News

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.

Lillian A. Black, English PhD student researching queer feminist theory in media, has been awarded the W.K. Thomas Award from the Department of English Language and Literature. This scholarship is awarded annually to a full-time graduate student based on academic excellence.

Jenn Rickert, English PhD researcher and Community Experience Curator for the Games Institute, has been awarded the David Nimmo English Graduate Scholarship from the Department of English Language and Literature. This scholarship is awarded to a full-time graduate student based on academic excellence.

Jonathan Baltrusaitis, English PhD student and Instructor at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, has been awarded the Lea Vogel-Nimmo English Graduate Professionalization Award from the Department of English Language and Literature. This award is given to a graduate student on the basis of academic excellence and merit of professionalization activities.