Neil Randall, PhD
Neil Randall promotes interdisciplinary research by supporting researchers in launching collaborative initiatives and accessing resources, and establishing partnerships between academic, industry, and non-profit partners. These collaborations and partnerships fulfill complementary goals, including the advancement, dissemination, and exchange of knowledge. Highlights of my work include: co-founding The Games Institute and serving as its inaugural director; being project director and principal investigator for the IMMERSe network; serving on multiple boards and committees at The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo); and getting involved in initiatives that promote opportunities for individuals and industries, such as my work with UWaterloo’s co-op. I promote multidisciplinary research through my many service roles at the University of Waterloo (UWaterloo) by: supporting researchers in launching collaborative initiatives and accessing resources; and establishing partnerships between academic, industry, and non-profit partners. These collaborations and partnerships fulfill complementary goals, including the advancement, dissemination, and exchange of knowledge.
...supporting multiple research teams and individual researchers in launching collaborative initiatives and accessing resources. In my administrative role as Executive Director of The Games Institute (GI), as well as through my service on the University of Waterloo‘s (UWaterloo) Senate, UWaterloo’s Board of Governors, and UWaterloo’s Research Leaders’ Council, I work on connecting researchers from disparate disciplines for collaborative research and establishing partnerships between academic, industry, and non-profit partners. These mutually beneficial collaborations and partnerships can fulfill complementary goals, including the advancement, dissemination, and exchange of knowledge.
Emma Vossen, PhD
Emma Vossen is a writer and researcher with a PhD from the University of Waterloo. She is the co-author and co-editor of the book Feminism in Play (Palgrave, 2018) and Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be (Punctum, 2025). Much of her writing looks at the intersections of politics and games. Her most recent article, “Tom Nook, Capitalist or Comrade?” discusses the Animal Crossing games in the context of the contemporary housing crisis.
Vossen has been interviewed about her work by Wired, Macleans Magazine, the Washington Post, and Electronic Gaming Monthly. In 2016, CBC Ideas made a 40-minute radio documentary about her research that was broadcast nationally.
After completing two postdoctoral research fellowships at York University and the University of British Columbia, Vossen returned to Waterloo where she is the Knowledge Mobilization and Research Impact Officer at the University of Waterloo's Games Institute.
...from the last decade to anyone, they would never guess that all my degrees are technically from departments of English Language and Literature. This is because I have always performed interdisciplinary research, drawing from any discipline I see fit to better understand the intersection between politics and media, with a focus on video games. It feels illogical to me to study technology from a single discipline. Collaborative interdisciplinary and intersectoral research is the only path forward for those looking to address the complexities of our digital lives and digital future. I am always more interested in sharing values, not disciplines, with my collaborators. Games and narrative are fields that can only be understood when researchers from all backgrounds and perspectives are included and, most importantly, brought together in a productive dialogue with each other.
Pamela Maria Schmidt, M.A.
Pamela Maria Schmidt is a graduate from the University of Waterloo’s “English, Experimental Digital Media” program. She is currently the Interdisciplinary Project and Communications Manager at the Games Institute, and was previously a narrative designer, developer, and project manager on the knowledge mobilization game Illuminate.
Schmidt’s research interests like in ambient and apocalyptic rhetoric, the use of dread by mass media, and climate change. Her Master’s thesis “The Garden of Humanity: The Manifestation of Hope in (Post) Apocalyptic Video Games” explored how rhetoric functions in apocalyptic video games, while consolidating technological and environmental anxiety.
Schmidt’s current research explores the use of horror as a communication tool in video games, adaptations, and monstrous representations. This work is forthcoming in “Horror as Medium: An Examination of Environmental Horror in Video Games” co-written with S. Heeg as part of the collection Epistemic Genres: New Formations in Digital Game Genres (Bloomsbury).
...has always enriched my work by collaborating with those from other disciplines, as opposed to working against them. Games are multi-modal, massive media productions that collects numerous stars to create a larger constellation—interactive storytelling experiences with the purpose to educate, inform, and feel.
I believe that the future of innovative research, which can address real world problems, is inextricably tied to interdisciplinary research. I am one of the very few highly specialized staff at the University of Waterloo who create solutions to support multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and cross-sectoral research on a daily basis and I have
Geneva M. Smith, PhD
Geneva M. Smith is a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Waterloo in the Faculties of Arts and Engineering. The core goal of her research is to examine the relationship between the programmed system, user interaction, and a user's perception of Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) to guide IDN development processes and tools for satisfying pro-social learning experiences.
She received her Ph.D. in Software Engineering from McMaster in 2023, where she worked in the G-ScalE Lab developing methods for acknowledging and limiting subjectivity in Computational Model of Emotion (CME) development for Non-Player Characters (NPCs) to improve their reusability, maintainability, and verifiability.
...every culture and group has some form of both in their history, using them to share experiences and knowledge that any single individual could never accumulate on their own. This is also true for research: it is impossible for any single discipline to address it all. This is why interdisciplinarity is essential. We need insights from different perspectives and schools of thought to understand the whole picture, and I strongly believe that failing to embrace those outside your own expertise will only hold you back.
My current research on Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) would be impossible to even start tackling without the collected knowledge of researchers from STEM, arts, and humanities. Fostering a community where interdisciplinarity thrives would only broaden my understanding of IDNs' potential to represent, share, and celebrate diverse cultures and our shared humanity so that we can face the "wicked challenges" of our world as a united front.
Sasha Soraine, PhD
Sasha Soraine is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in HCI at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on understanding the complexities of player experiences through the intersection of game design and human-computer interactions.
Sasha completed her PhD in Software Engineering at McMaster University. Her doctoral work (“Mechanical Experience, Competency Profiles, and Jutsu”), examines the design of gameplay challenges in terms of human cognitive and motor abilities for the purposes of modeling a player’s mechanical experience of a game. Sasha’s most recent publication, “Pandemic Gaming and Wholesome Philosophy: How New Players Reimaged Gaming Practices”, examines how cultural notions of hardcore and casual have changed to create new gaming identities and practices.
Sasha's current work with Dr. Melissa Rogerson aims to understand the effects of technology at a gaming table through hybrid board game experiences. Through studying player experiences and game design decisions, they look to understand meaningful hybridity in games.
...as a human-computer interaction researcher, it seems apparent that studying player interactions with games requires synthesizing knowledge from computer science, software engineering, and psychology. But as my work on player experiences has developed, I understand that realistically modelling the player-game system requires more than this. I need to understand more about the player; I need to draw insights from various realms of critical studies to understand the elements they bring with them to the game. I need to understand more about the game; I need to see how the structure of narratives and art evoke emotions and guide behaviour. Most importantly I need to merge these understandings, to get a sense of how experiences may be architected and situated in contexts. A game is more than its individual components; and experience is more than a single discipline can model