that it was a truly interdisciplinary collaboration that was founded by researchers from different backgrounds. While working in an interdisciplinary community was, and still is,  challenging, it creates unique–and often uncommon--networks of expertise.

Soon after the founding of the GI, Chrysanne, Karen, Neil and Stacey came up with the concept for the IMMERSe (Interactive Multimodal Research Syndicate) Network; a research network that would formally connect the GI with other similar institutes and centres as well as industry partners in the US and Canada. In 2012, the team secured $6.5 million in funding from the SSHRC Partnership Grant program.

The IMMERSe network required a project manager, and Neil was lucky enough to hire Agata Antkiewicz, who is now the GI's Associate Director of Strategic Planning and Administration. Soon thereafter, Neil and Agata started a long journey to secure research space for the GI. Later that year, the GI was assigned space in the North Campus TechTown building (now the Toby Jenkins Applied Health Research building), but this option was unfeasible for the needs of the growing GI community. Luckily in 2014, the University acquired multiple buildings on East Campus from Research in Motion (now BlackBerry). With the help of Scott Nicoll, (Manager Space Planning), the GI found its home in East Campus 1 in the summer of 2014 opening its doors to research with wet paint on the walls and furniture still in pieces.

Since 2014 the GI has been gradually growing in membership and notoriety. Neil jokes that the hardest things to aquire on any university campus are, in order, “number three is money, number two is space, and number one is parking.” Knowing that parking is a lost battle, and with GI space secured, Neil’s next challenge was to formally transform the GI to a cross-Faculty entity and in 2017 the GI joined the elite group of university level research centers and institutes.

Outside of the day-to-day leadership of the GI, Neil has continued to work on research collaborations with non-academic partners (industry and non-profit) via Mitacs projects and joint research endeavours with Electronic Arts, Deloitte, Scotiabank, Correctional Services Canada, Community Justice Initiative, the Violence-Evidence-Guidance-Assessment (VEGA) Family Violence group, and more.

It should also be mentioned that over the past 20 years, Neil has also worked as a developer and designer on many strategic tabletop simulation games including No Peace without Spain! The War of the Spanish Succession 1702-18 (Compass Games), Spartacvs (Compass Games), The God Kings (Compass Games), Blackbeard: The Golden Age of Piracy (GMT Games), Onward Christian Soldiers: The Crusades (GMT Games), and Pax Romana:The Ancient Mediterranean World (GMTGames) and more!

More recently, esports has become a point of interest for Neil, and he is now working on a trans-Atlantic exploration of collegiate esports to help grow the UW's programs. In 2022, the GI secured $50,000 of funding from the Ontario government for an esports scholarship program for Waterloo students.

On the scholarship, Neil says, “given the continued growth of the esports phenomenon worldwide, it's fantastic to see the Ontario government supporting students who want to be part of this emerging profession through these scholarships. UW students are perfect for this initiative, and I'm excited about where the support will lead them.”

In addition to partnerships, one of Neil’s goals as Executive Director has always been to provide state-of-the-art research infrastructure in the GI space by taking advantage of the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) funding programs. And so, to complement existing CFI-funded labs from other GI faculty members, Neil secured four CFI grants over the last decade.The latest is a virtual reality (VR) CAVE system from Arcane Technologies, which will also include head and hand trackers, laser projections, and high-performance computing.

For Neil, this equipment brings about limitless possibilities for himself and other researchers: “what can I do with these things that change the nature of game design and gameplay? What could I do with this big tech – rather than small tech – that's interactive, multiplayer multi-user and multi-touch?” Neil is incredibly excited to use this technology to get back to his roots in designing historical, military, and political simulation games. He is also interested in how the screens can be used in a work and classroom setting to improve hybrid working, learning, and training.

None of this is even touching on Neil's decades of research around J.R.R. Tolkien and the Lord of The Rings. Neil is currently working on several projects about film, television, and game adaptations of Tolkien's work, but that will require an entire second article.  

The Games Institute is now a much bigger and broader community than Neil ever imagined back in 2010, “I think it’s much more interesting than what I set out to do. You can do so much with this media. I knew so much was there to be explored, but I keep being surprised by what people are bringing to the table”

But what Neil did set out to do, from the very start, is “welcome people to bring in ideas and work that I simply wouldn’t have thought of. That was my goal from the very beginning. Build something that would help other people do research. Facilitating research was my goal from the beginning.”

Neil concludes that looking to the future, “we are more than just the Games Institute. Now it’s a matter of asking, ‘how far can we go?’”

The following is an excerpt from the epilogue of Neil's propheti tome The Soul of the Internet: Net Gods, Netizens and The Wiring of the World from 1997. If you do research on the development or history of the internet, social networking, online education, social media, or the metaverse, I really encourage you to pick it up and see all the ways Neil predicted our exact future online.Emphasis from the original text are in bold.

"The Internet is a monster--huge, sprawling, overwhelming, indifferent. It is, in many ways, exactly the monster we should have expected from our twentieth century love affair with technology. But that relationship with technology has not been, as some have suggested, a Faustian pact with the devil. It has been nowhere near as engaged as that, nowhere near as willed an act of concord. Faust knew what he was doing, and he knew where he would end up. We know some of what we're doing, and nothing about where we'll end up, if indeed ending up has anything to do with it. Still, some such as Kevin Kelly have suggested that the Net is the beginning of a movement in human society towards a hive-like conjoining of intelligence, and that, surely, is something worth fighting. While there are all sorts of things wrong with the emphasis on individuality that has been preached in Western society (especially in the U.S.) since the day of Romanticism, a great deal of human history has taught us that group action and group thinking are, for the most part, far worse. But certainly our interactions with the Internet are pointing towards a hiving, and we are taking this step with no seeming trepidation.

And so we have our new Frankenstein's monster. Two things about this, however. First, monsters aren't always bad, as often as not--just ask out storytellers--they're misunderstood and mistreated. More importantly, though, this monster is ours, all of ours: we have bought into the continual process of creation and are adding to it at all times.But this monster is different from Shelley's because it has not disgusted or mortified its creators, neither the original developers interviewed in this book nor the new builders that we have all become, and because we have created it with as willing a collaboration as we've seen in this century.Looked at from one way, in fact, the Internet is already an indication of what the hived mentality can produce. And while much of it is exciting and potentially very good, much is also frightening. Ultimately, however, the responsibility for assuaging and eliminating those fears is also exclusively outs. How we handle that responsibility will determine a wide range of issues in our future.

The soul of the internet grows day by day, encompassing, inevitably, the major issues of its time. That's because the Internet is a technology about communication, the central component of human activity, and the primary reason and focus for human society. The Internet is here to stay--not necessarily in its current technological form but with no perceivable shift to its users from form to form as it encompasses the new technologies as well--because the only way to destroy it now would be for all the nations of the world to cooperate in its outlawing and its removal, and that simply will not, cannot, happen.Whether or not the motivation for the creation of the Net was political or scientific, the fact remains that the Internet was built to survive, and so that others, at all times and in all places, could add to it and speed up its growth. And grow it has, converging new technologies, effecting social change, and beginning a long-term, relentless challenging of our political, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual assumptions and knowledge. So it is a Frankenstein we see before us? Of course. But unlike Shelley's monster, this one will not escape us, nor will it set itself adrift awaiting its own death. This monster comes in a much different time, when the value and the meaning of human life itself is up for grabs, and unlike Dr. Frankenstein we won't ever hate ourselves for its creation and seek to destroy it. We nurture it, and bring it to fruition, and hope to hell that it treats our world well."

-Dr. Neil Randall, 1997, pages 357-358.