News

As previously reported on the IMMERSe website: http://immerse-network.com/news-chi-play-2014-call-for-papers/ & the CHI PLAY website.

About the Conference

Brian Cullen’s You Are Not a Banana game is now available to buy on Desura ($2.99 USD). The game has a average rating of 7.4/10 and has drawn a lot of positive feedback.

Chantel Pilon, UW athelete of the week, set five personal bests in the pentathlon and came away with a new Waterloo record after competing at the SPIRE Division 1 NCAA Invite in Geneva, Ohio. Her total score places Pilon as the second best in the OUA and fifth in the CIS. She also participated in the women’s 4x400m, where the team has the relay time ranked third in the OUA and seventh in the CIS. More details can be found here. 

Denis Dyack coming to University of Waterloo

The Denis Dyack talk scheduled for Oct 29th, 2013 has been rescheduled to January 16th, 2014. 

Why Gamers Can't Stop Playing First Person Shooters

“Video games are essentially about decision-making,” Lennart Nacke, the director of the Games and Media Entertainment Research Laboratory at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, told me. “First-person shooters put these tasks on speed.

Meaghan Daly, president of Forward Vision Games, is utilizing online games to teach financial skills to students. She creates cloud-based financial strategy games geared to teaching concepts such a budgeting, risk management and aspects of personal finance.

“They get to see how they have more financial choices as they make better financial decisions,” Daly said.

Read more about the article here: 

Recruitment Award for Doctoral Candidates in Digital Game Studies at Concordia University, Montreal

SSHRC will look to identify future challenge areas for Canada in an evolving global context that are likely to emerge in five, 10 and 20 years, and to which the social sciences and humanities research community could contribute its knowledge, talent and expertise.  Steve Wilcox, University of Waterloo, is amongst one of the panel members in a discussion at CIGI  series of presentations on the six future challenge areas at universities across the country.

Volunteer Game Programmer Wanted

David Sonnenschein, author of “Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice and Sound Effects in Cinema” is developing a prototype of the music game 3 DEAF MICE with interns from Berklee College of Music, and seeking a volunteer who has the skill to program the interactive interface. (We will have paid positions in the future once the funding is in place.) Unity 2D seems the most likely program that we'll be using for the final game, although other programming languages might be useful for the prototype stage.