News

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.

GamesInstitute premier of Water, Water Everywhere game

On December 2nd, Drs. Brianna Wiens (English Language and Literature) and Daniel Harley (Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business) presented their work and research in areas of feminist and responsible design.

Canadian Cap and Trade Simulation (CCTS) is a serious game/simulation designed to teach undergraduate Chemical Engineering and Environmental Studies students about carbon tax and trade systems in Canada created by PhD candidate Alex Fleck and Dr. Jason Grove.

Dr. Kevin Harrigan is a founding member of the Games Institute, the director of the Knowledge Translation Stream at UWaterloo, and contact person for the Gambling Research Lab. Dr. Harrigan's present research focuses on promoting healthier gambling by developing methods to make gamblers aware of their statistical odds.

This week  on FPS, we have a commentary from Matthew Schwager that approaches Silent Hill 2 as a game about mapping and uses that lens to explore its themes of trauma and the influence butoh, the Japanese dance of shadows, had on the game's design.

This week in First Person Scholar, Dylan Armitage from the University of Calgary contributes an essay on the use of sound in Dark Souls and how it affects the player experience.

“When Dark Souls does use music, it uses it to say something about the space which it occupies as well as the characters and expected actions within those spaces.”  

Read the full essay here.