News

Justin Carpenter, GI resident and First Person Scholar Editor, will be presenting a paper at this year's Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference in Toronto, November 15-18. His paper looks at how the games Mountain (2014) and Everything (2017) by Irish artist David OReilly challenge players to reconsider notions of consciousness, things, and nature.

Carpenter argues that both games are "meditations on games as a medium":

Séamas Weech, Jessy Varghese, and Michael Barnett-Cowan, members of the VR working group at the Games Institute, co-authored a paper entitled "Estimating the sensorimotor components of cybersickness" published in the Journal of Neurophysiology.

Their results caught the attention of many, many news outlets who were picking the story up and claiming that UW researchers are on the cusp of curing cybersickness. Here are just a few...

Games Institute alumnus Jonathan Rodriguez joined us September 21 to give a Brown Bag talk on working in the VR film industry. Rodriguez has been working at Felix & Paul studios, a VR film making start-up based in Montreal, since 2017. In this talk, Jonathan discussed his role as a software developer in a creative industry.

Gada Jane, Research Associate at the GI, hosted a VR storytelling workshop in partnership with Michael Wheeler, Artistic Director at SpiderWebShow Performance. The two-day workshop took place Sept 14-15.

Jane and Wheeler invited playwrights and actors from the GTA and KW regions to learn about VR and develop strategies for using the medium to tell stories. Participants entered the workshop with little-to-no experience with VR and by the time they left they had produced their own VR performance.

Emma Vossen will be speaking at the Queerness and Games Conference in Montreal (QGCon will take place September 29 and 30). Her talk entitled "Queering the Links Between Sexual Orientation and the Female Gamer Identity" explores how sexuality interacts with female gamer identity formation.

GI resident Robert Gauthier will be giving a GRADtalk about social networks on September 27 in Needles Hall. Robert is a PhD candidate for Public Health and Health Systems. His research contributes to the fields of HCI and public health because he investigates how online communities support sensitive issues such as addiction

Play-By-Post Roleplaying: Ludic Structures, Creative Play, and Queer Identity

Shawn Dorey, alumnus of the Games Institute, and Sarah Stang, PhD candidate in the Communication and Culture joint program at York University and Ryerson University, will be presenting their co-authored research at the Queerness and Games Conference in Montreal, September 29-30, 2018. The two plan to explore the connections between play and queer identity development through play-by-post-roleplaying (PBPRP).

Play the Knave allows players to become an actor in a Shakespearian play without having to worry about trivial things like experience, skill, or preparation. The game was developed by faculty and students in the ModLab at the University of California, Davis, in partnership with the Games Institute through IMMERSe.