News

The City as Platform lab (cityasplatform.com), an associate lab of the Games Institute, published a Whitepaper to present their findings from their "Right to the Smart City" symposium that took place March, 2018 at Harvard University. Their work aims to help municipalities, experts, and community members plan smart cities together.

John Yoon, GI resident and English PhD student, presented a poster at this year's University of California Esports Conference (UCIESC), that took place Oct. 11-12, 2018. His poster examined the cultural practice of sports writing in esports.

Yoon's work examines and analyzes narratives in esports writing. He argues that esports writing is a mode of technical communication that accommodates non-expert audiences through narratives.

Steve Wilcox, GI alumnus and Assistant Professor of Game Design and Development at Laurier, presented a paper at the International Academic Conference on Meaningful Play in East Lansing, Michigan on Oct. 11.

Dr. Ali Mazalek joins us today to give a Brown Bag talk on human cognition and computational media.

The talk will be from 1- 2pm in the Games Institute Collaboration space - refreshments will be provided. For more event details, click here.

Justin Carpenter, GI resident and First Person Scholar Editor, will be presenting a paper at this year's Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference in Toronto, November 15-18. His paper looks at how the games Mountain (2014) and Everything (2017) by Irish artist David OReilly challenge players to reconsider notions of consciousness, things, and nature.

Carpenter argues that both games are "meditations on games as a medium":

Séamas Weech, Jessy Varghese, and Michael Barnett-Cowan, members of the VR working group at the Games Institute, co-authored a paper entitled "Estimating the sensorimotor components of cybersickness" published in the Journal of Neurophysiology.

Their results caught the attention of many, many news outlets who were picking the story up and claiming that UW researchers are on the cusp of curing cybersickness. Here are just a few...

Games Institute alumnus Jonathan Rodriguez joined us September 21 to give a Brown Bag talk on working in the VR film industry. Rodriguez has been working at Felix & Paul studios, a VR film making start-up based in Montreal, since 2017. In this talk, Jonathan discussed his role as a software developer in a creative industry.

Gada Jane, Research Associate at the GI, hosted a VR storytelling workshop in partnership with Michael Wheeler, Artistic Director at SpiderWebShow Performance. The two-day workshop took place Sept 14-15.

Jane and Wheeler invited playwrights and actors from the GTA and KW regions to learn about VR and develop strategies for using the medium to tell stories. Participants entered the workshop with little-to-no experience with VR and by the time they left they had produced their own VR performance.

Emma Vossen will be speaking at the Queerness and Games Conference in Montreal (QGCon will take place September 29 and 30). Her talk entitled "Queering the Links Between Sexual Orientation and the Female Gamer Identity" explores how sexuality interacts with female gamer identity formation.