News

Dr. Peyman Azad Khaneghah, Occupational Therapist and postdocrotal fellow at UW, created a health app rating system entitled Alberta Rating Index for Apps (ARIA) to help people sort through the 300,000+ health apps on the market. In an article by Agewell, Canada's technology and aging network, Dr. Khaneghah explains the intention and design driving the rating system project. 

GI faculty member Dr. Muhammad Umair Shah from the Department of Management Sciences is a co-author on the recently published paper in IEEE Access, “The Role of Personality Factors Influencing Consumer Video Game Engagement in Young Adults: A Study on Generic Games” with authors Amir Zaib Abbasi, Umair Rehman, Helmut Hlavacs, Ding Hooi Ting, and Saima Nisar.

Updates from the First Person Scholar Editorial Staff:

It’s March, and that means spring is almost here! Though, for us in Ontario, it also means we’ll be experiencing “second winter” before summer mysteriously appears. And with a new season comes a new FPS update! We’re very excited to announce and highlight our newest and our upcoming projects geared towards expanding the Games Studies community into other spaces and/or conversations.

Dr. Elizabeth Caravella, GI member and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies at York University, authored a chapter in the new edited collection “The Ethics of Playing, Researching, and Teaching Games in the Writing Classroom”.

Pallavi Sodhi, Research Intern for the Council for Responsible Innovation and Technology (CRIT) and Dr. Jason Lajoie, Research Associate for CRIT, gave a guest lecture about inclusive board game design for students at Branksome Hall in Toronto. Read a summary of the presentation on our blog.

Pi and Power (Π ∩ ϟ) was awarded $100,000 from the Velocity Fund Pitch Competition to advance their research into medical devices/applications, neuroscience and bioinformatics. Π ∩ ϟ was founded by GI members Dr. Janelle Resch and Eric Ocelewski. Janelle is the Chief Executive Officer, Eric is the Chief Technology and Architect Officer, and GI faculty member Dr.

Dr. Daniel Harley, GI faculty member and Assistant Professor at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, co-authored an article entitled, "Sound Beginnings: Learning, Communicating, and Making Sense with Sound" with Drs. Kurt Thumlert and Jason Nolan.

Fempower.tech published an article entitled "A call for respect, inclusion, fairness, and transparency in SIGCHI" for the Feminisms in Design special issue of ACM's Interactions magazine. The article advocates for structural change in SIGCHI that recognizes the interlocking nature of marginalizations:

Allen Bevans, User Experience (UX) Research Manager for Stadia at Google, presented "Building User Experiences for a cloud-native gaming platform" for Dr. Lennart Nacke's Design and User Experience of Interactive Games class, DAC 305.

Allen Bevans provided insights gained from his experience working as a games user researcher and UX researcher first at Electronic Arts, then Google play, to his current position with Google Stadia, the cloud gaming platform.