Events

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.

An enduring appeal of interactive entertainment media such as video games is that they invite the user to co-create the on-screen experience. More than an invitation, these experiences demand near-constant attention from players—and do so on myriad dimensions, including cognitive (problem-solving), emotional (affective reactions), apparatus (control or interface intuitiveness), exertional (physical activity) and social (attending to social agents).

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.

Spectating digital games can be exciting. However, due to its vicarious nature, spectators often wish to engage in the gameplay beyond just watching and cheering. To blur the boundaries between spectators and players, we propose a novel approach called "Fused Spectatorship", where spectators watch their hands play games by loaning bodily control to a computational Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) system.

Since the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985, Asia has remained the center of the manufacturing of video game hardware (China and Southeast Asia), the center of game innovation and the birthplace of most game genres (Japan), and the largest reliable resource of consumers (nearly half of game players reside in Asia).

This panel highlights emerging scholars in Asian/American games studies. Panelists will present recent and/or ongoing work, sharing a glimpse of the emerging research questions animating the field. Topics include He’s analysis of NPC discourse, particularly the phenomena of NPC streaming, as an Asiatic form, Ganzon’s examination of Filipino political activism in digital games that extend public and community spaces, and Howard’s inquiry on 'region locking' in online games as racial practices.

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.

This is a free, virtual event! Registration required.

In this workshop, members of the worker cooperative game studio SoftChaos will discuss how building structures of care and accessibility into the team's day-to-day working environment can strengthen the creative process of developing games, and will lead participants in interactive exercises to inspire them to bring similar ideas to their own work contexts. The workshop will take place online over two hours.

How should we conduct research in cooperation and partnership with Indigenous communities? What does it mean for Indigenous scholars and students to do research within the colonial structures and settler epistemologies of Western universities? The panelists, consisting of Indigenous students and researchers as well as settlers working with and for Indigenous communities, will share their perspectives and experiences on these questions. They will begin a conversation to help us consider these and other issues related to Indigeneity in the context of Western academic cultures and practices, and invite questions and discussion to develop our capacity to Indigenize research and scholarship.

The utilization of physiological measures in games and virtual reality (VR) has garnered significant attention in recent years. This hybrid panel covers the exploration of biometrics (or physiological measures) in game user research, driven by advancements in sensing technologies and the increased accessibility of signal processing tools.