News

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 12^th, 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.

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.

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.