Events

Come and discover the interactive and immersive technologies research conducted in the Games Institute's collaborative interdisciplinary environment!

Anyone interested in the research happening at the Games Institute (GI) is more than welcome to come and explore our space during the Open House. We especially encourage anyone considering or currently pursuing graduate school or a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Waterloo to come and learn about the work conducted at the GI over the past ten years.

Please join us at the Games Institute or virtually via Teams for a panel discussion on games and education with Drs. Jason Hawreliak (Brock University, Waterloo English Language and Literature Alum), Kristina R.

Join us at the Games Institute to hear two talks about exciting research from new Waterloo professors and GI members!

You can watch the event in person at the Games Institute or online via Teams.

In an effort to save on waste, we encourage you to bring a mug with you if you would like to have tea or coffee.

On February 2nd- February 5th, 2023, join us for the GLOBAL GAME JAM! Build a game with your team, join a thriving community & have lots of fun over the weekend!

WINTER 2023 Global Jam

Start: Time TBD, Thursday, February 2nd

End: Time TBD, Sunday, February 5th 

Join Elaine Gómez as she will describe the importance of representation in games and digital media. She will speak to how gaming has the power to destroy the perpetuation of stereotypical perceptions and will explain how games can be designed to create social impact in meaningful ways.

Games research is slowly diversifying in matters of representation as well as accessibility related investigations. Similarly, a materialist and embodied understanding of play (also digitally) seeps in more on a theoretical basis. However, we need to critically examine what kind of bodies are invited to participate in play and how. Where games and play are mostly conceptualized as entertainment for the majority of bodies, disabled people are often relegated to playing for  externally motivated purposes that are often driven by deficit oriented medical models of disability. Using the theory on the surrogate body in play, they illustrate how it can be instrumental to critically engage with norms governing digital play and identifying design opportunities playing with said bodily norms to holistically cater to disabled audiences. They do so by focusing on the critical analytical category of disability not just through an access oriented lens per se, but rather to bring principles of disability justice to play.

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.