In Spring 2022, UWaterloo welcomed thirty-four Ukrainian students whose, education had been disrupted by the war, to continue their studies at Waterloo. They were sponsored by the Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute (Waterloo.AI).
Before coming to Waterloo, Dr. Hector Perez held positions as a research assistant at a Mathematics Research Centre, as a project manager and later as executive assistant to the Vice-President of Administration and Finance at the University of Guanajuato in Mexico. He has travelled extensively (often teaching wherever he goes) and speaks five languages, in addition to understanding a few more.
Each year many GI faculty and student members present at the Canadian Game Studies Association conference, better known as CGSA.
GI faculty member Gerald Voorhees is currently CGSA president and organized this year’s conference with the assistance of the CGSA executive.
This year nine GI members and Alumni presented a wide array of research ranging from the games industry and education to the depiction of animals in games.
GI members also participated as reviewers, panel moderators, and adjudicators for CGSA’s best paper competition.
Fifteen Games Institute members presented at CHI 2022 (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) both online and from the conference venue in New Orleans Louisiana from April 30th-May 5th. Research topics included realism in games, VR, smart glasses, livestreaming, and more!
Excitingly, this year’s CHI included an opening Keynote by GI Advisory Board member, Dr. Kishonna Gray (University of Kentucky), one of the world’s foremost experts on the interactions between race, gender, games, and technology.
If Emma Vossen’s name sounds familiar, it’s probably because she is one of the earliest members of the Games Institute. She recalls the conversations in the basement of the PAS building on campus or the Rum Runner bar in downtown Kitchener (in 2013!) with Dr. Neil Randall and other graduate students about what the GI could be. After defending her dissertation in 2018 and setting out from Waterloo, she has returned to her old stomping grounds for the next stage of her career as the GI’s Research Communications Officer.
Games Institute (GI) and Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology (WIN) researchers have been working together on strategies to better educate the public about how the application of nanotechnology (the manipulation of materials on an atomic or molecular scale) impacts our daily lives. The first of these projects focuses on educating the public about how DNA-based nasal sprays can be used as intranasal vaccines during this crucial time.
To celebrate the launch of their edited collection Networked Feminisms: Activist Assemblies and Digital Practices, editors Drs. Shana MacDonald (Communication Arts), Bri Wiens (Communication Arts), Milena Radzikowska (Mount Royal University), and Michelle MacArthur (University of Windsor) invited their fellow co-authors to discuss the intersections between feminist theories and digital technologies with researchers at the Games Institute.
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.