News

Games Institute Executive Director Neil Randall and other representatives from The University of Waterloo are working together on a trans-Atlantic collaboration with The University of Warwick, focusing on collegiate esports.

Members of the two schools have been meeting to share their experiences and discuss ways that they can help each other innovate and grow their esports programs.

UW Professor Ian Rowlands, Associate Vice-President, International, explains,

On February 10, the Critical Media Lab with support from members of Feminist Think Tank and the GI held a virtual data jam and discussion on the issues of big data, machine learning, and how discrimination is encoded into our technology.

The Winter semester GI Jam was hosted as part of the Global Game Jam from January 26 – 30. Game makers of all ages and abilities came together to improve their game design skills. The four-day long jam provided tutorials and discussions on how to brainstorm, prototype, and develop games. Game Jam captains Alexander Glover (PhD) and Arielle Grinberg (PhD) led participants through paper prototypes and game concepts and helped them explore game mechanics, narrative, and artwork in addition to programming. At the end of the event, two games were created and presented.

The virtual reality experience “Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation” (DOHR) was recently peer-reviewed in Reviews in Digital Humanities volume 3 issue 1 on January 18^th, 2022.

The DOHR project uses VR to explore the Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children (NSHCC) as part of the curriculum for Grade 11 Canadian History students in Nova Scotia. NSHCC was opened in 1921 and operated until the 1980s and former Residents have come forward with stories of the physical, psychological, and sexual abuse they suffered there as children.

On December 2nd Matt Parker, a professor at the NYU Games Center, presented his work focusing on games and climate change to the researchers at the GI. Professor Parker taught the GI’s members about “carbon removal”, a technology that uses machines to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Parker emphasized that because emissions goals have not been met, even if people never released any more CO2 again, we would still need to remove carbon from the atmosphere to survive.

After a long period without visitors due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Games Institute (GI) was happy to welcome Associate Minister Kaleed Rasheed to the GI facilities on November 9th as part of his tour of the UW's main and Stratford campuses.

On June 12-16, 2021, the Games Institute (GI) held its inaugural International Conference on Games and Narrative. This 5-day conference welcomed participants and speakers from 47 universities, 28 of which were from outside of North America, some as far as Australia and South East Asia. Presentations included scholars at the forefront of games studies and offered a diversity of ideas and engaging discussions with keynote speakers, including Dr. Elizabeth LaPensée, Dr. Souvik Mukherjee, Dr. Clara Fernández-Vara, Dr. Jan-Noel Thön, Dr. Astrid Ensslin, and Dr. Kishonna Gray.

Congratulations to Mara Gagiu for winning the Best Student Research Poster at the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games Online. Her poster entitled "MMPX Style-Preserving Pixel Art Magnification" presented her research about the MMPX algorithm with GI faculty member Dr.

Dakota Pinheiro, English PhD student researching 21st century American protest and crisis literatures, has been awarded the Jack Gray Graduate Fellowship Award from the Department of English Language and Literature. This scholarship is awarded once a year to a full-time graduate student based on academic excellence. Read about the award here.