Events

Join us for a virtual panel with three researchers about their work and research in Accessibility in Digital Games and Virtual Reality. The panel will include Triskal deHaven, Dr. Katta Spiel, and Dr. Cayley McArthur. Triskal deHaven will lead the panel with frequently asked questions about Virtual Reality and Accessibility, research studies within higher level education, and some of the gaps in Accessibility that students could pursue. Students are encouraged to ask their own questions about these topics during the event.

A discussion of the promise and peril of POC video game character voice acting, focusing primarily on the connections of Black male anger and Black fatherhood in God of War through the voice work of TC Carson and Christopher Judge, contextualized against the audio Brownface of two voice POC women characters in Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves.

We are increasingly asked to envision and implement respectful and non-extractive research involving marginalized communities. But we are rarely challenged to bring those principles to bear in our own research groups, where asymmetries of institutional power between colleagues, students, and staff are normalized. This interdisciplinary panel will discuss how to foster and maintain just relationships among researchers, with a focus on the principles and practices animating non-extractive student-supervisor relationships.

Dr. Bird will emphasize the two types of language taking place in video games: mechanical, coded language, and visual, representational language. She presents the importance of teaching the history of Indigenous representation in games and will break down various examples from Custer’s Revenge to the Mortal Kombat and Red Dead Redemption series to demonstrate these types of gamic language.

This event corresponds with an in-person workshop. Separate registration required and seating is limited.

Due to technological advancements, communicating with computer systems using natural language has become a casual phenomenon. Speech-based systems, like Siri or Cortana, have become widely popular among people due to their convenience. Speech interaction encompasses a social component as it reflects the fundamental human capacity for communication and enables interpersonal engagement through verbal exchange. This makes human-agent interaction an essential topic of research in the field of human-computer interaction.

This panel highlights emerging scholars in Black game studies. Panelists will present recent and/or ongoing work, sharing a glimpse of the emerging research questions animating the field. Topics include Black worldbuilding in and across games (Fletcher), perceptions of Black male exceptionalism in gaming cultures (Dashiell), and the relationship between avatar representation and Black user experience in social VR (DeVeaux).

With recent waves of layoffs, high-profile workplace harassment cases, and a notoriously short career length for gender minorities and people of colour, the transition of new workers into the game industry involves navigating a spate of barriers to equity and success that have been understudied in academic research. This panel talks about "The First Three Years", an ongoing longitudinal study of graduates of game programs in Canada and the United States, following the journey of 207 students as they move into the game industry.

What if we could make complex social and cultural questions playable? And what if we could do so through interactions with familiar digital interfaces set in alternative presents and near futures? The work I will discuss sits at the intersection between the design traditions of speculative and critical design on the one hand, and the philosophies and best practices of game design, playful media and interaction design on the other.

Children are seeking their place in contemporary digital cultures, notably through the use of mobile devices, playing a variety of games with friends and accessing social networking platforms, resulting in interconnected performances in the digital setting. Therefore, it was necessary to base it on connective ethnography to track the interactions of a group of children between physical and digital spaces during playtime with peers.

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This event will be held in HYBRID format. Please join us in-person at the Games Institute, EC1 at the University of Waterloo or virtually through Microsoft Teams.

Speaker: Bruna Oliveira

Bruna is a Ph.D. candidate in Education at the Federal University of Sergipe and a visiting researcher at the University of Waterloo. She has been researching topics involving children's engagement with digital games, children's playful experiences with digital technologies, children as content producers, and research methodologies involving children in the digital era.