Directors

Mia Consalvo is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Game Studies and Design at Concordia University. She is the co-author of Real Games: What’s Legitimate and What’s Not in Contemporary Videogames (2019) and Players and their Pets: Gaming Communities from Beta to Sunset (2015). She is also co-editor of Sports Videogames (2013) and the Handbook of Internet Studies (2011), and is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames (2007) as well as Atari to Zelda: Japan’s Videogames in Global Context (2016).
Mia runs the mLab, a space dedicated to developing innovative methods for studying games and game players. She’s a member of the Centre for Technoculture, Art & Games (TAG), she has presented her work at industry as well as academic conferences including regular presentations at the Game Developers Conference. She is the Past President of the Digital Games Research Association, and has held positions at MIT, Ohio University, Chubu University in Japan and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Dr. Rilla Khaled is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada, where she teaches interaction design, design theory, programming, and more. She is the director of the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Research Centre, Canada’s most well-established games research lab, in the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology. Dr. Khaled’s research is focused on the use of interactive technologies to improve the human condition, a career-long passion that has led to diverse outcomes, including designing award-winning serious games, developing a framework for game design specifically aimed at reflective outcomes, creating speculative prototypes of near-future technologies, working with Indigenous communities to use contemporary technologies to imagine new, inclusive futures, and establishing foundations for materials-based game design research.

Coordinator

Marc Lajeunesse holds a PhD in Media and Communication with a focus on game studies. His primary work examines toxicity in online game spaces, with an emphasis on player-led grassroots resistance to in-game toxicity. Additionally, Marc has produced research on monetization and cosmetic goods on Steam and in Dota 2, disinformation in video games, and is a co-author of two books: Streaming by the Rest of Us: Microstreaming on Twitch, and the forthcomingTheir System, Our Game: Homebrew and the Worlds of Pathfinder. Marc is also a podcaster, and his work can be found at connectingtogame.ca.

Student Reps

Lyne Dwyer is a PhD candidate in Communication Studies. They are researching the design and reception of intimate relationships in digital game with a focus on non-monogamies, queer play, and creative labour. During their time here at Concordia, Lyne has worked as an instructor, workshop leader, interviewer, editor, research assistant, teaching assistant, and game-maker-in-the-making. To learn more about past and current projects, you can check out their (WIP) design and research blog here: https://questingqueerly.bearblog.dev/.

Hanine is a PhD student in the department of Communication Studies at Concordia University, looking at food accessibility within fishing mini-games. As a game designer, Hanine works for fun and plays for a living. She holds an MA in Social & Cultural Anthropology from Concordia University, a BA in English Literature and a BA in Media/Communications, with two minors in Film/Visual Studies and Arabic Language, from the American University of Beirut. Her interest in food stability and accessibility shapes her life’s activities while sitting on the boards of the People’s Potato and the Concordia Food Coalition. Hanine is also a member of the mLab, as well as a coordinator of Pixelles’ Make Games Program. In her free time, Hanine tends to a community garden, cooks at a vegan solidarity kitchen, and makes games which you can find here: https://arnabitakhdar.itch.io/

Executive Board

Lynn Hughes is a visual and digital media researcher, artist and Professor emerita who held the Concordia Research Chair of Interaction Design and Games Innovation from 2004 to 2018. In 2000, She was instrumental in the founding and financing of the Hexagram Institute for Media Art and Technology, and she continues as an active member of what is now an international research network. In 2008 she co-founded the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) Centre, and, in 2015, the Milieux Institute. Lynn continues to supervise graduate students, receive funding and produce both art and games related work.
Her, often collaborative, production over the years has explored the space between visual, and digital art, and games. A recent SSHRC project extended this to look at the relationship between games and interactive theatre. Over the years, she has also curated exhibitions including, in 2012 (with Heather Kelley and Cindy Poremba), a museum scale, fully playable exhibition on game culture at the Gaîté lyrique in Paris. Joue le jeu / Play Along set out to position game culture as absolutely central to contemporary Culture -as the broad, diversified, exceedingly dynamic and evolving cultural field it is.
Selected Projects: https://justplayalong.info/ (Joue le jeux exhibition)
https://vimeo.com/lynnhughes (Some older works)
liveness.milieux.ca (Recent SSHRC project)

Bart Simon is the current director of Milieux and Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. His areas of expertise include game studies, science and technology studies and cultural sociology. His game studies and design research crosses a variety of genres and platforms looking at the relation of game cultures, socio-materiality and everyday life. His current research on the Immersive Theatre and Games, materialities of play, and player-makers in Minecraft is funded by the Social Science and Humanities Council of Canada. Other projects include work on indie game scenes, solar media, social theories of play, and modding cultures.

Faculty

Pippin Barr (department of design and computation arts) is an experimental game designer and Associate Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University. He is a prolific maker of videogames, producing work addressing everything from airplane safety instructions to the nature of videogames and videogame technologies. He is a well-known figure in the independent and artistic videogame scenes, makes his source code and process documentation publicly available via his presence on GitHub, and his latest book, The Stuff Games Are Made Of (2023, MIT Press), discusses videogame design from the perspective of its materials.
Email: pippin.barr@concordia.ca

Kelsey Blair (department of English) is a theatre, performance, and cultural studies scholar and a professor in the Department of English. Her research focuses on multiple interconnected areas including performance studies; the intersection between genres of performance including theatre, sports, and games; and audience studies.
Currently, she teaches courses in professional writing, creative writing, and video games as literature in the Department of English.

Jason Camlot is Professor of English and Research Chair in Literature and Sound Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. His recent critical works include Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (Stanford 2019). and the co-edited collections, Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books (with Jeffrey Weingarten, WLUP, 2022), Collection Thinking: Within and Without Libraries, Archives and Museums (with Martha Langford and Linda Morra, Routledge, 2022), and CanLit Across Media: Unarchiving the Literary Event (with Katherine McLeod, McGill Queen’s UP, 2019). He is also the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, Vlarf (McGill Queen’s, 2021). Jason is the principal investigator and director of the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb research partnership <www.spokenweb.ca> that focuses on the history of literary sound recordings and the digital preservation and presentation of collections of literary audio. He has been involved in TAG since it was founded and has developed several (now expired) IOS games with student teams over the years, including The Victorianator, an iPhone game about Victorian elocution, and the sound-puzzle game, Jarbles.

Jill Didur is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Concordia. She is a Research Fellow at the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre, a member of Figura: Centre de la Texte et Imaginaire, and the Digital Environmental Humanities Network. A specialist in postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities, Jill has published on a wide variety of related topics including historical memory, partition narratives and secular discourse in South Asian, colonial and postcolonial travel writing, ecocriticism, landscape and garden studies, diasporic literature and culture, and globalisation. She is the author of Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory published by the University of Toronto Press in 2006. Jill is currently finishing a book manuscript, Gardenworthy: Plant-hunting in South Asian Literature and Travel Writing, which explores the discursive and material relationships between the plant- collecting practices and memoirs of colonial botanists in South Asia, contemporary postcolonial writing about the Himalayan region, and alpine and rock gardening culture globally. She is also designing and developing with Ian Arawjo (with support from le laboratoire NT2 Concordia and TAG), a locative media application that curates the relationship between colonial history and botanical gardens. A (Mis)-Guide to Alpine Plants subverts the genre of the botanical field guide and encourages garden visitors to hunt for and collect QR codes that unlock archival and contemporary material related to the history of colonial botanical exploration in the Himalayan region, analyses of travel writing and garden manuals related to the collection and propagation of alpine seeds and plants, and reflections on how colonial culture has shaped the design of contemporary and alpine and rock gardens.

Projects:
A (Mis)Guide to Alpine Plants

Darren Wershler is an Assistant Professor of English at Concordia, and is also part of the faculty at the CFC Media Lab TELUS Interactive Art & Entertainment Program in Toronto. His expertise is in the area of digital media and media history, with a particular focus on its relationship to the historical avant-gardes. Before joining Concordia faculty, he designed and taught the first Video Game Studies courses in the Department of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has also worked professionally as a writer and play-tester in the video game industry. His interests include nonlinear narrative, experimental games and the allegorical function of video games.

Jason Lewis is an Associate Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University. He founded Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media, where he directs research/creation projects in the use of interactive games to assist Aboriginal communities in preserving, interpreting and communicating cultural histories, devising new means of creating and reading digital texts, developing systems for creative use of mobile technology, and designing alternative interfaces for live performance. Obx Labs is deeply committed to developing intriguing new forms of expression by working on conceptual, creative and technical levels simultaneously. Lewis’s artwork and writing about media have been featured in exhibitions and conferences on four continents.

Marc Steinberg is Professor of Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, and director of The Platform Lab. He is the author of Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Commercial Internet (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), and co-author of Media and Management (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). He is the co-editor of Media Theory in Japan (Duke University Press, 2017), as well as special issues of Asiascape: Digital Asia on “Regional Platforms,” Media, Culture & Society on “Media Power in Digital Asia: Super Apps and Megacorps.”

Stuart is a professor, scientist and technocrat who pursues an understanding of society and its meaning through examining its technical artifacts, its means of learning, and most importantly, its mechanisms for providing leisure by way of games. He received his Ph.D. from Concordia where he teaches Software Engineering and Computer Science courses while trying to subvert course material to teach through games.

Martin French is an Associate Professor with the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at Concordia University. Martin’s research examines the social dimensions of technology with an empirical focus on communications & information technology (CIT). It emphasizes the broader social and political contexts of CIT, focusing especially on risk, surveillance, privacy, and social justice. Recently, Martin has been studying the ‘gamblification’ of digital media. This involves an investigation of the incorporation of gambling-like retention mechanics into digital experiences. Think of how free-to-play games resemble slot machine play, or how the infinite scroll experience on different social media platforms is designed to increase users’ time-on-device. The gamblification of digital media raises a host of ethical and regulatory questions; and the gamblification of digital games poses challenges for game makers, players and researchers alike.

Associate Professor Christopher Moore is a researcher, teacher, and maker of things. He received his MFA in Communication Design from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design before joining Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology in 1999. From 2004 to 2008, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of New Media at the University of Lethbridge, holding the title of Acting Chair during his final year. Moore’s multidisciplinary research and teaching interests include vernacular design and popular culture, experimental typography, and the use of humour as a form of social resistance. He has participated in artist residencies throughout North America, and his recent bodies of sculpture and media-based installations have been featured in both solo and group exhibitions across Canada and abroad. Moore’s current Speculative Playproject with Rilla Khaled and Pippin Barr focuses on designing our way out of the present and reimagining future scenarios.

As an Associate Librarian at Concordia University and compulsive blogger, Olivier Charbonneau is fascinated by how law and information mingle. To get him going, ask him about copyright, cultural economics, open access and any social media trend. He is a doctoral student at the Faculté de droit, Université de Montréal. He has over 15 years of professional involvement in library or cultural communities. He holds two masters degrees from Université de Montréal, one in information sciences and another in law, as well as an undergraduate degree in commerce from McGill University. He has kept a research blog since 2005 in French at www.culturelibre.ca and a work blog since 2011 in English at OutFind.ca.

Dr. Mudur is a professor in the department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He has extensive research experience specializing in computer graphics since the mid 1970s including interdisciplinary research involving collaboration with artists and designers. He has published widely in this field and has supervised many Masters and PhD students. His current research focus includes new computational techniques for processing large data, either sensed or logged for application in games, entertainment, scientific visualization and 3D human computer interaction.

David Waddington is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at Concordia. He received his Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University in 2006. His current research focuses on the connection between technology and citizenship in education, and he has a particular interest in American philosopher John Dewey’s approach to science and technology education. In addition to his work on Dewey, he has dedicated time to other important topics linked to technology and citizenship, most notably the ethics of video gaming and the potential for video games to serve as citizenship education tools.

Naj is a multidisciplinary researcher, and an Affiliate faculty member in the Departments of Design and Computation Arts; and Electrical and Computer Engineering. Naj has founded the Media Health Laboratory (https://media-health.ca) where she investigates the applications and implications of various ‘screens’ in digital healthcare at the intersection of Arts and Society. Naj’s research is informed by her scientific work in neuropharmacology, her engineering work in data science and digital signal processing, and her passion for media ecology, especially in relation to film, games and social media as psycho-cultural modes of action and interaction.

Charalambos (Charis) Poullis is an Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science at Concordia University where he leads the Immersive and Creative Technologies (ICT) lab. He also serves as the Academic Code Administrator at the School of Graduate Studies.
His current research interests lie at the intersection of computer vision and computer graphics. More specifically, he conducts fundamental research in acquisition technologies & 3D reconstruction, photo-realistic rendering, feature extraction & classification; and applied research in virtual & augmented reality. He has supervised more than 67 HQP to completion at all levels of study in academia, currently supervising 7 Masters and 7 PhDs, authored 79 publications, and as a Principal Investigator received several million in external research grants from governmental agencies and industrial partners, including the prestigious Marie Curie Fellowship (International Reintegration Grant) during 2010-2014.
Information about his latest work can be found at poullis.org

Jonathan Lessard (phd) is an associate professor of game design and virtual worlds in the department of Design and Computation Arts. He has been making games (mostly independently) for 20 years and now leads the LabLabLab research lab on interactive storytelling. He has also published numerous papers on the history of game design.

Affiliated Faculty

Shawn Bell is a program developer, pedagogic councilor & coordinator of video game programs & interactive media at Dawson College, Ubisoft campus and École de technologie supérieure. Bell is interested in constructionist approaches to new media education and how interactive technologies and complexity theory enhance and expand the creative process in the traditional arts, cyberarts and game design. He is presently developing a pre-university interactive media arts profile, a game design diploma, The Montreal Games Incubator, professional workshops for Montreal video games studios, and online games-related courses at Dawson College. He was the recipient of a grant from CIAM (Centre interuniversitaire des arts médiatiques) and was a also awarded a residency at Lovebytes Labs in Sheffield, England in 1999 to produce a piece for Digital Space CD and CD ROM of “innovative new work using digital sound and multimedia”.

Sandra Gabriele is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies. Her research has primarily focused on the history of newspaper forms, including women’s pages in the nineteenth century, weekend editions in the twentieth century and newsgames. She is a co-editor and co-author of Intersections of Media and Communications: Concepts and Critical Frameworks (Emond Montgomery, 2011). Sandra is currently finishing a manuscript on weekend editions in North America, tentatively titled The Sunday Paper, to be published by University of Illinois Press in 2015. She is also at work (with Lisa Lynch) on a newsgame, The Oldest Game, that explores the possibilities that games offer to tell the stories of sex workers’ daily lives under Canada’s current legal system.

Dr. Sergei Mokhov is the co-founder and co-director of CCIFF, and affiliated associated professor at Concordia University, co-founder of mDreams Pictures, Inc. and mDreams Stage Research and Creation Group at Concordia University. His technical expertise also allows him to work as technical manager for the Illimitable Space System (ISS) and OpenISS project.

Carl Therrien is an assistant professor in the new video game studies program at Université de Montréal. He worked on a postdoctoral research project on the history of video games, and recently completed a Ph. D. thesis about the formal and psychological aspects of immersion in fictional worlds. Major publications include the opening chapter in Mark Wolf’s Before the Crash (Wayne State University Press, 2012), many entries inGreenwood’s Encyclopedia of Video Games (2012), a historical contribution in Bernard Perron’s anthology on Horror Video Games (McFarland & Company, 2009), and an upcoming paper on the rise of cooperative address in game design (IEEE Handbook on video games).

Kelly Bourdeau has a PhD in Film Studies with a concentration in Game Studies. With an MA and BA in Sociology, her research focuses on player-avatar hybridity developed through the networked process of play in video games. Other research areas include forms of mediated sociality ranging from the dynamics of social identification in online computer games and virtual worlds to the fusion of internet activity and everyday life, research methodologies surrounding digital technologies as well as the role of indexicality on the player experience.

Rob’s PhD work, undertaken at the London Consortium, concerned videogaming and the embodied experience of time. His current research addresses videogame characterization, exploring the understandings of identity that digital games articulate and the new modes of representing, modeling and tracking and witnessing ‘personality’ that they employ, from AI routines to customizable avatars, player profiles to biometric monitoring. Recent publications include an account of videogames’ sexlessness for Games and Culture and an essay on bathetic interfaces for Nyx.

Cindy Poremba is a digital media researcher, gamemaker and curator. She is an Assistant Professor (Digital Entertainment), at OCAD University.
Cindy completed a PhD in interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University in Montreal, where she worked in association with the Centre for Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG). As an FQRSC Postdoctoral Fellow, she researched infrastructure for documentary videogames, at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Ryerson University. She holds an MASc in Interactive Arts from Simon Fraser University, as well as a BA from the University of Waterloo in Rhetoric & Professional Writing. Cindy is a former faculty member in Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), who has presented internationally at both conferences and invited lectures. Her work has been published in journals such as Eludamos, Loading and Games & Culture, as well as edited collections and magazines. She also organizes non-traditional exhibitions as an independent curator, including Joue le jeu/Play Along, XYZ: Alternative Voices in Game Design, and “new arcade” events as a member of the Kokoromi game art collective.

Stephen Yeager is a Professor in Concordia’s English department whose research looks at the various forms of medievalism in digital culture, and games in particular. He is the co-editor of a volume of essays Old Media and the Medieval Concept: Media Ecologies Before Early Modernity (Concordia University Press, 2021).

Thorsten Busch teaches corporate social responsibility, digital business ethics, and game studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany, and the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. He holds an MA in political science, economics, and management from the University of Oldenburg, Germany, and a PhD in business ethics from the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. Prior to his engagement at TAG, he was a participant in the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme 2010 and a visiting scholar at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University. Thorsten’s research focuses on how moral decisions are being portrayed in games, how the games industry deals with corporate responsibility issues, and how game companies regulate toxic gamer culture.

Erin Gee is an internationally active artist and composer who works in vocal composition, robotics, expressive emotional quantification, and other experimental technologies. Driven by conceptual frameworks of sound and performance art, her research-driven work in digital media illuminates cultures of technological agency, personhood and empathy through the metaphor of human voices in electronic bodies. Gee’s research combining digital media with human emotion has been reviewed in publications such as Canadian Art, MusicWorks Magazine, Scientific American, VICE, National Post, and La Presse. Gee has published work in Leonardo Music (2013) as well as eContact! Journal of Canadian electroacoustic community (2010). Gee is the creator of futurefemmes, an online blog archived by Cornell University featuring interviews, showcased work and links to relevant articles on the topic of women working in technological culture.
At TAG, Gee is currently conducting research and production for a new emotion-driven VR experience with collaborator Alex Lee and research assistants Roxanne Baril-Bédard and Marlon Kroll. She is currently teaching in the Communications department at the University of Maine.

Elena Razlogova is an Assistant Professor of History and the Director of the Digital History Lab at Concordia University, Montreal. She studied history and cultural studies at Moscow State University, University of California Berkeley, New York University, and George Mason University.
The Concordia Lab produces websites and tools that use digital media to encourage popular participation in interpreting and presenting the past. Elena co-produced websites on US history, contemporary politics and the Soviet Gulag, and published articles on U.S. radio history and public opinion in American Quarterly and Vectors. She is interested in games as a form of documentary expression and a research tool, on such subjects as historical radio sound and Cold War surveillance.

Jane Tingley is the former Manager of Technoculture Art and Games. She is an artist and an Assistant Professor in Hybrid Media at the University of Waterloo. Her work combines traditional studio practice with new media tools – and spans responsive/interactive installation, performative robotics, and the creation of a gestural game. Her current artistic trajectory is interdisciplinary in nature and explores the creation of spaces and experiences that push the boundaries between science and magic, interactivity and playfulness, and offer an experience to the viewer that is accessible both intellectually and technologically. You can see her website at www.janetingley.com.

Daniel Cross is founder of EYESTEELFILM in Montreal, named by Real Screen Magazine as a top 100 non-fiction production company in the world. He is an Associate Professor and previous Chair of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University. Cross also serves on the University’s Board of Governors and the Provost’s Circle of Distinction. He was recently appointed Research Chair in Interactive Documentary Filmmaking. In November 2015 Cross’ latest feature documentary I AM THE BLUES premiered at the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA), the film will have a theatrical starting in spring 2016. In conjunction with his research chair Cross launched V1.0 of the 3D Web GL www.IAMTHEBLUESMOVIE.com, to be followed by a spring launch of the interactive documentary Turcot Interchange, documenting the demolition and re-construction of Canada’s largest cloverleaf interchange. Daniel Cross is a multi-disciplined award winning documentary filmmaker with a long history of directing and producing theatrical documentaries and exploring new media documentary approaches. He made his mark directing feature length films concerning issues of homelessness, THE STREET: a film with the homeless (1998), S.P.I.T: Squeegee Punks In Traffic (2001) and created an online interactive documentary experience working with the street community called www.HomelessNation.Org (2001) winning many new media awards, the most prestigious being the UN World Summit Award for e-inclusion. Together with eight Inuit students he co-directed the award winning film; Inuuvunga: I am Inuk I am alive (2004), produced with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). In 2014 he co-directed the film Atanasoff for History TV, and in 2003 directed Chairman George for the BBC and CTV networks. As a producer Cross has co-produced two Genie award-winning films Up the Yangtze, which also won the Golden Horse and Last Train Home, which also won 2 Emmy’s in 2014. In 2015 Jingle Bell Rocks was nominated for 2 Canadian Screen Awards; Chameleon and Fortunate Son were both nominated for the International Feature Documentary prize at IDFA the world’s largest documentary festival in Amsterdam. Cross also co-produced the IDFA People’s Choice Award and Genie nominated film Rip: A Remix Manifesto. 2013 saw Fruit Hunters premiere in Berlin, 2012 saw China Heavyweight premiere at Sundance and in 2011 Vanishing Spring Light won the IDFA First Appearances Award.
Daniel received the Trailblazer award at MIPDOC in Cannes, and was the inaugural Mentor of the Year recipient from the Canadian Media Producers Association. He participates in the IDFA Academy and has served on the boards of Hot Docs, the Documentary Organization of Canada and The Concordia University Documentary Centre.

Dr. Renee Jackson earned a PhD from the Education Department at Concordia University in Montréal, Québec Canada, an M.A. from the Art Education Department at Concordia University, a B.Ed from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in partnership with Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a B.F.A. in Visual Arts from York University in Toronto, Ontario. She was a lecturer on the faculty of Education at McGill University in Montréal for six years, and has taught both elementary and high school visual arts for over seven years. Dr. Jackson has also been working in a community arts capacity for the last six years with the nonprofit organization Culture for Kids in the Arts in Hamilton, Ontario. She also served on the executive board for the Canadian Society for Education Through Art (CSEA/SCÉA) for seven years as a vice president and director. Dr. Jackson’s dissertation research involved following and participating in a year-long, collaborative social justice video game design project involving an all female team of 15 girls in grade seven, 5 undergraduate students and the CEO of a small gaming company. Building off of the idea that such partnerships within schools can support contemporary versions of progressive informal learning environments (affinity spaces) in formal settings, Dr. Jackson’s ambition is to establish a long-term collaborative social justice game-design research partnership with a local school here in Philadelphia. She remains affiliated with the Technoculture Arts and Games lab at Concordia University, where her interest in video games and education originally developed. Dr. Jackson’s art and teaching practices aim to inspire a sense of wonderment in both viewers and students. In her art practice, she works with everyday materials in unexpected ways to fabricate surreal creatures and situations, encouraging viewers to create their own narratives within her work. As a teacher, she emphasizes the ongoing development of artistic capacities in order to discover or further one’s personal sense of curiosity and determination through active engagement with life.

Dr. Miao Song is the founder and president of the China Canada International Film Festival. She also works at Concordia University as an affiliated professor of computer science and part-time faculty member at Computation Arts.

Andrei is an FRSQC-funded outgoing Doctor of Communication based in the Communications Department at Concordia University, in Montreal, Canada. His research focuses on resonance in blockbuster games and its uses for (re)producing real-world cultures, as well as the political economy of game distribution, and its monetization/gamblification.

Sarah Ganzon is an LTA faculty in Communication Studies at Concordia University. Her research revolves mostly around the areas of game studies and transcultural fandoms. Currently, she is writing her thesis on otome games in English, and otome game players. She holds a PhD in Communication Studies from Concordia, an MA in English Literature from Cardiff University and a BA in English Studies from the University of the Philippines, Diliman. Prior to starting her doctorate, she taught courses in literature and the humanities at the University of the Philippines, University of Santo Tomas and Far Eastern University. Apart from spending countless hours playing visual novels and RPGs, she enjoys dressing up as a Jedi, watching an unhealthy amount of kdramas, reading out-of-print nineteenth century novels, looking for well-written fan fiction, and keeping an eye out for disappearing blue police boxes.

Ryan Scheiding earned his PhD in the Communication Studies Program at Concordia. He is also affiliated with the Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG) research lab and the mlab at Concordia. Prior to joining the program, he received MAs at the University of Waterloo in History and at York University in Communication & Culture and a graduate diploma in Asian Studies from the York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR). His research is primarily concerned with the collective memory of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as expressed through video games, especially Fallout and Resident Evil. He is also the writer/ director of Nagasaki Kitty, a twine game based on the experiences of atomic bomb victims. In his past studies, he has focused on collective memory practices, legacies of propaganda in media and World War II Japanese history.

Anna Eyler is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montreal. Combining sculpture and 3D modeling, she has been working in collaboration with Nicolas Lapointe under the name AENL since 2019. Their practice explores the intersection of digital technology and the mystical-occult. Drawing from data centers, science fiction, and video games, they investigate how digital objects influence everyday life. She holds a BA in religious studies and art history from Carleton University (2010), a BFA from the University of Ottawa (2015) and an MFA in sculpture and ceramics from Concordia University (2020). Eyler teaches 3D modelling and interactive media at Concordia University and Dawson College.

Students

Katelyn Campbell (she/they) is a Game Designer, Video Editor, and MA student in the Media Studies program at Concordia University. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Media Production from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Postgraduate Certificate in Game Design from George Brown College. Her research focuses on video game history and girlhood.

Taylan is a PhD student of Communication Studies at Concordia University. His research focuses on the relation of player agency and politically active subjects in gameplay. Beyond these internal functions observed in video games, he is also interested in how such formations may shape and determine the fan communities and the broader player bases of video games.

kamyar "noak" karimi (Computation Arts Specialization), is a digital storyteller who believes that within the dynamic human global network, the interwebs of human-stories are recursively retold within the different media. All stories are human produced and all humans come from the stories they tell. This in fact vibrates a greater sense of storytelling within the context of our lived human experiences, which ultimately sticks us to the global network. noak's career spans roles as a programmer, game designer, and sound designer. He is currently contributing his skills at LabLabLab, following similar roles at multiple studios and institutes. In his work, noak primarily uses code and sound to explore and expand the possibilities of storytelling in the realm of new media.

Meg Hutchison is a narrative designer pursuing a PhD in Communications. Her research focuses on how narrative design combines trauma, grief, and death to make a meaningful experience. Her PhD expands on her industry experience, creating these moments within Season: A Letter to the Future. Meg's masters examined the use of the carnivalesque to explore the implications of the military-industrial system within games.

Rosie earned a BA Specialization in Women's Studies from Concordia's Simone de Beauvoir Institute, clearly could not get enough of Concordia, and is now back pursuing a Masters in Sociology.
She has become increasingly involved with TAG's Minecraft Bloc, and in addition to being passionate about the block game, her interests include queer and feminist game studies, community dynamics, accessibility, anti-oppression, and cats.

Josh Spatzner is a M.A. student in the Media Studies program at Concordia University in the Communications department. His research is focused on historical grand strategy games, history, and exploring the motivations and meanings that players create by playing these games and creating and imagining counterfactual histories and alternate worlds. He is a member of the mLab, a space dedicated to studying games and game players.

Sarah Elizabeth is a freshly minted graduate student pursuing an MA in English Literature by examining Disco Elysium's narrative in juxtaposition with its literary predecessor, "Sacred and Terrible Air." When not replaying Disco Elysium, she is interested in persistent world roleplaying online video game servers; namely how the dynamic between source material, game masters, and players create paradigms of what is believable in a make-believe setting.
Outside of academia, she is really, really into Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 Edition and can't stop playing wizards. To date she has accrued 13,143 hours in Neverwinter Nights.

Pavel Berger is a Graduate student in Concordia's English Literature program. His passion for storytelling him to his research focus - the contradictory nature of some video games pushing anti-corporate narratives while being produced as a commodity for consumption by corporations. His broader interests lie primarily in investigating video games as literature in their own right, and their impact on the collective subconscious.
He loves video games, but wishes he had more time to play them.

Andrew Bailey (he/him) is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow with the Technoculture, Art, and Games Research Centre at Concordia University. He also teaches a variety of media studies courses at OCAD, York, and McMaster University. Previously, Andrew was the Knowledge Mobilization Officer for Archive/Counter-Archive (York University), Section Head of Essays for First Person Scholar (The Games Institute/the University of Waterloo) and Co-Vice Editor for Press Start Journal (the University of Glasgow). His research on the relationship between videogames, art, and archives has been published in the Videogame Art Reader, the International Journal of Creative Media Research, and Loading: The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association, and he has upcoming chapters in edited collections from Routledge, Edinburgh University Press, and Louisiana University Press.

Sarah Raine is a game designer, programmer and Computer Science student. She has been developing indie games for 6 years. She likes touching various aspects of development, namely writing and art. She is especially interested in systemic game design and developing designer-friendly tools.

JoDee is currently pursuing a Humanities research/creation PhD at Concordia University. Her art practice ranges from dance-on-stage to dance-on-screen. Most recently she curated the Digital Dance Arcade, presented at the Choreoscope festival in Barcelona and was artist-in-residence at Flux Laboratories in Geneva.

Alex Custodio is currently pursuing a SSHRC-funded Humanities PhD at Concordia University where they study how communities of users modify and repair handheld videogame platforms decades after their market lifecycles. As a research assistant at the Residual Media Depot and a member of the Solar Media Collective, their ongoing projects also include cataloguing early home computing and videogame technologies and exploring solarity through hardware modding and game design. Their first monograph, Who Are You? Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance Platform, is available from the MIT Press.

After completing his BA in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia in May 2020, Zac is currently in the second year of his MA in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia’s Mel Oppenheimer School of Cinema. His research interests include ecocriticism, climate and environmental media, film theory, video game studies, slow cinema, surreal aesthetics, and experimental forms. In his MA research, Zac is specifically interested in examining how film and video games represent the overwhelming temporal and spatial complexities surrounding the climate emergency.

Alexandre is a writer & filmmaker with 20 years of practice. His films explore myth, fantasy, and humor as a means for coping with trauma.
Set in the world of a medieval LARP, Alexandre’s first film, The Wild Hunt (2009), won the Best Canadian First Feature Award at TIFF. For his second feature film, Happy Face (2018), Alexandre worked with disfigured non-actors. Together they drew from experimental theatre and the carnivalesque aesthetic in order to transcend the devastating effects of our beauty-obsessed culture.
This experience led Alexandre to enroll in Concordia’s MDes program to explore moving away from the screen and into everyday life with transformative narratives.
His current research-creation, Quest for Communitas, seeks to co-design a carnivalesque live-action role playing game structured like a rite of passage with a group of 11 high school dropouts. To that effect, Alexandre created Doktor F, a Swiss-German designer of human interactions with dubious credentials.

Hanieh is interested in design, narration, and art in video games. She came to Concordia University to study master of design under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Lessard.
Conversational Landscape is the subject of her thesis. The aim is to explore the possibilities of conversing with a virtual character in the same way as if we are exploring a new territory.

Chip Limeburner - Milieux UG Fellow
With backgrounds in both computational neuroscience and computation arts, Chip is a designer and doctoral student in the individualized program exploring questions at the intersection of interactivity and sensory experience in themed entertainment. Their current research turns on emerging tech integration in theme parks and how these trends necessitate a rethinking of established design paradigms within the industry.

Leonardo is a Mexican-Canadian digital artist and experience design enthusiast, studying an undergraduate degree in Computation Arts at Concordia.
Leo has a background in 3D Animation & CGI, Quality Assurance analysis for AAA games and Art Direction for independent interactive media production – Specifically for a videogame concert with the contemporary jazz ensemble Cabale.
His ongoing projects include the investigation into the therapeutic applications of digital interactions and the prototyping of cinematics, world building, and narrative design for a fighting game based on Mesoamerican mythological themes.

Andrew is an artist and current undergraduate student in the Philosophy and English programs at Concordia University. He has been working with the TAG Minecraft Bloc since 2021 researching innovative ways to use Minecraft in education. Andrew is currently working on modding and game design and immersing himself in that culture. He is also researching haptic feedback to enhance multimedia experiences.

Man Zou is currently enrolled in the program of Design and Game Design at Concordia’s Design and Computation Arts department. Her interest in games centers around the inclusivity aspect of games: how games can serves as a bridging element to connect players from different backgrounds and with different personalities.

Jess Marshall is an MA student in Media Studies at Concordia University and a research assistant in the mLab under the supervision of Dr. Mia Consalvo. Their research focuses primarily on the community value of tabletop roleplaying games, using performance studies as a primary lens of investigation.

Thomas “TJ” MacPherson received his MA in English at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is currently enrolled in the English PhD program at Concordia University. His main research interest is in media archeology. Most of his projects such as trying to 3D print a replica of a typewriter from 1910 or creating a podcast and website about celebrating material collections start with the question “what makes this thing so cool?” In his free time he can be found trying to buy fountain pens he will never write with, instruments he can’t play, or cameras he will never shoot with. He is currently working on a project relating to the history of guitar pedals.

Matthew Bethancourt - PhD Indi - develops experimental games and interactions. He is interested in situated play, alternative controllers, procedural sound, sonification, nostalgia, and probably spends too much time thinking about negative space and deep time. Much of his work invites people to do silly or mundane things, which points to deeper themes and often poses unanswerable questions. He has an MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School for Design in New York.

Angelica is an independent undergraduate student and graphic designer, with a previous BA in Communications from Concordia University. She’s interested in Minecraft as a visual medium, as documented in her project A Year In Minecraft, and is currently pursuing research related to the game with other students through the Minecraft Bloc. She also hosts a weekly radio show on CJLO 1690AM, Concordia’s radio station.
angeli.ca ayearinminecraft.angeli.ca

Sophie is in her third year of the undergraduate program specializing in Anthropology and Sociology. By intertwining the gaming and military worlds, she is interested in researching ways in which the US military recruits young gamers to participate in their drone program. This research would concentrate on examining why young gamers might appeal to the drone program, how the military recruits these young gamers, and if there may be cultural resemblances within the gaming culture that might be beneficial to the military industry. Sophie is also interested in intertwining creative worlds with academia in order to disseminate information in a unique way.

Annie Harrisson is a PhD student in Communication studies with a background in illustration and graphic design. Her current work focuses on discursive constructions surrounding the gamer. Through the study of the history of let’s plays, of retrogaming practices and of gaming industry’s promotional strategies, she explores how this seemingly stable, yet evolving, imaginary shapes power dynamics in gaming communities.

Marc-Antoine Jetté-Léger is an experimental game designer, systems artist, and minimalist game creator. Trained as a programmer, he works to study, create and deconstruct games by focusing on the mechanics and rulesets that constitute their interactive systems. By designing refined interfaces to invite players in, his intention is to discover and expose the atom of the experience offered within games by minimizing noise and sensory input.
https://ma-jetteleger.itch.io/
He is currently researching and creating within the Master of Design program in order to uncover the rich potential of minimalist games.

Cyrus LK is a full-stack developer and a design researcher. His work investigates the gray zones where machines and language meet. Through a speculative and critical design approach, he explores how circuit-bending, media-archeology and neural networks are enabling new kinds of poetic structures and electronic literatures. His last project translates an entire book word by word into internet memes.

Vadim is a game developer, musician, and scholar. In his research, he deals with generative systems, and how they can be leveraged to engage with our emotions and affect our behavior, using games as experimental vehicles. Procedural music is his affective medium of choice. He is further interested in uncovering the generative structures in our reality, and uses playful technologies, such as game engines, to recreate and investigate them. You can find some of his works here https://zolarsystems.itch.io/ and here https://vadimnickel.com/

Aurélie Petit is a PhD Candidate in the Film Studies department at Concordia University, Montréal. She specializes in the intersection of technology and animation, with a focus on gender and sexuality. Her thesis examines the role that U.S.-based Japanese animation online communities played in shaping contemporary sociotechnical uses of social media, and in particular exclusionary practices towards women users. During the Summer 2023, she was a PhD Intern at Microsoft Research where she worked on the limits of applying live-action governance frameworks to animated pornographic media. She is currently a Doctoral Fellow in AI and Inclusion at the AI + Society Initiative (University of Ottawa), working with Professor Jason Millar and the CRAiEDL on the ethics of deepfake pornography.

“i design, research, and implement participatory initiatives from a playful and justice-oriented perspective. My expertise intersects urbanism, sustainability, pedagogy, games, and technology.
i am the co-founder and Lead Design Researcher of Mutual Design, and a PhD student at Concordia University.
i’m based in Montreal/Tio’tia:ke and Mexico City.”

Julie is an Impact Experience and Play Designer specializing in making games for social change. Her current research focuses on the study of power dynamics to understand behaviours of gamesplaining and consent in collaborative decision-making. She is particularly interested in how authority is distributed between humans at the game table and in human-machine interactions. She designs playful media, including game-based learning tools, programs, workshops, and both digital and analog games, for nonprofits, educators, and civic practitioners to support education and mobilization. Julie also occasionally works in facilitation, editorial, and branding design. You might find her playing digital toys or tabletop games. Find her work at bonjourjulie.com

Claire Kim is a Media Studies MA student in the Department of Communication at Concordia University. Claire is interested in researching the social politics of video games in the horror genre, with a particular focus on the articulation of the relationship between the player and the game. She is a research assistant at mLab and is a member of the Concordia Technoculture, Arts, and Games lab. When she’s not pulling her hair out in the library, you can find her maladaptive daydreaming about D&D or yapping about the next indie horror game!

After a Bachelor in Psychology in Padua and an MA in Game Studies and Design in London, Leonardo crossed the ocean for his PhD in Montreal, attempting to blend his varied experience into a cohesive whole. He is currently working on his thesis on the local history of Italian TTRPGs both as a hobby scene and as a game design space, as compared to mainstream anglophone influences.

Courtney Blamey is a PhD Candidate and game designer at Concordia University in the Department of Communication Studies. Her doctoral research concentrates on the process of meaning-making in games involving emotions central to their design and exploring the relationship between player and designer in her own critical game design process. Her previous research unpacked Blizzard’s approach to community moderation in Overwatch by investigating both developer and community inputs on forums. She is a member of TAG and the mLab, a space dedicated to developing innovative methods for studying games and game players.

Poki is a PhD student in INDI at Concordia University. She holds an MSc in Multimedia and Entertainment technology from the Design School of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where she started her journey in exploring possibilities in a virtual representation of the heritage of cultural significance. Her research focuses on heritage conservation by leveraging oral history to provide an effective understanding and cultural presence for the global audience.
She has been working on her game CAGE which portrays the vanished Kowloon Walled City of Hong Kong and will serve as a testbed for her research. The value and potential social impact of this game have been recognized by Ubisoft gTV channel, the Hong Kong Federation of Design Associations, and the Hong Kong Game Development Association.
https://www.pokichan.com/project/klwc-reforge-project https://www.pokichan.com/

Brock Dishart is an FRQSC-funded queer doctoral student in Concordia’s Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program in Tiohtià:ke (AKA Montreal, Canada). He holds a bachelor’s degree in French to English Translation from York University, Glendon College, and a master’s degree in Digital Media from Toronto Metropolitan University. Brock has worked as a digital producer & strategist for Franco-Ontarian TV shows and has won a Gemini Award (Prix Gémeaux) in 2017 for his work on the BRBR music app.
Brock’s academic work focuses on embodiment of emotion in digital media, tangible & embodied interaction design, and mental health in the queer community. His doctoral research will work with the queer community to explore embodied ways of interacting with technology that help facilitate emotion regulation & processing through the body with a focus on post-traumatic growth, resilience, and queer joy.

Morning Star Fayard is an Indigenous student majoring in English Literature with a minor in Professional Writing. She is intrigued by video games and how they may be used to teach many subjects such as history, culture, and creativity. She became interested in how video games might provide a place of observation after taking a course by Darren Wershler that utilized Minecraft as the platform to learn about modernity. She aspires to use her English degree to enter the writing profession and gain some experience in developing storylines for video games

Tony Higuchi (b. Las Palmas, Spain) is a research-creator based in Montréal. In the early 2000s he moved to Madrid where he began experimenting with digital media, computer programming and electronic music production. His interest in human nature and cognition lead him to pursue a degree in Social and Cognitive Psychology at the UCM and his interest in art and new technologies lead him to subsequently obtain a Master’s degree in Web Design and Development from the CICE.After moving to Barcelona in 2009 he continued his practice and research while also employed as a web developer at Alt120 Comunicació Interactiva working with international ad agencies. In 2012, he received the Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s Master’s degree in Digital Arts, and completed a residency and an internship at Hangar’s Interaction Lab.In 2015, after participating in Critical Hit, he joined Milieux’s Technoculture, Art and Games research center as resident artist, where he currently conducts his PhD project in which he explores cultural and artistic issues regarding playfully interactive artificial intelligence with a multidisciplinary and experimental approach.He has performed in festivals such as Cau d’orella and collaborated in the production of works exhibited at festivals such as Sónar, Mutek, Indiecade, Cau d’orella and venues such as Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst and Quartier des spectacles.
He enjoys teaching and has conducted workshops on openFrameworks, Arduino programming, machine learning for artists, and hacking audio and video devices.
@tonyhiguchi

Master of Design
Santosh Kale is a transmedia designer (Communication Designer and Interaction Designer) who has worked in feature films, video games, ad films, and broadcast design. The last two stints were at Microsoft Research and IBM, in developing concepts and ideas for digital products. Over the period of time, the approach to work has transitioned from the entertainment industry to Social Design. At CU, the focus is to create a series of graphic novels based on real stories of emerging adults and explore the possibilities of mapping them together to create new ways of storytelling through the medium of games. He has MFA in Applied Arts, MA in Computer Arts and has worked in the US, India, Australia and Canada.

Étienne Racine is majoring in computer science along with a minor in game design and is one of the 2023 Undergrad Milieux Fellows.
Generally clueless about life with a passion for game-making, they are investigating topics of the integration of soundtrack as game mechanics and of player expression.
Contact them by email at e_acine@live.concordia.ca and see their most recent developments at https://atienn.itch.io/.

Steven Sych (MDes) is a digital artist and academic currently based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. He holds a B.A. (Honors) in Philosophy (University of Alberta 2009), a Master’s in Design from Concordia (2021) and a PhD. in Philosophy from McGill University (2016). His work has been shown at festivals such as Mutek, Ars Electronica, and ADAF (Athens Digital Arts Festival); it places the techno-quotidian realities of 2021 into surprising contexts and configurations and aims to open up novel pathways for meaningfully re-approaching the role of the digital in our everyday lives. Currently, Steven is a faculty member at John Abbott college where he has taught everything from documentary film to science fiction to game design to sexual ethics.

Richy is a sociologist in the PhD Social & Cultural Analysis program, working with Bart Simon. He studies the generative potentials of nostalgia in the relationships people have with their objects, video games, selves, and time. Alongside 5 TAGsters, Richy co-founded the Nostagain Network at TAG in 2022 - a network that hosts yearly symposiums gathering the latest scholarship and art on the topic of nostalgia.

Junior is an artist-researcher working with video, sound, and code to create interactive web-based experiences and installations. His work weaves absurd narratives and playful aesthetics, engaging in a subversive use of technology. He currently is a Master's student in Design at Concordia University, where his research explores the creation of interactive experiences through the lens of humour theory and interaction design.

Aidan is a game developer, writer, and lover of all things sci-fi. He's the founder of WhySo Studios, Montreal's newest video game studio focusing on virtual reality. He also works as a narrative designer for indie developers. His goal in life is simple: he wants to make giant spaceships blow up in VR.

T Braun is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher who creates virtual worlds and performances that challenge hegemonic notions of gender. Their Ph.D. uses autoethnography and participant observation work to explore how trans virtual reality enthusiasts envision the metaverse, create gender-affirming content, and form emergent, imaginative communities. They are currently conducting interviews and collaborating with other gender non-conforming artists in the social VR platform VRChat.

Rowena Chodkowski is pursuing a research/creation PhD in Humanities at Concordia University. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Davis, where she specialized in nonfiction and experimental/hybrid forms of writing. Her research/creation work focuses on interactive conversational agents (bots), exploring how creative computing and creative writing intersect to open new possibilities for storytelling and digital life.
Outside of academic work, Rowena is dedicated to building creative community. A founding member of the Spittoon Literary Collective, Rowena has helped to facilitate performances, publications and creative workshops in China and the United States.
www.mediaproject.club
www.rowenac.com

Scott DeJong is a designer, educator, and PhD candidate in Communication studies at Concordia University. His research, funded by the FRQSC blends creative research approaches with traditional methods to explore how games can help better understand the learning challenges of disinformation. This work has led to the creation of escape rooms, board games, and card games that engage with media literacy and systems thinking design. He is also the co-producer of the Humour and Games podcast, is currently co-authoring a book on creative design within table-top role playing games, and is trying to find the recipe for the perfect cookie. In addition to TAG, Scott is an active member of the mlab, the Applied Ai Institute, and the Machine Agencies research group.

Theodore Fox is an undergraduate student studying English and Creative Writing at Concordia University. Since 2021, he has been a researcher for the TAG Minecraft Bloc studying Minecraft and undergraduate learning and, since 2022, a researcher with SpokenWeb cataloguing literary events during the COVID-19 pandemic for their Archive of the Digital Present. Theodore is also interested in researching digital book clubs and adult co-learning outside of classrooms as well as how online game communities communicate and discuss shared values.

Idun Isdrake is a game designer and film director with 15 years experience as a CEO and Creative Director in the game and film industries. Their research is concerned with diverse game design and interfaces, including de-biasing AI datasets and prototyping new kinds of game systems. Isdrake’s work is situated in Nordic Futurism from a diverse solarpunk animism perspective, ranging from landscape photography and art house games, to cyborg implant interfaces and counter tactic mods protecting privacy and diversifying human expression. They thrive at the intersection of the classic and the unknown, the peaceful and the violent, restlessly creating with new tools, or pushing the existing beyond and in-between the conventional. Isdrake founded Sweden’s first game innovation lab and art gallery, co-developed a R&D lab (AI, VR, etc) and many inclusion initiatives in the global games industry, received a couple of film and game awards, and are a part of the body>data>space collective of pioneers in digital arts. They are also a guest teacher at several universities, and consultant/speaker/expert at conferences and policy making spaces like the EU Commission.

Calvin is doing his MA in Sociology following a bachelor’s in Health studies. His research interests are in health and drug policy, substance dependence and responses to the opioid crisis, and the surging interest and knowledge production surrounding psilocybin therapy. He is currently researching apps gathering data on illicit substance use. His favourite video game is Night in the Woods.

Jules Maier-Zucchino is an PhD student in Media Studies at Concordia University and a research assistant at Dr. Mia Consalvo’s mLab. With a background in leadership studies and team building facilitation, his current research investigates the ways in which video games model and represent ideas of leadership through their mechanics and narratives.

Sylvain Payen is a game Designer and PhD student in INDI Program with TAG. His thesis works revolves around the engendering of emotions in video game especially within ludic situations and without strong narrative context. Prior to beginning his doctorate he worked in serious games industry and held a BA in Computer science from Paris-XI and an MA in Video Game Design from ENJMIN (FR). During this time he was awarded prizes for his video games – Avenue de l’école de Joinville and Coeur. Since 2016, he teach game design at champlain college of vermont.

Elise Trinh (PhD Humanities) is a narrative designer, game writer and HUMA PhD student. She is researching and creating interactive oddities related to video games, narrative and cultural studies. She has worked for AAA, indie and mobile games over the past decade, and is currently a writer at ZA/UM Studio.

Maia Earl is beginning her MA in Media Studies at Concordia University starting fall term of 2025. She is also a proud participant of the Concordia Communications Undergraduate program, and has done work examining many forms of content creation and media, taking a particular interest in Affect studies and game design. Research interests include: game studies, gender studies, online community-building, film, visual arts, and history of various art and media.

Anne-Marie is pursuing a master's degree in Sociology at Concordia University. Inspired by her work in UX research and data analytics, her research interests focus on the quality of players' engagement with interactive story structures in digital media, the critical process of defining specifications for user input, and the compounding effects of data labeling and classification strategies on gameplay outcomes and player behaviour.

Francis Léveillé is a PhD Student in Communication Studies at Concordia University. His research interests oscillate around contemporary social theory, online discourse and history of science. His eventual dissertation project will analyze livestreaming platforms at the intersection of mainstream culture and game subcultures.

Ming Wong Fearon is a Master of Design student at Concordia University with a professional background designing visual identities for exhibitions and public programs at cultural institutions in New York City. Her thesis research is a meditation on the power of intentional display and how to design virtual exhibition content in ways that both leverage and amplify the medium.

Maria Wehdeking is a designer and artist from Colombia based in Montreal; obsessed with color and illustration, she likes to mix digital and traditional media to create an enchanted world full of feminine shapes and endearing characters. Her art has been inspired by Eastern expressions and pop culture, giving her a mixed artistic style that conveys new perspectives. Her master of design research investigates creating connections between Latin American immigrants through gamification and artistic approaches to break down the otherness that can emerge when facing a new society. Her growth as an immigrant and her feelings of giddiness, loneliness, and nostalgia are her main inspirations. You can see her around with her iPad and coffee, ready to chat about new creative outcomes and trends.

Abby-Jean is (presumably) working on her MA in English with a focus on Medieval literature. Her primary interest lies in the representation of monstrous figures--particularly monstrous women--across various mediums and time periods, especially so in epic heroic poetry and modern video games. Her current thesis focuses on how monstrous women represent societal fears of traditional knowledge systems and the Other, with a focus on works such Melusine, Beowulf, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Outside of academics, you can probably find her wrestling with her sourdough starter (the Rye of Sauron), or desperately trying to get you to join her TTRPG/DnD groups.

Austin Tecks is a musician and artist pursuing a Master of Design at Concordia University. With a background in Electroacoustic Studies, their work explores the intersections of sound, technology, and experimental media through research-creation.

Amanda Stormyr is an interdisciplinary artist in her third year of undergraduate studies in Studio Art with a specialization in Intermedia. Her work explores the intersection of digital media and AI with living organisms, ecology, community, and our relationships to death. Over the past year in New Mexico, Amanda developed projects including a living hydrogel casket infused with mycelium culture, and a digital twin presented on a decaying interface.

Sebastián is a PhD student in Educational Technology. His research explores how play and games can be used to facilitate liberatory pedagogies in education. He is also interested in how theory informs the design of technology in the digital era, and how play and games can serve as mediums to make digital technologies more beneficial for their users. He holds a Master’s in Games from ITU in Copenhagen, and has worked as a teacher across age groups and continents.

Mohamed (Mo) is an INDI PhD student at Concordia University whose research-creation revolves around game making at the intersection of urbanism, spatial culture, and 3D reconstruction. His work experiments with recreating distorted or disappeared spatial cultures by weaving together tangible and intangible threads of collective memory. Through a participatory approach, he aims to craft game experiences and narratives that bring lived traditions and community experiences back into “play”. Before Montréal, Mo taught and supervised digital media students across universities in Egypt and England. He has a habit of questioning everything, a fear of finishing anything, and can usually be found sitting silently performing mental gymnastics while poking fun at himself and the world.

Cameron is a former Toronto-, current Montreal-based indie developer & systems designer, studying the exploitative effects of "retention" or "gamification" mechanics in digital products. https://cameronallan.github.io/

Kristian North is a genre-agnostic songwriter, musician, composer, and artist. Active since 2003, he has written and performed original music as both a solo artist and band member, touring widely across North America and Europe. This experience informs his compositional practice that values chance, live performance, and collaboration. He holds a BFA in Electroacoustic Composition and is pursuing an MA in transdisciplinary research-creation at Concordia University.

Alexandre Beuzen is a Master of Design student and creative technologist whose past works focuses on interaction design and installation art. Following his undergraduate studies in immersive and interactive experiences at UQAM, Alexandre's research now focuses on virtual worlds and their potential as vectors of immersion and sensitization.

bea flowers is undertaking a Bachelor's in Computer Science/Computational Arts Joint Major as a backup plan in case capitalism doesn't end in our lifetime. Their work combats dissociation and apathy by finding ways to reintegrate with our bodies and reconnect with our liberated desires. They believe our technology can make us more human, not less, if the freaks and weirdos get agency over its design. bea's projects focus on absurd electronics, alternative controllers, and ecological/interpersonal connections. Mostly though they're just messing around and having fun.

Nadia Abdul Aziz is an undergraduate student in Computation Arts and Electroacoustics at Concordia University, creating experimental games, interactive installations and more. She works across 3D art, games, and sound, with a practice rooted in embodiment and play. She is driven by the belief that digital spaces can feel alive, not just watched or played, but inhabited, blurring the line between the digital and physical.

Alexandre Godfroy is an artist, programmer and game designer currently studying in Computer Science and Computation Arts. He has developed games of a variety of genres, including incremental games, platformers and point and clicks. He specializes in creating 2D games in the Unity game engine. He focuses on player feel and experience, often giving a handcrafted and gritty feel to the visuals of his game, and is currently exploring how different types of visual and audio feedback affect the gameplay and feel of a game.

Marie Silhova is completing her Media Studies MA at Concordia University. Her research is focused on Twitch live-streaming, and the collaborative dynamic of narrative creation between the streamer, chat, and game. Outside of her thesis project, Marie enjoys the critical analysis of video games, film, animation, and online content. You can usually find Marie moderating Twitch chats, drawing, watching video essays, or creating elaborate research flowcharts on Obsidian.

Visiting Scholars

Robert Glashüttner is a game culture journalist from Austria with over 20 years of experience as a radio editor and presenter at the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation ORF (public service radio and television). He holds an MA in Communication Studies (University of Vienna) with a thesis on the character of video game journalism (2006). The topic has been revisited several times in different publications since then. Other specific fields of interests are with indie and retro games, their development and design processes as well as their communities. Robert is also a pinball enthusiast, his project as a visiting researcher at TAG is The Ball is Wild? - The Interconnection Between Skill and Luck in Pinball, an essay that tackles the perception of chance within a game of skill.

Niels Jørgen Gommesen is a PhD fellow in Media Studies at the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark. His PhD fellowship forms part of Our Museum, a national research programme that facilitates new forms of citizen engagement by designing and studying how museums interact with the public in innovative ways. He collaborates with the Center for Macro Ecology, Evolution, and Climate at the University of Copenhagen, around the citizen science project The Sound of Denmark. The aim of his PhD project is to contribute to our understanding of dialogical interaction for successful citizen science. The aim is realized through theoretical development and empirical co-design and evaluation of citizen science communication. As visiting researcher at TAG he will extend his recent work in a more speculative, reflective and experiential direction, and investigate the intersection of citizen science and games.

Paloma Dawkins is a cartoonist and animator fascinated by visual patterns found in nature. She has made multiple small games in the last 2 years, her most known being “Gardenarium”. Her video game work is characterized by psychedelic use of color and form with a positive laid back vibe. Paloma also makes comic books and landscape art whenever possible from her home in Montreal
@Palomadawkins

Decode Global is an international organization focused on developing mobile applications for social change. Decode Global believes that not only can games be a lot of fun, but they can also teach kids about important global issues.
CEO, ANGELIQUE MANNELLA has over 12 years of experience in technology product design and business development. She began her career as a semiconductor designer, and subsequently worked in consulting, business development, and mobile product management in Canada, Singapore and Finland. Angelique is a professional engineer, and has degrees from McGill University (BEng), the London School of Economics (MSc), and INSEAD (MBA).

Mónica Rikić, a Barcelona-based electronic artist, received the Catalan National Culture Award in 2021. With a BFA from UB, a Master’s in Digital Arts from UPF, a Master’s in Philosophy from UOC, and currently pursuing a Ph.D. at UOC, her work combines creative coding and electronics with non-digital elements to create interactive projects, robotic installations, and handcrafted devices. Focusing on the social impact of technology and critical thinking about AI, she has participated in festivals like Ars Electronica, Creative Tech Week, Robotronica, and FILE, and exhibited at various international institutions. Mónica has been awarded a BBVA Foundation Leonardo grant and recognized at Japan Media Arts Festival, AMAZE Berlin, and Margaret Guthman Competition in Atlanta. Her works feature in collections such as .NewArt {foundation;} and Colección DKV, and she has participated in multiple international residency programs.

Milan Jaćević is a PhD student at the Institute of Visual Design, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, in Copenhagen, Denmark. His PhD project focuses on the examination of digital gaming as a form of human practice, and is based on Pierre Bourdieu’s work in the domain of practice theory, principally his concept of habitus. The project seeks to investigate how players build up their understanding of digital games as a broad domain of different artefacts, how that knowledge is structured in different players, and how it is deployed in gaming practice. To that end, Milan’s work combines theoretical and empirical investigations, the latter in the form of experimental studies with different player groups utilizing purpose-built digital game prototypes.
Milan holds an MSc in Game Design and Theory from the IT University of Copenhagen, an MA in Language, Literature and Culture from the University of Belgrade, and a BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Niš.

Heather Kelly, also known as moboid, is a media artist, curator and game designer. Currently, Ms. Kelley heads her interaction and experience design studio, Perfect Plum. She is the co-founder of Kokoromi, an experimental game collective with whom she has produced and curated the renowned GAMMA event promoting games as creative expression in a social context, as well as created numerous games. With TAG and Hexagram she has participated in game projects and exhibitions since 2007.
PROJECTS
SUPER HYPERCUBE
Play Along / Joue le jeu @ La Gaîté lyrique
Victorianator
Fabulous/Fabuleux
Cubid
The Oldest Game

Yiou Wang is a multimedia artist, designer and metaverse architect with social science and design backgrounds, currently a Master of Architecture student at Harvard University. Spanning across mazes, games, and transmedia storytelling, Yiou is interested in game mechanisms intersecting transhuman and nonhuman agency – spatial, biological, environmental. Yiou is working on her thesis Ludius Loci, a series of speculative architecture games, and she is in residence at TAG in the summer of 2022, working with Prof. Martin French and Prof. Chris Gibbs.
yiouwang.org/

Jonathan Chomko is an artist and designer working with technology. He holds a BsC in Interaction Design from Malmo University, and is co-founder of design studio Chomko & Rosier, which operates parallel to his artistic practice.
His works often centre on the seam between the physical and digital worlds, examining the effect of transposing the physical into the digital, and the digital into the physical. These examinations take a range of forms, from installation to performance to products.
His work has been exhibited at the Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome, the V&A Museum in London, Media Ambition Tokyo, the London Design Museum, and he has been commissioned by institutions such as the UK Space Agency and Historic Royal Palaces.
www.jonathanchomko.com

Kitfox Games is an independent Montreal-based games company that’s dedicated to creating only the highest-quality games. We have a soft spot for exploring and discovering new worlds.
Much like the crew of any respectable starship, we were each born in a different country. We’re now united in hard work on Shattered Planet and Moon Hunters.
TANYA X. SHORT | CREATIVE DIRECTOR
Captain Tanya leads the team to discover new game designs, through karate chops AND diplomacy! She’s helped design worlds for over seven years, including Funcom’s The Secret World and Age of Conan, as well as the more indie Dungeons of Fayte and Aetolia: The Midnight Age.
XIN RAN LIU | ART DIRECTOR
Xin is the crew’s expert Terraformer. He is behind everything visual, including concept art, 2D assets, animation, UI design, graphic design and some web design. Everything he draws is subconsciously influenced by Ultraman.
MIKE DITCHBURN | PROGRAMMER
Mike is the Chief Happiness Officer, on account of owning more board games than the rest of the galaxy combined. He’s been programming since he was 10, when he made his first Commodore 64 text-based battle arena game, Blood Wars.
JONGWOO KIM | PROGRAMMER
Jongwoo is the Spymaster, eliminating alien threats through stealth and subterfuge. His obsession with stealth games has led him to develop a constant awareness of surveillance cameras and an occasional habit of sneaking up on people at night.

Neilson Koerner-Safrata is a new media artist working with video game engines and immersive technologies. Interested in our lived experience in virtual worlds, his last piece Dustnet was a multiplayer video game that imagined the death of Counter-Strike. Previously, he was a close collaborator with Tender Claws, with selects at Sundance, Tribeca, Borscht Film Festival, Future of StoryTelling, and Games for Change.

Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan is curious about the spaces between human problems and shiny new technologies, especially those related to expression, learning, connection, and community.
Marie’s tools are fluid: she plays with tools that intersect with questions she is exploring: experimental gameplay, cooperation, virtual reality, augmented reality, systems, narrative, open source data, biosignals, smell art, sonic art, computer vision, machine learning, and human learning.
Before designing experiences Marie founded Wyrd Arts Initiatives, a nationwide nonprofit dedicated to encouraging, documenting, and connecting creative expression across Canada; served as the Editor in Chief of Weird Canada, and foundedDrone Day, an international day for the celebration of drone music and communities.

KO-OP Mode is a game collective based out of Montreal inspired by indie music labels – a collection of artists working both together and independently and supporting each other.
Cofounder Saleem Dabbous makes small and experimental games at KO-OP Mode – a collective of weird and quirky game makers. He also co-organizes the Mount Royal Game Society, and used to work as the TAG and Hexagram Game lab coordinator for two years before going off and joining the game making world.
Nick Rudzicz, MRGS Co-Founder and Game Maker, studied computer science through undergraduate and graduate studies in Montréal, then promptly forgot everything and took up an informatics job at a local hospital. In an effort to then call his own bluff, he co-founded the Mount Royal Game Society in 2010, and joined the KO-OP Mode collective in 2012, to which he has remained faithfully bound ever since.Resident
Bronson Zgeb, Cofounder, is an independent artist and game maker. His background is in programming, but his skills cover all aspects of game development. He enjoys making quirky games, and particularly working with new technologies and hardware. He wants to empower everybody to create things.
G.P. Lackey is a freelance artist and occasional game maker. He works in a variety of styles but is fascinated by the pixels, polygons, and rough edges of the digital medium. Currently attached to KO-OP Mode, G.P. has determined the art direction and built the graphics for many of KO-OP’s previous games.
Samuel Boucher is an illustrator and a chocolatine lover. He started as a graphic designer and had various projects including his own t-shirt brand. After having his first contract for an iOS game, he decided he would continue making this for the rest of his life. He now works at KO-OP Mode making weird and experimental games.
Ramsey Kharroubi - Collaborator, Sound Design
Nadia Miltcheva - Collaborator, 3D Artist/Animator

Associate Members

Gina Hara is a Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker and artist. She holds an MA in intermedia, an MFA in film production and had worked in different media with regard to film, video, new media, gaming and design. Her research focuses on marginalized narratives in the context of technology, specifically social media and games culture. Hara’s art works have been featured by different institutions including the New Museum in New York, Budapest Kunsthalle and the City of Montreal. Waning (2011), her first fiction film, was nominated for Best Canadian Short at the Toronto International Film Festival. Your Place or Minecraft? (2016) is her machinima docu web series about game studies and is available on YouTube. Hara’s feature length documentary, Geek Girls (2017), explores nerd culture from women’s perspective and was in theatres in Canada and Australia in 2018. Geek Girls is currently available on the website of the National Film Board of Canada, while it is distributed by Women Make Movies in the USA and South-America. Hara’s experimental short film, Sidings of the Afternoon won the Critics’ Choice Award at the Milan Machinima Film Festival 2021. Her most recent fiction short, Prism (2024), begins its festival journey this year.
ginahara.com/

Jason Della Rocca is the co-founder of Executions Labs, a first-of-its kind, hybrid game incubator and go-to-market accelerator that helps independent game developers produce games and bring them to market. Formerly, Jason was a game industry consultant focused on business and cluster development, working with game studios and organizations all over the world. Prior, he served as the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) for nearly nine years, and was honored for his industry building efforts with the inaugural Ambassador Award at the Game Developers Conference. In 2009, Jason was named to Game Developer Magazine’s “Power 50,” a list which profiles 50 of the most important contributors to the state of the game industry.
As a sought after expert on the game industry, Jason has lectured at conferences and universities worldwide. He also serves on various advisory boards and volunteer roles, such as co-chairing IGDA-Montreal, as an advisor to the ICT Practice of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada, and serving on the research management committee of the GRAND Network Center of Excellence.

Agustina Isidori is an interdisciplinary artist born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 2006 she pursued studies in digital and analog photography and in 2012 completed her BFA in Film Studies and Film Production at the University of Buenos Aires. She has completed the Graduate Certificate in Digital Technologies in Design Art Practice in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University. Agustina’s artistic practices oscillate between still and moving images. As a photographer and videographer, she has experience in both feature film productions and independent projects and additionally as an archival researcher for several audiovisual projects.Her photographs and installations have been exhibited in Buenos Aires and Montreal. The audiovisual installation “Skin” in 2012; focused on the female body and reflected on how experiences, such as aging or giving birth, can leave imprints on the skin. In “Cuerpos”, Agustina explores a symbolic fusion between nature and women; and positions a language that reflects on the naturalized violence against women and the aftereffects of trauma. Her body of work is an inquiry into the normalized physical and visual gendered violence suffered in Latin America.
www.aisidori.com/

Marco Luna - Research Associate for the CURC on Interactive Documentary - Born in Lima, Peru, Marco is a social engaged documentary filmmaker who believes on the power of filmmaking as a tool for social change. He participated on the first editions of the Peruvian Documentary Caravan (Caravana Documental) as well as the Independent Documentary Film Exhibitions (Muestra de Documental Independiente Peruano), venues that promote human rights and social engagement of documentary films in the Peruvian culture.
In 2007 he moved to Montreal to pursue a master’s degree on film production at Concordia University and since then he has worked in different social film projects. From 2008 to 2010 he trained homeless people in the use of digital cameras and new media tools for the project HOMELESSNATION.org, the first website by and for the street community in Canada. In 2011 he joined the WAPIKONI MOBILE team and traveled to several First Nation communities teaching filmmaking as a form self expression to at-risk youth. He currently works at EyeSteelFilm, a film and interactive media company dedicated to using cinematic expression as a catalyst for social and political change, and he is also the research associate of the recently established Concordia Research Chair on Interactive Documentary filmmaking.
You can watch his film here:
Estatus / Status
Lo que olvido / What I forgot
Cuando todo sucedió / When everything happened
Pamashto
Martires

Cody Walker studies the cultural and material history of text editors and his current project investigates posthuman writing practices through live coding, machine learning and videogame development.

Nour Chahine is a PhD student in neuroscience at McGill University. She is passionate about understanding sleep and dreams. She is also interested in algorithmic art and integrating biofeedback like EEG signals into technologies and games.

Mohannad Al-Khatib [aka Psycho-Designs] is a passionate 3D and Digital Artist and a graduate of the Computation Arts program at Concordia University. Interested in complex character design and storytelling, he has worked at the Hexagram Concordia Research Institute as a 3D and VFX artist and teacher on various game related projects such as Skins, Otsi and TimeTraveller . He is also an active member of Obx Labs, AbTeC, and TAG.

Artist and AbTeC CoDirector - Skawennati is an artist with a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal. Since 1996, she has been working in New Media, beginning with the pioneering, Aboriginally-determined, on-line gallery and chat space, CyberPowWow. Her artwork, which addresses history, the future, and change, has been widely exhibited. Completed in 2013, TimeTraveller™ is a multi-platform project featuring a 9-part machinima series shot in Second Life. Skawennati is currently Co-Director, with Jason E. Lewis, of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace, a network of artists, academics and technologists investigating, creating and critiquing Aboriginal virtual environments. Their Skins workshops offer Aboriginal youth the opportunity to design and produce games based on legends and community stories. They have twice won imagineNative’s Best New Media Award.

Quinn Kybartas is a PhD student at McGill University, collaborating on a project with Concordia’s Lablablab. Their research revolves around interactive storytelling, game technology, and artificial intelligence. They completed an MSc. in the area of narrative generation at McGill and further spent two years in the Netherlands working on a project for virtual narrative exposure therapy for PTSD treatment. They worked as a narrative consultant for Kitfox Games’ “Moon Hunters” and as a designer/programmer on an unannounced AI/emergent narrative project. Additionally, they have collaborated with University of California, Santa Cruz on the Tracery project and served on the program committee for the International Conference on Digital Storytelling.

Alexandre Saunier is an interdisciplinary artist and doctoral student. He specializes in physical computing technologies with which he associates both computer and physical systems, challenges our perception of digital machines, and seeks sensible links with abstract processes.
Alexandre’s PhD project focuses on live light performance. In developing and experimenting with light instruments he explores the bidirectional relation between humans and machines. Questioning the way technology reshapes us as we create it is central to Alexandre’s work.
He holds a master in sound engineering from the ENS louis Lumière (France) and participated in research works on interactive light systems and behavioral objects at the ENS Arts Décoratifs (France).
His artistic work has been exhibited in several french and international festivals. He also conduces workshops in numerous contexts, including the Conference on Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction ’14 in Munich.

Programming is Playful! Hardware is Clay! Crcuit Bending starts with Circuit Making! SOLAR is Power we’re Given!
Tactile, Responsive, Ubiquitous Interfaces == Excellent Story-Telling
Transmedia Fibre Artist, Hexagram/TAG Researcher, XX Files Radio show host&producer, Part-time Faculty Concordia University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Indigo Dyer, Solar Maven
www.ValerieDWalker.com
Listen to THE XX FILES!! The Truth about women and technology is out THere.
For information on the Molecules of Life Project, teaching elementary students science and art see : www.moleculesofLife.ca

Fabio leads Breathing Games, a commons to make respiratory and mental health fun by co-creating games and game controllers that can be reproduced freely.
Building on five years of creation-as-research, Fabio finishes his thesis named “”Global crises, democratic solutions—within days: How thousands of humans can coordinate online, and co-create solidarity solutions in days (libre and open-source commons)””. His committee is composed of Philippe Caignon, Marguerite Mendell, Satoshi Ikeda Warren Linds.
www.breathinggames.net
www.fabioballi.net
@fabioballi

Stéphanie Bouchard is studying at the intersection of design, art and technology in Concordia’s computational arts program. She’s a human-computer interaction freak with an obsession with creating more transparent and intuitive user interfaces. She spent the past summer at the MIT Media Lab developing a xylophone-ish tangible midi interface for Harmonix. When she’s not building first person shooters, where you blow up stuff with mind control, she’s a game designer for the Technoculture, Art & Games research group. Stéphanie will probably take over the domotics industry and turn your whole house into an augmented reality entertainment system.

Patrick Gauvin completed his MA in Education after working in the field of computer graphics for television and cinema. He is currently a PhD student in the INDI Program at Concordia University while teaching 3D animation and creativity at UQAT in Montréal.
Patrick wants to participate in the authentication of 3D animation as a sensitive and artistic medium. He wants to foster creativity in digital practices by incorporating wandering and objects/people/places discovery as part of the methodology. He explores fieldwork through photogrammetry (the process of acquiring 3D models from 2D photos) where serendipity and digital artifacts are central to revealing a continuity between physical and memory landscapes, between public and individual spaces.

Laura Laabs is a PhD candidate at the research training program “Configurations of Film” at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. She holds a BA in Theater, Film and Media Studies from Goethe University, and a Master’s Degree in Film and Media Culture Studies from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her dissertation project is concerned with video game paratexts. Following Genette’s metaphor of the “threshold” both in its discursive and material dimensions, Laura Laabs analyzes intro sequences, character editors, tech demos, and cardboard boxes and asks how the multiple beginnings of video games establish ludic regimes and narrative logics by processing and negotiating games’ and players’ positions in the wider landscapes of media and play. Since 2020, Laura Laabs has been serving as an editorial member of the German game studies journal “Paidia. Zeitschrift für Computerspielforschung”.

Jason Suagee is a new arrival from the United States. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from George Washington University and has in his previous existence been active in the areas of topological graph theory and low dimensional topology. His interests now center around applications of Deep Learning for procedural content generation in video games, and the development of technology that makes the process of game making easier for artists, writers, and other creative people who may not come from a technical background.

Nyambura M. Waruingi is a multihyphenate creator. An accomplished writer-director-producer for screen and theatre, she has evolved into a conceptual artist and curator at the intersection of art, culture, gaming and immersive technology. Inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s ‘critical fabulation’, she produces visionary projects that weave speculative fiction in innovative ways. She is a two-time Women Win’s ONSIDE Gaming grantee, and her immersive experiences have been showcased at New Images Festival, DoK Leipzig, Johannesburg Art Gallery, and EyeMyth Festival. And she has been invited to speak at UnWrap Festival, Games For Change, and Museum Next. Her most recent body of work, The Ground Screams To Whisper, explores erased histories of women as a result of imperialism, colonization, and nationalism. And when she is not instigating change, she is the Chair of the Short Documentary Film Committee at BlackStar Film Festival, and writing her first graphic novel series, Unearthing Heaven.

Graham Candy is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His research interests include game studies, internet infrastructures as well as networked publics. A central focus of his research is China, where a massive growth of Internet and Communication Technologies (ICTs) use coincides with rapid social-economic change and government regulation. He is also keen on developing and adapting current anthropological methods to study these emergent issues.

Nelanthi Hewa is a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. She studies sexual violence news coverage in Canada, journalism labour, and digital media. She also studies journalists as content creators and the creative industries more broadly.

Maize Longboat has earned his MA in the Media Studies program at Concordia University. His research-creation examines Indigenous videogames and culturally-connected development practices by contributing to the growing field through the production of his own game.
Maize completed his BA at the University of British Columbia where he double majored in First Nations Studies and History. His major research projects examined Indigenous art and artists in Vancouver by drawing connections between Indigenous identity and creative practice, both individual and collaborative. He also observed and reflected upon how Indigenous communities are utilizing video games for purposes of self-representation and cultural revival.

Adam Van Sertima writes about the metaphysics of play and the relationship between theories of mind and interactive art. His academic background is in philosophy, communication studies and art history. The methodologies he uses include craft, music, video, and art installations.

Tricia Enns - Master of Design. Graduate of the Master’s of Design program at Concordia. I continue to be curious about how play, design justice methodologies, participatory practices, mapping and walking can be used to spotlight overlooked stories about urban spaces. Currently a co-founder of the international, and 4 Nations Funded, group (per)mission to play, which uses play to engage with public spaces and others throughout the world. Find more of my work at my infrequently updated website www.triciaenns.com.

Composer and sound designer for games.
https://soundsbymutatayi.itch.io/

Former Postdocs

Maude Bonenfant is Assistant Professor, at the Département de communication sociale et publique, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). She holds a Ph.D in semiotics and specializes in online social networks and communities, social web and online communication, mobile technologies and space, gamification and videogames. She is active with two research groups: Homo Ludens, dealing with communication and videogames and GRISQ, focussing on information and surveillance in everyday life. She has coedited three books: Socialisation et communication dans les jeux vidéo (with Charles Perraton et Magda Fusaro, Presses de l’Univesité de Montréal, 2011), La ruse, entre la règle et la triche (with Charles Perraton, Presses de l’Univesité du Québec, 2011) et Comment vivre ensemble? (with Charles Perraton, Presses de l’Univesité du Québec, 2009).

Dan Staines was a Horizon post-doctoral fellow and researcher specialising in games designed to provoke moral reflection and development. A native of Sydney, Australia, he spent most of his time in the mLab, contributing to an as-yet-untitled visual novel that explores the ethical dimensions of tabloid journalism. In addition to moral games, Dan is keenly interested in the history and evolution of the videogame press and would one day like to explore how comedy “works” in interactive media. Dan holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of New South Wales, Australia.

Shanly Dixon is a digital culture scholar and educator who has spent over a decade employing ethnographic and arts based methodologies to investigate people’s engagement with digital culture. As a participant in a pan-Canadian network of 150 women working on a variety of projects to advance gender equality and support feminist action at the national level, she is currently working as a Lead Researcher and Knowledge Mobilizer on a new project which addresses the issue of gender-based sexual violence on college campuses. She also works as Lead Researcher and Educator for the Atwater Library and Computer Centre’s Digital Literacy Project, a non-profit organization providing educational workshops primarily to marginalized, and at-risk communities. Previously (2014-2017) she has acted as Co-coordinator, Lead Researcher and Knowledge Mobilizer for a Cyberviolence against girls and young women; Helping communities respond project funded by a grant from Status of Women Canada. She has taught courses on topics relating to digital culture at both Concordia University and John Abbott College. She is co-editor of the text Growing Up Online examining how girls and young women use digital technology in their everyday lives. Her interest focuses on facilitating networks bringing together academics, community organizations and activists to address social issues. She holds an Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture, Concordia University, Montreal.

Jen was a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at TAG and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo. She also teaches at Waterloo’s Digital Media campus in Stratford. She’s interested in the secret life of software, the people who make it, and how both change our daily lives. Her current projects centre on digital media incubators, indie game makers, and on the surveillance implications of data-driven design, respectively. She also researches social influences on game development processes, governance in online domains, the socio-economics of the game industry, and gamification. Since 2012, she has been an embedded ethnographer at the Execution Labs game studio incubator/accelerator. She has published articles on games, gamification, and design patterns in journals including Surveillance and Society, First Monday, Loading…, and Fibreculture. You can find them, along with her other work at: www.jenniferwhitson.com.

Lai-Tze Fan was a Postdoctoral Fellow at TAG in 2015-16 for Professor Jill Didur’s SSHRC Insight Grant project “Greening Narratives,” an environmental digital humanities project. For this, she utilizes her doctoral work in media history, materiality, and narrativity towards the research and development of locative media projects. Fan has a PhD in Communication & Culture from York University and Ryerson University and is a former recipient of the international ADHO (Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations) Lisa Lena Young Scholar Prize. She is also the Research Lead of Digital Narrative and UX of the Breathing Games Commons and has recently accepted a position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University.
laitzefan.wordpress.com/@lychee_fan

Amanda William’s research centers on space and mobile bodies, and the ways in which they interpenetrate with, construct, and are reconfigured by computational technologies and media. She deals with tangible interaction, physical/social/spatial embodiment, DIY, and ubiquitous computing in urban environments. Because she has never been able to decide her disciplinary affiliation, she does design and ethnography, software and hardware hacking.

Felan Parker is an Assistant Professor of Book & Media Studies at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, specializing in interdisciplinary media studies, game studies, and cinema studies. He is the principal investigator on the “Indie Interfaces: Examining Independent Game Development Support Networks” SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2016-2018) along with Jennifer Whitson and Bart Simon, and in 2017 he was elected President of the Canadian Game Studies Association. Felan was previously a SSHRC Postdoctral Fellow at TAG, and completed his PhD in Communication & Culture at York University. His research interests include indie gaming cultures, the cultural legitimation of games as art, AAA “prestige games,” the Bioshock franchise, authorship, canon formation, game criticism, paratexts, media industries, transmedia franchises, genre, action movies, and tabletop roleplaying games.
felan.me
@felantron

Alumni

Isabella Byrne (she/her) is a Canadian-Egyptian anthropological researcher who studies pilgrimage and narrative in video games. She is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Concordia University under the guidance of Dr. Bart Simon. Prior to this, she obtained a Bachelor of Arts with Distinction from the same university, majoring in both Anthropology and Religious and Cultural Studies. When she is not reading about liminality or narrative design, you’ll find her playing tabletop games such as Gloomhaven, Blades in the Dark, D&D, or devouring fantasy novels at the speed of light.

Roxanne Baril-Bédard was an undergraduate student double-majoring in Communications and Cultural Studies and Religions Studies, following her eclectic interests. She have been involved in the Religious department association in 2015 and 2016, as well as sat on the ASFA board of coordinator the same year, but her passion for community organizing dates back her CÉGEP years. She is working towards the creation of a Milieux Undergraduate Group (MUG) to facilitate undergraduate research-creation initiatives under the Milieux’s umbrella. Her research in and around video games focuses on rhetorical, symbolic and ideological analysis; content production to re-mediate video games; the promotion of their legitimacy as art, both towards a wide public and towards Canadian’s cultural industry policy makers; and critical futurism. She is currently earning a Masters Degree at OCAD.

Sam Bourgault (Montreal) studied Computation Arts at Concordia University (2019) and owns a bachelor in Physics Engineering (2015). Embedding coding, video, sound and games, her practice involves constant back and forth between art and science and explores how technology impacts and shape the social and individual experience one has with machines and algorithms. Contrast is used as a process and method to raise critical awareness: control and submission, real and simulation, mass and solitude, and instructions and randomness are strategies to convey the uncanniness arising at the junction of the real and the virtual worlds. Her work has been exhibited at Art Matters (Montreal, 2018), at the VAV gallery (Montreal, 2018), at Mutek Festival (Montreal, 2017), and at Computation Arts Graduation Show (Montreal, 2017). She is the recipient of the Campaign for New Millennium Student Contribution Scholarship (Concordia University, 2017), the Feynman Award for best student in contemporary physics (University of New Mexico, 2014), the Roger-Lessard Scholarship for best average in mathematics (Polytechnique Montreal, 2014) , the CRSNG Scholarship for a research internship in experimental physics (Polytechnique Montreal, 2013) among others. She works as a research assistant at the Technoculture, Art, and Game lab (Concordia University) for professor Rilla Khaled and as a teacher assistant in Creative Computing I for professor Pippin Barr. She also worked as a research assistant at Obx lab (Concordia University, 2017) for professor Jason Lewis.

Charles Doucet graduated in 2019 from Computation Arts after coming from a Graphic Design background. He decided to shift from the printing to the digital industry to be able to create using technological tools. Most of his project orbit around experimental games and interactive media development. He also tries to exploit possibilities for the production of simulated environment. Learning new methods and tools is part of Charles’s daily routine, gaining ultimately more skills as a developer. For now, Charles mostly works with Unity 3D for his games and apps creation.

Julia Zamboni was born in Brasilia, Brazil. She earned her PhD at the INDI program and holds a master in Robotic Art. Julia’s artistic research focuses on machines as ambiguous characters, perceived by the audience as entities that operate between the realms of the living and non-living.

Joel Jordon earned his degree in game designer as a master’s student in the interdisciplinary INDI program with a focus on philosophy and computers. His research centers on the history of normative frameworks of rules/laws for thought in philosophy and their influence on the development of logic, computer code, and the aesthetics of computer games.
He has previously worked on digital games, live-action roleplaying games (LARPs), and combined digital/physical games. His research in philosophy and computers intersects with his interests in game design, particularly with his exploration of the differing limits and possibilities of the rigidly defined laws of games mediated by code and the socially negotiable rules of physical games. He has been working for a long time on a real-time digital game about the demands made by both labor and mediated consumption on time under capitalism, in which every action taken by the player takes real hours, days, or even weeks to be completed.
Game criticism: http://gamemanifesto.netGames
Development blog: http://astroassembly.com/
@pumbertop

David Leblanc earned his Master’s degree in Film Studies in 2018 from Concordia University, Montreal. His research interests include Y2K cinema, technoculture, the politics of video games, and the intimacies and future of work. In his Master’s thesis, David proposes understanding simulation as the paradigmatic apparatus of contemporary video games, tracing the politics of ‘simulators’ – factory, farming, and trucking games in particular – through the reified circuits of capitalism. When not writing, David spends his time on the Internet, working as a freelance graphic designer, or hard at work playing the latest sim. In addition, his essay “Queering the Family Archive” has been recognized with the Student Writing Award by the Film Studies Association of Canada. His work has been published in academic journals such as Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies, First Person Scholar, and The Film Atlas.

Mélina Lopez-Racine graduated from Computation Arts at Concordia University in 2019. In 2015, she obtained a Diploma of College Studies in 3D animation at College Bois-de-Boulogne. She is currently working as a research assistant on an independent project for Jonathan Lessard. Her research interests include game design theories, with a focus on UI/ UX design, game mechanics, and everything in between. She participated in various game jams since 2016, and intends to join more for years to come.

Kaustubha Mendhurwar received his Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from Nagpur University, India, and his M.A.Sc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Concordia University, Canada. He is presently working towards his doctorate degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering Department of Concordia University. He has published several papers in the areas of computer aided design, image processing, computer graphics, 3D games, etc. He is teaching assistant for courses like advanced computer graphics, introduction to game development, advance game development, etc. He is the recipient of many awards including the Doctoral Research Scholarship (FQRNT), NSERC Engage Research Internship, Mitacs Accelerate Research Internship, Industrial Research Internship, etc. His research interests include Kinect based games, image processing, 3D game character development, 3D graphics, Multimodal data processing, etc.

William Robinson completed his MA in the Special Individualized Program at Concordia University in 2012. He finished his PhD Candidate in the Humanities Program in 2018 where his research focused on materiality, game studies, player creativity, digital labour and aesthetic analytic philosophy. His dissertation argues that ‘serious games’ can explore social problems. He has used the unique features of games to address a range of topics. These include federal politics, high school suicide, and net neutrality.

Irene Serrano Vazquez is a journalist and a PhD Student in Communication Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, QC, Canada. She holds an MA in Literary Studies and a BA in Journalism. Prior to beginning her doctorate, she worked as a writer in various Spanish journals (El País, elmundo.es, soitu.es), magazines (Marie Claire, Cambio 16, Vanity Fair), and international media (BBC). Her research interest are a mix between new media, journalism, participatory culture, game studies and social networking. In her free time she still collaborates with Spanish media.

Seyed M. Tabatabaei is a Montréal-based multidisciplinary designer and media content creator. Completed his Master of Design at Concordia University, his recent focus of research/practice has been the medium-specificities of Virtual Reality. His research-creation project Narrative Affordances of Scale in VR: Remediating Traditional Iranian Storytelling won the Hexagram Grant 2019. During his studies at Concordia, he was involved in three different VR research-creation projects as a design consultant, research assistant and Unity developer. Holding a BSc. in Architecture and MFA in Animation, he enjoys interweaving the language of cinema with the interactivity of the game design and spatiality of the architecture within the realm of Mixed-Reality. His short animation Light Sight (2017) was officially selected and screened in more than 300 festivals around the world and won 80 national and international awards. Its accompanied research Plausibility of 3D Characters: Towards a 2nd Uncanny Valley won the Superior MFA Research Award from Art University of Tehran, Department of Cinema & Theatre, 2016. With more than a decade of professional practice in the field of architectural concept design, 3D visualization, film editing and animation in Montréal, Tehran and Dubai, he is currently expanding his critical design experiments in VR and 3D animation with social/cultural dimensions.
www.linkedin.com/in/seyed-m/

Supervillain. Social Justice Wizard. Free Lance.
As a freelance writer and relapsing academic, Natalie Zina Walschots writes about heavy metal, CanLit, speculative fiction and horror, feminism, combat sports and video games for a living. She regularly contributes to National Post, Quill & Quire, The Globe & Mail, Rue Morgue, Game Dynamo, Torontoist and Exclaim!. Her work has also appeared recently in Hellbound, About Heavy Metal, Angry Metal Guy, Toronto Standard, Canada Arts Connect, HuffPost Music Canada, broken pencil, This Magazine, Gameranx, Toronto Film Scene, The Coastal Spectator and The Walrus Blog.
Natalie is the Section Editor of Aggressive Tendencies (Metal & Hardcore) in Exclaim!, and the Reviews Editor of This Magazine. She is responsible for the column about feminism and aggressive music, “Girls Don’t Like Metal,” hosted on Canada Arts Connect Magazine. She is known for her postcard-length, poetic album reviews, which have appeared in Hellbound and Toronto Standard. She is also a member of CWILA (an organization devoted to building equitable critical culture in Canada) and a member of the board for Meatlocker Editions.
Natalie‘s second book of poetry, DOOM: Love Poems For Supervillains, was published by Insomniac Press in the Spring of 2012. Her first book, Thumbscrews, won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and was published by Snare Books in the Fall of 2007. Her poetry and fiction have recently been featured in Everything Is Fine, Little Brother Magazine, Joyland, Matrix, dead (g)end(er), Carousel, and broken pencil. Natalie earned her MA in English Literature and Creative writing from the University of Calgary. As PhD candidate at Concordia University, she is working on a project of feminism, video games and gaming communities under the auspices of the Centre for Interdisciplinary studies. She has often been in the newspaper for swearing.
http://www.nataliezed.ca
@NatalieZed

Mike Wozniewski has spent over a decade developing interactive software for artists and designers. His Master’s degree (at the Centre for Intelligent Machines at McGill University) focused on creation tools for real-time interactive systems. This included research in human-computer interaction, motion tracking, virtual reality, and immersive environments. After that, Mike became a member of the Société des arts technologiques [SAT], where he developed software like the SPIN Framework (www.spinframework.org), which facilitates the creation of networked audiovisual works. He now splits his time between his indie game studio (www.hololabs.org) and working on his PhD in the INDI program at Concordia. His research focuses on tools for creativity, affordances for creation, expression through game making, and platforms for building and sharing games.

In his capacity as a new PhD Sociology student at the University of Waterloo, Pierson Browne devotes most of his time to studying cultures of play and ludic contingency in both digital and physically collocated contexts. Research, however, is but one part of Pierson’s larger commitment to exploring and documenting fan culture, maker culture, and contemporary play; in addition to his work on Geek Girls (a feature documentary by Gina Haraszti), he has collaborated with filmmakers, academics, and museums to create games, mount exhibitions, and create travelling interactive installations, bringing them to audiences in Montreal, New York, and beyond.

Owen is an undergraduate student in the Computation Arts Major program, who’s passion for small projects is evident by the trail of chopped-up and discarded web experiments, small games, and general musings that lie in his wake. His interests lie squarely on the intersection between whimsicality, unorthodoxy, and technicality in games and other interactive media. One can often find Owen’s artistic and programming sides at viscous war with each other, and with no clear winner in sight.

Antoine Beauchesne holds a bachelor’s degree in video games creation – software integration profile from the Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT). He is currently a graduate student at Concordia University doing a Master of Design and works as a research assistant for Lablablab and helps with the development of Chroniqueur, an emergent story engine.His research is about facilitating the discoveries of afterstories in emergent narratives games by designing User Interfaces (UI) and User Experiences (UX) that present a lower barrier of entry to people new to this genre of games.
antoinebeauchesne.carbonmade.com/

Etienne Brunelle-Leclerc graduated from the Master of Design program, with a background in game studies and video game development. His research interests range from natural language interactions in video games to the agency of complex systems, with a special soft spot for video game history. He currently works as a research assistant for Interfaces Subjectives, an FRQSC-funded research creation project that aims to develop techniques of natural language interaction with video game characters.

Project coordinator, artist and game-maker, Charlotte Fisher holds a BFA from Concordia University where she specialised in Computation Arts (with a focus on 3D art for games) and minored in Music. Prior to TAG, she was a Production Coordinator, 3D Artist and Research Associate for Timetraveller™, a machinima by artist Skawennati, and Workshop Coordinator and Instructor for Skins: an Aboriginal Videogame Workshop. Last summer, she completed the vertical slice of a feminist-zombie game called Assembling Rosie in a small team for Critical Hit 2013. Currently, Charlotte is also a Production Intern for Minority Media, Inc., creators of Papo & Yo, and Game Jam Coordinator for Pixelles, a women-in-games initiative which promotes diversity in the games industry.

Rebecca earned her Master of Design degree at Concordia University studying reflection, meaning, and learning in games. In 2016 she completed her Media Arts and Cultures undergraduate degree from the University of New Brunswick, subsequently acting as a researcher in residence at the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland. Her first large scale game design project, Guide, was described in the peer reviewed journal Well Played and featured in numerous exhibits including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington and THEMUSEUM in Ontario. She continues to work as a TAG affiliate on numerous independent and team based creative play projects.
https://rebeccagoodine.com/
https://guidethegame.com/
@RarelyTweetingR

Pierre-Olivier Jourdenais earned his M.A. in Sociology at Concordia University under the supervision of Dr. Martin French, and previously obtained a B.A. in Sociology with a minor in Computer Science at the same university in 2016. He is interested in issues of gender and race representations in video games, with strong interests in the study of sexuality and relationship norms, gambling, queer studies, the search for ‘meaning’ in one’s life, and politics/political sociology. His current research focuses on the numerous discourses around ‘responsible gaming’, on how games (both video games and gambling) are built to be addictive, and the impact of this on at-risk communities.

Isaac Lenhart recently completed his M.Sci. in Games Studies from the I.T. University of Copenhagen in Denmark and was a Ph.D. candidate in the INDI program at Concordia, focusing on the understanding and analysis of games from an esoteric, numinous and ritualized perspective, especially as it conflicts and merges with modern concepts of technology and HCI interfaces. He holds a B.A. in Art and Technology from the University of Texas, which has led to studio art talents as well as over a decade of software engineering experience and practice. His favorite games include Minecraft, Sword and Sworcery, To The Moon, the Monkey Island Series, and really, almost anything by Tim Schafer.

Hunter earned his MA degree in the Media Studies program at Concordia and a BA in English at the University of Calgary. His research interests involve weird and marginal games, queer and transgender experiences playing and creating games, and death and failure in games.

Allison Moore is a new media artist working with immersive and expanded cinema based in Montreal. She has crafted an independent practice participating in residencies, conferences, and exhibitions internationally. Her cross-disciplinary research into Immersive media environments (VR/AR/XR/projection mapping) is supported by SSHRC. Her work has been programmed at MUTEK Montreal, Tokyo Arts and Space (Japan), 39art (Japan), OBORO Gallery (Montreal), Traverse Video (France), Museu de Arte de Belem (Brazil), Festival of Nouveau Cinéma (Montreal), FIFA Experimental (Montreal), and the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides. Her latest work Fresque Grotesque, is a monumental projected generative animation displayed at le Grand Theatre du Quebec. Her work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and Conseil des arts et lettres du Quebec.
www.allisonmoore.net

Arian holds an MSc in Computer Science and is interested in procedural content generation for games, specially in forms of stories and narratives. His thesis research is about procedurally generated murder mysteries as games of information using social simulation while intersecting with concept of emergent narrative. He also works on different game projects from time to time that try manifest subjects of randomness, absurdity and consciousness.
https://ariansaffari.com/
https://steelfalcon.itch.io/

Born from Argentinian parents in a small Italian town, Alessia currently calls Tio’tia:ke/Montreal home. She studied Design with a Minor in Computation Arts at Concordia. Through her art practice, she strives for a greater appreciation of the built environment and to create new platforms for human connection and empathy. By creating opportunities for sharing moments together, her artworks celebrate playfulness, curiosity, heritage and the human psyche.

Hazel is a visual artist and recent graduate of the Computation Arts program at Concordia. She works with art programs for children and teens and has been participating in game jams for the last six years. She especially values the interactive and transformative possibilities of games as a medium for both art and play, and her art practice focuses on issues of gender and subjectivity.

Nic Watson earned his PhD at the Communication Studies program at Concordia University. He is interested in digital game studies and has a background in anthropology and computer science. Previously, he applied ethnographic methods to study the relationship between developer and player cultures in co-constructed online game worlds, using Myst Online: Uru Live as a case study. His current dissertation work examines the cultural practices of Minecraft modders, and how their activities have played a central role in the definition of the game as a cultural artifact.

Colin Young is an MA student in the English department, and he is currently completing research investigating modern Eurogames through a postcolonial lens. In conversation with the research of William Robinson, Nancy Foasberg, and Greg Loring-Albright, Colin is looking at particular intersections of component culture and game mechanics, insofar as they reinforce modern concepts of empire in fantastical geographies.

Sasha Elbaz earned his undergraduate degree in psychology. He is passionate about research about about helping clinically diagnosed populations. He is also a passionate video game enthusiast and researcher. He seeks to examine the role of technology, specifically games, in acting as potential intervention methods or simply to provide benefits in all sorts of life domains (e.g., social, cognitive, mobility, and health).

An undergraduate in Concordia’s Computation Arts program, Ian Arawjo has worked at TAG, Alkemie Atelier, the Topological Media Lab, NT2 lab, OBX labs, and on the SpokenWeb team in multiple capacities as a dual programmer and designer. As an undergraduate he presented projects at the ACLA conference and twice at GRAND. He has several years of experience working with Apple’s iOS frameworks; in 2012 he released a satirical game, Kale In Dinoland, which was featured by Apple on the App Store.
Ian is currently working on a locative media app for display at the Montreal Botanical Garden, an experimental poetry game involving the SpokenWeb archive, and an augmented reality platform involving portals. In the past, he worked with TAG and the LudicVoice team on the Jarbles and Ethereal game projects. His personal interests are in sketch interpretation, tangible media, and games for education.

Gabriel Beck is a relational artist, game creator, entrepreneur and architect born in Paris. His work attempts to shake up the norms that underlie the “being together” in creating new relational practices. Gabriel Beck makes unseen forces that tend to organize relationships the material of his relational works. His latest card game, Makesense, which will be released in the fall of 2019, is based on the interpretation of language to democratize the reading of the unconscious mind, the ability to listen and authentic connection.
www.gabrielbeck.info

Liane Décary-Chen is an artist and researcher operating within the fields of digital and interactive media. Throughout her practise, she has investigated themes such as empowerment and identity through games (Arcade Our Way), wearable computing (XS Labs), interactive filmmaking (Concordia Chair in Interactive Filmmaking), and community organising (Gamerella, Tech Witches). A common thread which runs through all her projects is the desire to equip women and marginalized people with tools that will allow them to take control over their bodies, lives, and stories.

Michael Fortin is a Concordia masters student in Computer Science, supervised by Dr. Peter Grogono and Dr. Sha Xin Wei studying means of interactively simulating fluid flow on large rectangular grids with the purpose of creating interesting visual effects that are intuitive for the TML. Within TAG he is currently working on the Victorianator project with Jason Camlot, Heather Kelley, and Pierre-Alexandre Fournier. Interests include creating prototype software on iPod/iPad to study how people interact with the device, calligraphy, issues related to multi-core programming, and simulations of physical phenomena.

Ken Hunt’s work has appeared in NōD Magazine, No Press, Rampike, Spacecraft Press, and Matrix Magazine. His first book of poetry, Space Administration, was published in 2014 by the LUMA Foundation as part of Hans Ulrich and Kenneth Goldsmith’s 89+ Project. For three years, Ken served as managing editor of NōD Magazine, and for one year, he served as poetry editor of filling Station. In 2014, Ken founded Spacecraft Press, an online publisher of experimental writing inspired by science and technology. Ken earned an English MA at Concordia University in Montréal.

Nicholas Kornek is an English major turned game designer/programmer with a background in the sciences. He recently finished his undergraduate degree at Concordia, had the chance to participate in Critical Hit ’14, and is now working as a freelance designer while considering an MA thesis focusing on game studies. His academic interests focus on literary adaptations and influences in games, as well as the interactions between game mechanics and player emotions. His various games and prototypes can be found at www.thegoty.com

Michael finished his BA in English Literature and is currently teaching English in Japan as a JET. He’s always had a huge interest in Japanese popular culture anything from anime, manga and video games. He ‘s also been interested in transmedia and how a franchise can change under different mediums to create multiple iterations and interpretations.

Jessie earned her Graduate Diploma in the Communications Studies Department at Concordia University. In Fall 2018, she started her MA in Media Studies at Concordia and researched Pervasive Gameplay and interactive locative media. She has been a long-time video game enthusiast and advocates for equal opportunities within the gaming industry.
Jessie is currently the lead research assistant for Indie Interfaces: MESI Quebec-GPS Discoverability Engine Project, which examines and evaluates indie dev support and discoverability initiatives at GamePlay Space in Montreal. Data, information and analysis she generates during this study will be used to help evaluate discoverability initiatives for indies as well as to provide guidance and advice for future initiatives. She hopes to help foster a more sustainable and inclusive indie game sector in Montreal, Quebec and Canada.
Jessie currently works at Ubisoft Montreal.

Researching deep into the haptic realm, Leif Penzendorfer is fascinated by controllers and control schemas as well as UI elements, and “immersion,” a term he hesitates to use openly due to its poor reception and ambiguous definition(s). Synesthesia, cross-modality, and psychological impacts of technology are pet interests. Even after his time at Concordia he is still interested in finding a way to test philosophical theories using digital game conceits.

Dr. Kalervo A. Sinervo is a graduate of the Interdisciplinary Humanities program at Concordia. His work tackles the intersection of commerce and creativity, examining how contemporary pop culture franchising functions in an environment of transmedia storytelling and business strategy. He also focuses on the media theories that frame comics, games, and life online, especially piracy, modding, and social games. From 2019-2022, Kalervo worked as an FRQSC postdoctoral scholar at the University of Calgary and Carleton University, where he researched comic cons, videogames in a transmedia context, and geek culture magazines. In 2024, he began a postdoctoral appointment with the Games as Research project at Concordia, studying how designers make decisions and what the creative process looks like.
badpanels.com
gamesasresearch.com

Ida Toft is a media artist, game designer and a PhD candidate. Their work features a mix of screen-based games, digital games without screens, analogue games without screens, experimental workshops and installations with game references, in short a conglomerate of game culture, performance art, sculpture and installation. Ida is originally from Copenhagen, and study in Concordia’s Individualized PhD program.
Ida’s current research investigates machine touch and vibration patterns as the primary modality for choreographing social gatherings into game-like situations. While consumers of mainstream game culture have refined their literacies in screen-based media, it seems that the modality of vibration is less coded. Via a research creation practice, Ida’s PhD explores what local multiplayer games might look like if they stage vibration patterns as the primary modality for expression.

Waylon Wilson is from the Tuscarora Nation, Deer clan. Raised in the Nyučirhę’e (Tuscarora Nation Territory), Waylon’s culture and nationhood are a critical influence to his research as an experimental game developer, artist, designer, and scholar; he utilizes his lens as a Tuscarora man to address critical Indigenous and environmental issues. He is a Master of Design student at Concordia University and recently graduated summa cum laude with his Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies from University at Buffalo, majoring in production and Game Studies. He is a Co-coordinator and Media Instructor for the Indigenous youth program, Skarùrę’ Awękwehstá:θe:’. Waylon’s media work centres on encoding critical Indigenous thought and perspectives into interactive forms of media towards education, both on and off screen.
www.waylonwilson.com

Nancy Zenger is in the MA Media Studies program at Concordia University. After completing her BA in Communication at Simon Fraser University, a certificate in Political Science at Sciences-Po Paris, and a trip to South East Asia, she headed to Montreal. As an athlete on the Concordia Cross-Country team and a volunteer for the Canadian Olympic Committee’s communication’s team for London 2012, she is interested in how the athletic body is communicated. Her current research deals with looking how people who use mobile fitness apps understand their ‘quanitified’ selves, and how fit and non-fit bodies are subjectified and governed through mobile applications, including fitness games. Her other research interests include ICT policy, digital labour, game studies, religion and new media.

Cole Armitage earned his MA in Film Studies from Concordia University. Cole’s primary interests include animation, video games, webtoons, Japan, and media theory. Cole’s thesis project, supervised by Dr. Marc Steinberg, offers theoretical examinations of particular works, including webtoons (The Bongcheon-Dong Ghost, 2012) and games (Undertale 2015 & Doki Doki Literature Club 2017), which produce animacy through the projection of agencies typically associated with human viewers and players. Cole has acted as a teaching assistant for “History of Animation” and is currently a teaching assistant for “Introduction to Film Studies”.
Cole obtained his Bachelor of Arts Honours in Media Studies, with a minor in Business Administration, from Trent University, where he also received a Symons Medal. Cole was an active member of the Trent community, founding and acting as president of the Trent Media Society, volunteering as an executive producer at Trent Radio, and working as a team lead at the Trent Annual Fund. Cole has spent time in Japan through an exchange program at Kansai Gaidai University (2016-2017) and a research fellowship at Yokohama National University (2019). Cole has published for Synoptique and the Animation Studies 2.0 blog, and has presented his work at Yokohama National University.

Hilary Bergen is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University in Montréal. She has published work with Screening the Past, Culture Machine, Briarpatch Magazine, The Dance Current, Archée, Word and Text and PUBLIC. Her research explores posthuman dance through the relationship between dance technique and technologies of embodiment and animacy.

Joachim Despland is a game developer and alumnus of the interdisciplinary INDI program at Concordia University with a background in Computer Science. He focuses on procedural manifestations of ideology in historical strategy games, and on critical analysis of the political economy of the games industry. He has been involved in various DIY game culture and literacy projects within the community. Joachim enjoys working on creative projects, solving interesting problems, experimenting with technology, and figuring things out. He believes in making people learn and laugh and think and use their imagination through play, and one day he will make a game that will bring about revolution. In the meantime the small games that he creates are played at various events and shows around Montreal and the world.
@jdespland
www.joachimdespland.com

Jean-Francois Robin earned a Master of Fine Arts in Intermedia at Concordia University. His most recent work is Memories of the Futures: a movie made in Unity3D that tackles the notion of futures, languages & translation over time and space. He brings together the virtual and the real with a poetic lightness as to examine our relationship with the horizons we draw. From an aesthetic point of view, he confronts formations of patterns found in nature (rock formations, lichen, organic growth, etc..) with real-life assets captured with photogrammetry. Memories of the Futures is a speculative walk into oneiric landscapes, a way to think about futures in something other than dystopian.

Desirée de Jesus earned a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University. Her doctoral research focuses on representations of displaced girls and marginalized women in popular culture. It examines how the treatment of narrative spaces in contemporary films and video games about precarious girlhood provides new and more inclusive ways of understanding how girls develop and experience their identities. This research has received various scholarships, namely the Soroptimist Foundation of Canada Grant for Women, the Bourse d’études Hydro-Quèbec de l’Université Concordia, the Glay Sperling Scholarship and a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship.
Desirée is an experienced and dedicated researcher, enthusiastic about cultivating knowledge, demonstrating the continued value of film and moving images for society, and serving the needs of diverse audiences. Desirée has curated games and interactive artworks about women and organized events exploring diversity in games and the intersections between feminism and humur. As a 2017-2018 Concordia University Public Scholar, she also began producing a series of video essays that helps film lovers think critically about female-driven films and the ways these films speak to broader cultural issues affecting girls and women.

Marlon Kroll is an interdisciplinary artist and recent BFA in Studio Arts (specialization: Ceramics) graduate at Concordia University. In 2018, he was awarded a prestigious 4-year residency at the Darling Foundry. His work has been shown nationally at both DIY, institutional and commercial gallery spaces, and in 2019 he will present solo exhibitions at Parisian Laundry and Clint Roenisch Gallery. Additionally, Kroll is a freelance 3d artist, having worked with such diverse clients as Kanye West, Jon Rafman and the Globe and Mail.

Milin Li is currently enrolled in her BFA (Computation Arts) at Concordia University. She has an AEC in Multimedia (2005) and worked as a graphic designer for several years in Hong Kong and Montreal. Milin is currently pursuing her interest in interactive media, where she works to uncover unique and new ways to develop playful interactive media, such as transitioning gaming experiences away from screens, creating unconventional controllers and implementing physical body movements into games.
Milin was a part of the Deathwhiff 3000 team, a smell-based video game that was shown at Digifest Toronto and featured in Amazing Independence Magazine. She participated in the Ubisoft Game Lab Competition 2015, where her team’s game won Best Game Design, was nominated for Best Prototype, Best Art Direction, Best Technical Challenge and Innovation, and Best Quality of the “3Cs (Character, Controls and Camera)”. She was also part of Critical Hit Montreal 2015 – her final game, (Un)done, was showcased at GamePlay Space in Montreal.
milin.yolasite.com/

Jess Rowan Marcotte (they/them) is a queer mixed white-passing Mi’kmaw game designer, writer, maker and Doctor of Philosophy (Critical Interaction Design, Individualized Program). Their work focuses on interactive experiences of all sorts. They are the lead co-organizer of the Queerness and Games Conference (QGCon) and one-third of Soft Chaos, a worker’s co-op that designs intimate, vulnerable interactive experiences. Their most recent solo work includes TRACES, a hybrid game about trans experiences and time travel, and UNLOCK. UNPACK., exploring carry-on suitcases, puzzles, and written messages as tools for creating intimacy between strangers who may never meet face to face.
jeka.games
@jekagames

Oliver graduated as an undergraduate student in Concordia’s Computer Science General Program. These days he works as a freelance researcher and game developer in collaboration with Concordia, McGill, and Hyroglyphik games. His past experience includes work in games (Deus Ex: Mankind Divided), graphic design (TakeOff CSH), and club administration (Concordia Game Development), among other things. Going forward he is also interested in exploring new and less prescriptive interfaces and architectures for personal computing and applications.
@OliverAnthony_

Rainforest Scully-Blaker was an MA student in the Media Studies program at Concordia University. His SSHRC-supported thesis discussed speedrunning (the process of beating a video game as quickly as possible without cheating) and the online community that has grown around this emergent gameplay practice. He first got involved at TAG by doing research on speedrunning during his BA at Concordia through the CUSRA prize. His current research interests include deviant play, virtual speed, and Twitch.

Marilyn Sugiarto completed her BA in Pacific and Asian Studies and History at the University of Victoria in 2015. She also completed a year at East China Normal University in Shanghai, where she developed an interest in Chinese gaming culture. Being an avid gamer her entire life, in Shanghai she searched for something familiar, but instead discovered an entirely different world. With her passion for the industry and her academic history, she combined her worlds and came to Concordia’s MA in Media Studies to look at the impact of the game industry in China. She graduated in 2017.

Amanda Tom is currently a student at Concordia University majoring in Computer Science with a specialization in Computer Games. As a programmer, she is interested in storytelling through games and interactive art about topics that are relevant and mindful in today’s world. As a hobbyist cosplayer, she also wants to create and see more games that use interesting controllers, costumes, and props that will allow players to roleplay their game avatar or persona. Her other hobbies include writing, drawing, and watching nature documentaries.
Amanda was also part of Critical Hit 2015, where she made the (un)done, a non-linear narrative game which was showcased at GamePlay Space in Montreal.
cargocollective.com/amandatom
@theAmandaTom

Katian Witchger is a Concordia PhD student in Humanities at The Center for Interdisciplinary Studies on Society and Culture. Her current research interests include digital objects, sound recording, online music, intellectual property law and the Internet.

I see myself as a design researcher with an interest in the relationship between humans, technology and the world. I aim to explore what it is like to interact with the world through and with technology and strive to create designs that feel innate in technologically mediated worlds.
My work centres around conducting research, design making, and creating insights from and with people. My skills and tools include: service blueprints, customer journeys, design fiction writing, interviewing, user testing, sentiment analysis, diary studies, hosting ideation sessions, hosting workshops, and event organization.

Justin Roberts is a MA student in Media Studies at Concordia University and is currently a research assistant at Dr. Mia Consalvo’s mLab. His research interests center around queer identity and community in videogames, specifically observing the ways queer fan appropriation of online multiplayer games can inform transgressive queer play. You can also find him being an absolute mess while playing games on Twitch, under the username Auraculum.

Ceyda’s work focuses on the implications that artificial intelligence phenomena have for the sociology discipline. By looking at machine learning and automation, she questions the traditional conceptualizations of ‘social’; and through this criticism, aims to contribute to new ways of doing sociology. Her MSc. thesis was about common sense dynamics that construct an everyday reality in virtual worlds. She conducted an ethnography in the World of Warcraft in order to observe and make sense of the mechanisms through which a consistent reality is established in virtuality.

Enric Granzotto Llagostera is a PhD student at Concordia University, researching alternative game controllers, their political potential, and how they can foster reflection in players. He makes experimental games and has been involved with organizing independent and alternative games events in São Paulo, Brazil. Enric has worked as a university lecturer in Brazil teaching courses about game development, design, and analysis. He is also interested in experimental arcades, music, and public play.

Stephen is a writer, game designer, lapsed video essayist, and Netrunner enthusiast with a background in political science and history. He is currently developing The Jagged Time, a deckbuilder based on the Late Bronze Age Collapse. He is particularly interested in how games model history, roleplaying in strategy games, and the rhetorical and narrative power of systems. You can find his work at https://subrosagames.itch.io/.

Dimana Radoeva (she/her) is a Montreal-based writer, digital artist, and game designer enrolled in the INDI program working on a research-creation project reimagining the Old English epic poem Beowulf as a speculative fiction choose-your-own-adventure game.
https://dimana-radoeva.neocities.org/

Quinn Saggio is an undergrad student currently studying Marketing at John Molson School of Business. His passions focuses on creative writing, storytelling and video games, while looking for a way to combine them together.

Pauline Hoebanx is a PhD candidate in Concordia’s Sociology and Anthropology department. Her research focuses on the women in the manosphere, a network of anti-feminist websites and social media pages. She is also a member and the coordinator of the Jeu Responsable à l’Ere Numérique team, where she conducts research on slot machine vlogs on YouTube. She is particularly interested in social media communities, the media they create, and how this constant media production participates in the formation of a group identity.

eileen mary holowka (they/she) is a writer, game dev, and patient researcher/advocate. They have their doctorate in Communication Studies from Concordia University where they researched the role of social media for people with endometriosis. They are also the co-founder of the Canadian impact fund Weird Ghosts and a member of the Gamma Space cooperative where they support early indie game studios. For their master’s thesis, Eileen created a digital narrative called circuits about the act of narrating sexual trauma within institutional spaces. Eileen has plenty of experience working in theatre and games, including co-creating a playable art project (Place des ALTs) for Montreal’s largest ever public art event, KM3. In 2022, they were long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize. You can find them online @derangedpoetess
eileen-mary.itch.io/circuits/@derangedpoetess

Michael Iantorno is a FRQSC-funded PhD candidate in Concordia University’s Communication program whose research investigates videogame histories, game industry labour, and intellectual property law. His dissertation explores SNES/SFC archival, reproduction, and hacking practices.
In addition to his academic work, Michael hacks/mods old videogames, develops TTRPGs as one half of Mammoth Island Games, and writes about games and the people who make them.
www.michaeliantorno.com www.mammothisland.itch.io https://bsky.app/profile/michaeliantorno.com\

Joseph Igiraneza is a Design student who is passionate about creating User and Developer experiences, as well as understanding the concepts of distributed systems and their impact in fields like education, finance and society in general. He is particularly interested in exploring the intersection of user experience, gamification in creating better digital products. He is always looking for new ways to push the boundaries of what’s possible, and is eager to learn more about these fields and take on new challenges.

Skot is a mixed media artist, curator and scholar from Montreal Canada. Oscillating between one of a kind custom toys, and small run resin castings, Skot treats the action figure form (both the toy and the packaging) as found material – remixing character licenses, globalized IPs and pop culture detritus into new configurations; sometimes political, sometimes whimsical. Skot is the curator of the Kitbash Toy Art Microfestival and is currently writing his dissertation on bootleg toys, character licensing and appropriation art.

Don Undeen (UF Computer Science 2003 ) was the Founding Manager of the Maker Hub at Georgetown University, and Adjunct Professor of creative technology courses in Georgetown’s Communications, Culture, and Technology graduate program. Prior to his work at Georgetown, Don was the founder and Senior Manager of the Media Lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an incubator for experiments at the intersection of art, technology, and the museum experience. A lifelong lover of creative technology and the communities that practice it, Don has consulted with businesses, non-profits, museums, governments, and religious institutions around the world, helping complex organizations develop spaces for innovation.
Don is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Design from Concordia University in Montreal, with a focus on makerspaces, speculative design, and sociability.

Mohammad (Yekeh) is a UX and Accessibility designer. He earned his Computer Science degree from Amirkabir University and is currently pursuing a Masters of Design at Concordia. He believes in building a better world by promoting design patterns rooted in inclusivity.
Now, Mohammad focuses on Dark Patterns and leveraging machine learning to identify non-textual instances of these practices. He aims to develop tools and strategies that detect and mitigate the negative impact of deceptive designs. Mohammad envisions a future where all design patterns prioritize inclusivity, ensuring accessible, ethical, and user-centered digital experiences.

Derek is a Master’s student studying Sociology, with a BA in Anthropology from Concordia University. Their research interests relate to the personal and emotional experiences of games, with particular interest in how individuals’ personal narratives shape the affective discourse of video games, and the implications of this for individual’s social lives in gaming communities.

Sâmia is a Brazilian journalist, also a former: entrepreneur, reporter, and press relation consultant (Brazil). She holds an M.A degree in Digital Humanities from the University of Alberta, Edmonton – Canada, and currently, she is a Ph.D. candidate in Communication Studies and Game Studies at Concordia University, Montreal – Canada. Interested in the procedural manifestation of culture, representation, and ideology in digital games, Sâmia is currently investigating the political economy of the videogame industry for her Ph.D. dissertation.
samia.fluxo.art.br @spedraca

Liam Byrne is an old skool sci-fi comix nerd and cartoonist. He is also a master’s student in the Educational Technology program with a particular interest in how creativity and storytelling techniques can be used to craft engaging educational experiences. He is currently cramming as much info about the creation and application of game-based learning into his skull as he can. He finds it pretty rad how such serious games can motivate learners to engage more with complex learning material.

Shahrom is a Computer Scientist and therefore his primary activities are reading, writing, and fixing code. His research speculates on a future where postsecondary education uses video games as the primary tool for learning and seeks answers to all questions surrounding the implementation of such games. Outside of work, he likes collecting hardcover Stephen King novels, Assassin’s Creed games, and rewatching John Wick.
mushahroomali.itch.io/@mushahroomali

Hannah is a Toronto based artist doing their BFA at Concordia University. Illustration, narratives, and conceptual work are their specialities. A large portion of Hannah’s current work is in writing and drawing comic books and graphic novels.