It’s official! The NOSTAGAIN Network proudly presents Love & Loss 2025: Nostalgia Symposium and Research Creation Showcase with 27 presenters and artists who will explore what the “love” and “loss” of nostalgia means for individuals, communities, and what this looks like for different fields.

In June 2024, TAG hosted the annual Canadian Game Studies Association Conference, holding four days of panels, talks, keynotes, and game studies events with game scholars from across the globe.

What is a solar game?

Is it a story? A mechanic? A hardware object? Take the prompt as broadly as you’d like! Approach the question thematically through your game’s narrative or design around speculative hardware affordances.

The goal of this experimental game jam is not to develop a polished game but rather to design small game prototypes with GB Studio and to explore speculative solar inputs.

We invite you to think outside the box—to imagine handhelds differently. How might the game change if you can only play it on a solar-powered Game Boy? What if the controls were light sensors instead of buttons? What does sustainable solar play look like?

We’re curious to see how game makers of all levels approach the theme of solarity in all its forms. There exist few explicit solar games—let’s create and imagine new ones!

Join us for a candid and open conversation about game history and immersion in the context of Montreal Game Studies, featuring Dr. Carl Therrien from Université de Montreal and Dr. Darren Wershler from Concordia University. This is an open and freeform conversation where we discuss unconventional and exploratory approaches to researching and understanding videogame history and immersion. Through these topics, we reflect on the impact of the Montreal game research scene on our own work and within game studies and associated fields to articulate the challenges and possibilities of past and future collaboration between local research groups in Montreal, across lingual, institutional, and cultural borders.

In this paper I discuss the research-creation roadmap for the SunBlock One solar Minecraft server. SunBlock was devised as an ecomodding project that simultaneously addresses two major issues in energy transition research. The first, is the relatively unaddressed yet significant contribution of personal computing and especially gaming to the global carbon footprint and the second, on the role of popular and moddable sandbox games in fostering shared alternative energy imaginaries. We do this by extending ecomodding practice to include the material conditions for gameplay itself.

SunBlock One is a Forge modded Minecraft 1.20.2 Server running on an Intel NUC computer powered by a 12v LiON battery attached to a 100W solar panel. Solar, power and temperature data are visualized in the Minecraft game interface providing players with a real-time sense of the relative energy costs of their gameplay.  Here, I will report on the work accomplished so far and open a discussion of how the project might progress over the summer as we develop new mods that might operationalize real-time energy data as game mechanics as well as thinking about larger questions around the potential for our system to counter-game Minecraft which is otherwise understood as a game about colonialist extractivism and neoliberal sensibility.

In two weeks, on March 22nd, one of the students who works with Jonathan Lessard, Shamanth, will be giving a small workshop in TAG about large language models (LLM - a kind of AI). Shamanth will be giving an overview of how transformers work and present a small notebook on how to fine tune language models for specific tasks. If you ever wanted a deeper understanding into how this kind of AI works, this workshop is for you!

As we emerge from a global period of great loss, sacrifice, and patience into a “new normal” fraught with conflict, ecological crisis, and rapid sociotechnical change…digital nostalgia has taken a turn towards encapsulation.

On social media, custom-made pop-culture dioramas are sold out to buyers eager to preserve the set of their favorite childhood video game or TV show. Meanwhile, costs of supporting digital cloud storage to hoard our pasts mount while we risk forgetting it anyway. Large language models “speak” from the frozen moments of their training data, stuck between the past and the next update. Those who itch for clairvoyance seek their own remembrance as cold comfort: in 2019, over 25,000 Koreans engaged in therapeutic “living funerals,” donning burial shrouds, posing for their own memorial portraits, and lying inside real coffins as the living chant prayers for the “dead”.

These containers of time are comparable to bottles full of ideological messages which recall a rose-tinted past, a somber future, a present tinged with grief. 

• If these items could talk, what “message in a bottle” do they have for us?

• What are the social, ecological, and cultural impacts left in the present by our pursuit of the nostalgic past or future?

• How far will we go to preview, pay, and pursue a time outside the present? 

Rather than resting on the adage, “only time will tell,” this symposium asks participants to consider what these “bottles” tell us about the future we are drifting towards.

From the publisher: Scholars, critics, and creators describe certain videogames as being “poetic,” yet what that means or why it matters is rarely discussed. In Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice, independent game designer Jordan Magnuson explores the convergences between game making and lyric poetry and makes the surprising proposition that videogames can operate as a kind of poetry apart from any reliance on linguistic signs or symbols.

You’re invited to DisinfoGames, an analog game jam hosted by Concordia University’s Disinformation and Games Research Project in partnership with ACT (Ageing + Communication + Technologies). This is a 2-day event taking place Friday May 19th and 26th from 9-4pm on the 6th floor of Concordia’s ER building (2155 Guy).

Check out The OTHER Market this Saturday April 22nd. The OTHER Market is a mini-larp locative media treasure hunt exquisite corpse gamey experience –  designed over many months by the Liveness Research group at TAG. 

The OTHER Market is part of a SSHRC project looking at ways to design what are now often called immersive experiences, so that they are truly participatory. This results in a structure which does not rely on a lot of actors (or other trained staff) to run a production and makes these kinds of projects more sustainable for small teams and companies with modest budgets.

Enculturing Anti-Racism, Decolonization, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion in Games Research & Creation

Creating opportunities for meaningful equitable change in the games industry requires active and inclusive community-building. As a part of this mission, The Games Institute created the following speaker and workshop series to centre the voices of individuals from marginalized groups. This includes, but is not limited to, persons who are Black and/or Indigenous or otherwise racialized, women-identified, LGBTQ2S+, disabled and/or neurodivergent, and people from other under-represented communities.

As interactivity has become an ever more important part of the theme park experience, interactive technologies deployed within parks have gravitated towards only a handful of proven platforms, eschewing thematic fit in favour of design expediency. This presentation will outline an ongoing research project examining the motivations for themed tangible interactivity, and how designers can improve guest experience through a sensitivity to the specificity of audience aspirations and iconic affordances drawn from transmedial sources.

We often hear makers say, “we wanted our game to resonate with audiences.” Likewise, we as audiences often express our recognition or enjoyment of a media product by stating how it resonates with us. However, what audiences and makers mean by resonance is not always the same, especially when it comes to AAA game studio productions involving gigantic scale and investment.

The GameBling Game Jam is back for a second edition and it’s all about luck this time!

The outcome of some gambling games relies on pure probability (i.e., slot machines, lotteries), while others involve a bit of skill (e.g., poker, mahjong). But for many gamblers, the odds of winning are also up to luck.

Luck is the magic that takes gambling from a question of probabilities to the perception of something that can be controlled. Perceived this way, luck can be influenced through ritualistic behaviors (think of superstitions like touching a ‘lucky’ four-leaf clover).

Luck is an intangible force, but also something that is perceived to be inherent in people, objects, and practices. Given these qualities, how do game designers play with luck?

LOSTAGAIN is a hybrid gathering of scholars and artists thinking about the tools we use today to access the nostalgia of our past that asks, “What if we could use these tools of forgetting the losses of a past to help us remember how to prevent more of them in the future?” Created by TAG student Richy Srirachanikorn, the crux of this symposium is to investigate how productivity can be achieved with the possibilities of video games.

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Specifically, how can the emotions and emulations of a lost PAST in video games be used to prevent a FUTURE of repeating losses? If nostalgic gaming means we are “LostAgain” in our technologies, then how can we ensure what is “Found” on the other end of the experience may contribute to social kindness, collective responsibility, or simply, hope? Check out their website for more info and registration!