Games Institute Seed Funding Program

In 2022, the GI ran its first-ever Seed Grant competition in which both faculty and students, who are active members of the GI, could apply for up to $15,000.00 to invest in a new collaboration or project with fellow members of the Institute. The awarded research groups had until the end of 2023 to finalize projects and spend all funding. 

The program was specifically put in place to promote interdisciplinary collaborations between interdisciplinary researchers—encouraging members to reach out to colleagues outside their home disciplines who they had not worked with previously. GI staff specialize in supporting interdisciplinary collaborations, liaising between departments and faculties on campus to ease the administrative burden that often throws a wrench, and at times can derail, these collaborations from fully coming to fruition. The GI also offers project management services to track budget spending, hire researchers from a variety of departments, and ensure that current equipment in the core facility is still being used.

Initially, the GI announced that $100,000.00 was the amount of funds allocated for the GI to award as Seed funding. A committee of GI faculty members who had not applied for the funding, was created to help in the deliberation of which projects would be awarded and for how much. The GI staff ensured that there was equal representation from all faculties on campus on the committee, to ensure diverse perspectives from various disciplinary backgrounds who would have a better understanding of how funding works for specific disciplines and even between students. For example, the Faculty of Engineering has very strict rules for student funding, and Graduate Research Payments (GRS) are calculated meticulously to the final decimal. Conversely, the Faculty of Arts typically offers partial GRS ($4,500.00) and full GRS ($9,000.00) to its student. This does not include the varying rules, calculations, and differentiations between individual departments and how they function within greater faculty structures. These decisions are often made based on the different ways graduate students are funded in different faculties.

Dr. Gerald Voorhees (Communication Arts), who at the time was Chair of the GI’s Anti-Racism, Decolonization, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (ADE) Committee was also apart of the deliberation committee, to ensure that all projects funded would adhere to the GI’s mandate for ADE considerations and representation in immersive and interactive technology research.

The committee ended up awarding an excess of $110,000.00 to eight projects ranging from $10,000.00 to $15,000.00 in Seed funds distributed per project. The full breakdown of how much was awarded was highlighted in our 2022 Impact Report. Principal investigators (PIs) included faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students. Both postdoctoral fellows and graduate students were required to have a faculty advisor who would help mentor them in grant budget tracking and where to best allocate funds.

The PIs were from the following departments and faculties and their specific research interests could be summarized as:

A summarized breakdown of spending is as follows:

Seed funds naturally fell into four major categories of spending: salaries and bursaries for students; participant remuneration for studies; travel assistance for networking opportunities with partners or at conferences; and additional equipment. The vast majority of funding (65.19%) went toward paying graduate students for their work on the Seed projects as a form of HQP training.

The next largest expense after student payments, was travel expenses (13.68%). These travel expenses covered professional development for PIs (presenting research at conferences and receiving feedback from colleagues) or travelling to meet directly with community members who were part of Seed projects. For example, Dr. Hector Perez (School of Public Health Sciences) partnered with two Indigenous Nations: Kahnawà:ke Search and Rescue and Peacekeepers in Québec; and Fire and Fisher River Ambulance from Peguis First Nation in Manitoba. Travel funds were used for Dr. Perez to meet with Indigenous community leaders directly in-person, to better explain project goals and outcomes, as well as showing them how to use the technology they produced.

The third largest expense produced by Seed project teams was equipment purchases (10.49%). Before any purchases were made, PIs would first consult with GI staff to ensure that this equipment was not already available in the core facility and was absolutely crucial for the research to move forward. New equipment purchased with Seed funds included state of the art microphones and recording equipment for field work, as well as the latest generation of tablets to help facilitate workshops exploring social media campaigns and activism through their designated apps. Finally, the smallest amount of funding was related to participant remuneration for any studies run with the Seed funding (8.59%).

As per the funding breakdown and discussion above, the largest category of expenses was related to graduate student payments. This aligns well with one of the GI’s core goals of supporting and promoting innovative, cross-disciplinary graduate training and mentorship in all aspects of games and interactive and immersive technologies. Moreso, the ability to give graduate students and post-doctoral fellows the opportunity to be novice PIs of a project is an invaluable form of mentorship that is not often presented, let alone offered, to graduate students who plan to continue their careers in academia.

The GI staff were also pleasantly surprised to see that very little funds were allocated toward new equipment purchases. As a core facility, the GI works very hard to share collated resources and ensure that all equipment is being used effectively before anything new is purchased. This is important given the lifespan of technology is quite short, and equipment like laptops, tablets, and VR/AR headsets quickly becomes obsolete—which also aligns with the GI’s commitment to the Green Office Initiative, alongside increasing encouragement from CFI and other federal funding agencies to lower large amounts of duplicated equipment at universities.