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We asked Dr. John Harris, valued GI alum from Computer Science and founder of the Playful Pixel, to tell us the story of his collaboration with the Ideas Clinic, a Software Engineering initiative that offers creative crash-courses for first-year students. Dr. Harris stepped in to support the clinic in designing and delivering a game experience. Read on to discover the results of this unique interdisciplinary collaboration and find out what “Games as learning sandbox” means.

An online platform built with the assistance of the The Games Institute at the University of Waterloo has been launched to assist healthcare and social service providers to recognize and respond safely to family violence.

New research by Rina R. Wehbe and collaborators from the Cheriton School of Computer Science and the Games Institute at University of Waterloo explores territoriality in playful applications. In the paper, Wehbe et al. investigates the relationship between digital and physical spaces as they apply players’ understanding of shared space, collaboration, and social behaviours.

Haptics are becoming a staple for high-end technologies (ex. iPhones, the Google Pixel, and Nintendo Switch), as they enhance user experiences by incorporating multisensory feedback, like touch-tones, movements, or vibrations. Despite this, developers currently lack a framework for understanding how to best incorporate and improve them.

Dr. Shana MacDonald, Communication Arts professor and SSHRC-funded intersectional feminist media researcher, gave a talk as part of the “COVID-19: Ask our Experts” lecture series, hosted by the University of Waterloo. The focus of MacDonald’s talk revolved around social media during the pandemic: how are people using social media to combat loneliness? how is news traveling? and how can we make the internet a more positive place for people?

“I wasn’t really planning any game in particular,” says Oliver Schneider, Assistant Professor in the Department of Management Sciences, “I just knew I wanted to check out the Game Jam since I’ve seen how important it is to the GI culture".

Marisa Benjamin, the GI's Research Communications Officer, and Eric Blondeel, Co-Founder of ExVivo Labs, teamed up to design and deliver a Knowledge Translation Workshop for the Concept by Velocity Graduate Student Stream

Enriched narratives can reduce cybersickness in virtual reality (VR) for people with little-to-no video game experience, according to a new study by researchers from the University of Waterloo’s Multisensory Brain and Cognition (MBC) Lab in the Department of Kinesiology and the Games Institute.

Wisdom science, an interdisciplinary field of studies that looks at sound judgment and decision making, suggests that people can be guided by rational or reasonable standards when making gaming decisions. How can we better understand the difference between rationality through studying behaviour in socially-oriented games?

NB: This blog article was written by Grace VanDam who worked here as our wonderful Operations Assistant from September-December, 2019