Blog

Panel Overview

This collaboration between the Games Institute and the UW Women’s Center highlighted a considerable range of issues with misogyny, homophobia, and racism in gaming. The panel, moderated by Gioia Myers, was planned for “love your body week” and discussed the policing of women and LGBTQ+ people’s bodies in both games and game spaces. The panelists, PhD Candidate Lindsay Meaning (English), Postdoctoral Researcher Dr Brianna Wiens (Communication Arts), Associate Professor Dr Shana MacDonald (Communication Arts), and Game Design and Development Instructor Dr Emma Vossen (UW Games Institute, GDD WLU) made connections between current events in games and historical and feminist events in media at large.

For the past few years, Dr. Oliver Schneider has been working hard to build a network of Hapticians across Canada—CanHaptics. Or, as it’s described on the CanHaptics website, “we make technology more human by making it physical – pushing out from the screen to be graspable, holdable, and engage with all of your senses – and do so by putting people, not technology, first”. The Covid-19 pandemic put haptic technology research between a rock and a hard place; how does one study human interaction with technology, remotely?

The GI’s Games and Narrative Reading group (whose goal is to investigate traditional texts on narrative theory alongside emerging theories in multimedia and games to theorize on what narrative in video games truly means) created the basis for the ICGaN. Guided by Drs. Ken Hirschkop and Neil Randall, the conference series goal is to challenge the complexities around narrative theories and functionality in games.

Pallavi Sodhi, Research Intern for the Council for Responsible Innovation and Technology (CRIT) and Dr. Jason Lajoie, Research Associate for CRIT, gave a guest lecture about inclusive board game design for students at Branksome Hall in Toronto.

Do our self-perceptions influence our preferences when designing avatars in the games we play? GI members Mitchell Loewen and Dr. Lennart E. Nacke, with Dr. Christopher Burris of St. Jerome’s University, co-authored a paper about the psychology of preferences toward game avatar styles.

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted the research landscape. In this series, we explore how our community is navigating their daily lives and innovating to adapt their research and collaboration techniques.

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted the research landscape. In this series, we explore how our community is navigating their daily lives and innovating to adapt their research and collaboration techniques.

The Human-Computer Interaction labs at the Games Institute, and at the University of Waterloo overall, emphasize collaboration between and within groups so any one student is uplifted by the entire network of HCI researchers.

Dr. Judy Ehrentraut's PhD dissertation is an exploration of posthumanisms through digital artifacts, arguing for a theoretical frame called "inclusive posthumanism" that accounts for the ways individuals intersect with technology. She successfully defended her dissertation on November 29th, 2019, completing her requirements and obtaining her PhD in English Language and Literature.

In partnership with CRIT and the REDI Council, the Games Institute is hosting a Racial Equity Board Games Panel on October 21, 2020, to kick off the Racial Equity Board Games Showcase, which will take place in Winter 2021. Click to register for the panel.

Energize is an educational tool for understanding how to plan and implement sustainable energy solutions. It represents the potential that games have for teaching people complex ideas, like environmental realities, by demonstrating the obstacles, considerations, and possibilities involved. AC Atienza, English graduate student, collaborated with the Waterloo Global Science Initiative (WGSI) via a Mitacs partnership and co-op term to turn their prototype and concept of Energize into a fully-realized game.