Did you know there were anime games made in Montreal? Come meet CyberConnect2 (Naruto STORM, Demon Slayer) VP Taichiro Miyazaki and art director Yohei Ishibashi at an event co-hosted by TAG and the Concordia Game Development Club! CyberConnect2 will introduce their studio, the artistic ins and outs of anime game development in Japan and Montreal, and their experience with indie publishing.

Are educational games bad?

Educational games are made with different goals than most commercial titles. How does this help and hinder these games and the design processes behind them? The Bad Game Arcade investigates these and other question with interviews, roundtable discussions, panels, and games made for learning. Many, many games made for learning. Educational games are being made by non-profits, universities, libraries, and game companies. It’s time for them to be talking and showing their work to each other–and us. Come check out presentations and play some games in 4th Space from January 23-27! For details about who’s talking, what you’ll be playing, and other programming, please visit the event’s web site.

The Bad Game Arcade is organized by former teacher and Concordia PhD candidate Scott DeJong, with support from the Concordia Public Scholars Program and the Technoculture, Art, and Games Research Centre.

Introduction to Coding
A hands-on workshop series that teaches the fundamentals of programming in a fun and interactive manner through customizable examples that explore shape, color, animation, and user interaction using C# and the Unity development platform. The only prerequisites are a computer with a recent version of Unity installed: https://unity.com/download.

This workshop will cover character animation basics in Unreal Engine, and is aimed at beginners on the topic. A basic understanding of what rigging & skinning is is assumed but not required. Beginner-level experience with Unreal Engine is highly recommended.

In the workshop we will cover importing a provided skinned character into Unreal, some of the basics of Unreal’s control rig, how to add the character to a level sequencer and play animation on it. We will take the Unreal default third person project and replace the mannequin within it with our new character. We will briefly cover what animation state-flow and runtime animation systems are on a theoretical level. The exercise should serve as a good primer for beginners to research animation topics more in depth on their own.

This chapter investigates the developer’s moderation of Overwatch by analyzing the game’s official Blizzard forum discussions (2016–2019). The moderation put in place by Blizzard allows players to address, for instance, toxicity by reporting or avoiding players, while also rewarding positive play experiences. By analyzing the player discourse around these moderation systems, the data gathered yields a rift between casual and competitive players, resulting in conflicts in what players might expect and want from their play experiences. I conclude that varying expectations and standards of play feed into a community’s conflicts alongside the failure of moderation in curtailing unwanted behaviors.

TAG is happy to introduce its new online speaker series for the 2021-22 academic year: Rethinking Playfulness!

Experts from all around the world will join us online to talk about their perspectives on game design, playfulness and storytelling!

Making/Meat/Matter is a research project questioning the politics and complicated human/non-human relationships behind meat consumption through research, creation, and collaborative works with other human and non-human actors, culminating in a tabletop role-playing game.