On July 5th, GI membersDr. John Muñoz (J&F Alliance), Dr. Lili Liu (Dean of Faculty of Health), and Dr. Michael Barnett Cowan (Kinesiology and Health Sciences) came together to discuss the overlap between using games in areas of health.
Games Institute faculty member Ben Thompson (School of Optometry and Vision Science) was recently named a 2022 University Research Chair. Dr Thompson is the CEO and Scientific Director of the Center for Eye and Vision Research, and his research focuses on human brain plasticity and visual cortex particularly in promoting plasticity to improve outcomes for patients with brain-based visual disorders.
Games Institute PhD student and Research Communications Writer Sid Heeg (Environment) delivered a guest talk to the UW Staff Association about COVID-19 misinformation on May 12th, 2022.
Heeg’s talk Malicious Messaging: How Misinformation Operates Online covered how misinformation forms, how it differs from disinformation and how it appears online using examples from real COVID-19 misinformation that has been spread on social media.
They argued that the “COVID-19 Pandemic has made it clear that we are living in a time of rapid misinformation and distrust in public and government institutions.
The Games Institute (GI) is currently accepting applications for our first-ever seed funding competition! Both students and faculty are eligible to apply for this funding of up to $15,000 per proposal.
This program is in place to promote interdisciplinary collaborations between interdisciplinary researchers and to encourage researchers to reach out to colleagues outside their home disciplines with whom they have not worked previously.
Dr. Bo Ruberg presented on their upcoming book Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies on April 18. The virtual talk explored the histories and stories surrounding the interactive and playful sexual technologies. Ruberg’s research includes the complex history of sex dolls and robots and how that history has been misrepresented, often pointing back to rudimentary sex dolls supposedly made by European sailors.
Professor Darren Wershler spoke to Sabrina Marandola for CBC Radio on March 14th 2022, about teaching his class “Video Games and/as Theory” at Concordia University within Minecraft during the pandemic.
Games Institute postdoctoral fellow Dr. John Muñoz and NASA Distinguished Research Associate Dr. Alan Pope are presenting their research on biofeedback and games at the Games Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 21st.
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.