The Canadian Game Studies Association Conference 2024
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.
Unity Dialogue Workshop Featuring Owen Hellum
Descant (https://omch.tech/descant) is a Unity Dialogue System plugin designed to be easy to pick up and use, but with room for growth and customization. It was developed for a CART Independent Study, with the goal to address the missing niche for dialogue systems between ones that are enormous and expensive, and those that are tiny and un-featured. It uses a node-based dialogue creation system, and makes use of the Unity Component system concept for enhancing such nodes. The workshop will involve a simple introduction to the system and explanation of the Component framework, followed by a few hours for experimentation. It’ll function like a tutorial and something like a miniature game jam. At the end, some time will be reserved for feedback and improvement comments.
A Montreal Game Studies Conversation With Dr. Carl Therrien and Dr. Darren Wershler
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.
Materialist Ecomodding and Picopower Logics: The Case of SunBlock One, a Solar Minecraft Server
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.
TAG and the Solar Eclipse
Transformers and Large Language Models with Shamanth R. Nayak K.
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!
Nostagain: Time in a Bottle Symposium
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.