Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Teaches Typing
Type! Type the boulder up the hill! Type the eagle away from your liver! Type, damn you! It’s Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing in the depths of Hades! Feel the burn of your repetitive strain injuries!
Cloud Bodies
CLOUD BODIES is a 6dof VR experience using volumetric capture of two dancers merging with the point clouds of photo-scanned landscapes I photographed around where I grew up on Vancouver Island. The virtual bodies of the dancers morph with topographical scans from the natural world. Geometric metadata gathered from real environments are processed into point clouds, which are then reconstructed into virtual environments. A similar process of volumetric capture records the movement of bodies in x-y-z space. The use of photo-scanning to generate 3D virtual spaces signals to a hyper-archive of the future. What is the body’s relationship to these virtual and physical spaces?
Growing the otome game market: Fan labor and otome game communities online
Enjeux économiques et industriels de l’animation pornographique française
L’animation pornographique et érotique commerciale semble avoir toujours existé sur les écrans français. Son histoire commence par les court-métrages d’animation destinés aux maisons closes du début du XXe siècle, en passant par les grands succès commerciaux de longs-métrages dans les années 1970 tels que La Honte de la jungle ou Fritz le chat, jusqu’à la diffusion estivale en 2018 de la série d’animation française Peepoodo and the Super Fuck Friends. Pour autant, cette production subit une marginalisation économique, juridique et morale, limitant sa distribution. À partir d’une rétrospective historique puis d’une étude de cas, cet article se propose d’apporter une première réponse à la question de savoir si une industrie de l’animation pornographique – et non pas seulement un ensemble de contenus cinématographiques et audiovisuels – a la possibilité d’exister dans la France des années 2010.
Affective Game Planning for Health Applications (AGPHA)
User retention is the first challenge in introducing any information and communication technologies (ICT) for health applications, particularly for seniors who are increasingly targeted as beneficiaries of such technologies. Interaction with digital technologies may be too stressful to older adults to guarantee their adoption in their routine selfcare. The second challenge, which also relates to adoption, is to supply empirical evidence that support the expectations of their beneficial outcomes. To address the first challenge, persuasive technologies such as serious games (SGs) are increasingly promoted as ludic approaches to deliver assistive care to older adults.
Terra Nova
Experience first contact in the future! This 2-player cooperative platformer explores what first contact between Indigenous and Settler peoples might look like thousands of years from now. The game follows the stories of Terra, an Elder Earthborn landkeeper, and Nova, a youthful Starborn inventor as they explore their respective environments and interact with the people in their communities. Their two worlds collide after a mysterious spacecraft crash-lands in Earthborn territory and Terra is sent to investigate. Nova, in the meantime, is separated from the rest of his people and must try to find them in an alien world. Inevitably, they encounter one another and must work together to uncover mysteries of the past.
Field Work Rovers: Part 2
This project was the second of two pieces commissioned for the Concordia Fine Arts 2019 “Field Work Rovers” initiative. The Fieldworkers worked to (1) comb the Faculty to gather data about space needs, (2) focus on specific questions and spatial problematics arising from consultations to develop case study analyses, and (3) respond to and communicate publicly “findings” from the field using a variety of fine arts methodologies.
This game was designed as a real life scavenger hunt created from historical facts and documentation supplied by Concordia Archives.
The mission: You are tasked with finding the official Fine Arts gem before time runs out. Using the enclosed materials as clues, determine the location of this hidden campus gem in order to share your findings with the Concordia community.
Field Work Rovers: Part 1
This project was the first of two pieces commissioned for the Concordia Fine Arts 2019 “Field Work Rovers” initiative. The Fieldworkers worked to (1) comb the Faculty to gather data about space needs, (2) focus on specific questions and spatial problematics arising from consultations to develop case study analyses, and (3) respond to and communicate publicly “findings” from the field using a variety of fine arts methodologies.
“RoVA” is a digital game recreation of a walk through I did through Concordia’s VA building. Looking for “hidden gems,” I took photos and written reflections as I toured a space that was largely unfamiliar to me. Three categories of gem emerged; the permission for students to remix the space with their own innovations; the humanizing signs of ‘life’ and activity taking place in the building; and pride placed on celebrating students’ artistic achievements in the space.
Cook Your Way
This is a game about how immigration systems and capitalist discourses of multiculturalism combine to oppress migrants. Visa applicants (or players) are tasked with cooking a typical dish of their country of origin using a custom cooking station. Immigration authorities then evaluate applicants according to their efficiency and potential to contribute to the new country’s society. Cooking becomes a standardized test, one step within a longer application process.
Cook Your Way started in the context of the Reflective Game Design research group, and the exchanges with my peers (Rebecca Goodine, Jess Rowan Marcotte, and Dietrich Squinkifer) and research director (Rilla Khaled) were crucial to its development. The design strategies of questions over answers, clarity over stealth, disruption over comfort and reflection over immersion (more details here) were key to this process as they helped to solidify the game’s design around player reflection and critical game design approaches.
I Can’t Find the Words
I Can’t Find The Words is a prototype created for Mia Consalvo’s Games and/as Research-Creation graduate class at Concordia University. It explores the research question: “Can certain established videogame mechanics (namely, navigating 2D game space and speaking with NPCs) be co-opted to create an effective metaphor for the social anxiety caused by living with a speech impediment?”
Animating the Kinetic Trace: Kate Bush, Hatsune Miku, and Digital Dance
Sport! The Algorithmic Circuit
Sport! The Algorithmic Circuit’ is a game for strategic interventions into the ebbs and flows of surveillance and profiling using personal devices and social media. Taking action beyond the extreme positions of comfortable lethargy or paranoid paralysis “Sport! The Algorithmic Circuit” can be a critical and collaborative investigation of surveillance algorithms.
Play Sport! The Algorithmic Circuit on your apps and phones!
How Conglomeration and Player Data Impacts Player Behaviours
Presented at the Canadian Game Studies Association, this presentation built off of my previous work of League of Legends, discussing how of conglomeration, user data and the esport scene influences player behaviour. Connecting to arguments of surveillance, filter bubbles, and the digital economy, this presentation argued that game platforms are actively shaping users play habits and preferences. I initially explore the relationship between Tencent's control of Riot Games (founders of League of Legends) and the social features that are introduced and adjusted. This is furthered by connecting it to recent work on the dangers of the digital economy, exploring how these economic practices are embedded in the free-to-play game platform. Finally, this presentation concluded with a brief discussion of the competitive community space. Highlighting the impact of League of Legend's popular competitive scene, I argue that its popularity directly influences players to participate in the game 'like the pros'. While some of my claims do not directly impact each player, these processes (among unexplored others), cause a change in community play. I conclude by discussing the positive potential of these process, specifically around toxic community cultures.
Rewriting the Game: Queer Trans Strategies of Survival, Resistance, and Relationality in Twine Games
This thesis explores how a selection of video games, created by transgender people using the free software Twine, create space for the survival and flourishing of queer and trans subjects through visions of transformative relationships. It deploys the lenses of queer theories of failure (Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure), disidentification (Muñoz, Disidentifications), and utopianism (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia) to perform close readings of the techniques of narrative and game mechanics used as strategies for survival, resistance, and relationality in anna anthropy’s Encyclopedia Fuckme and the Case of the Vanishing Entree and Queers in Love at the End of the World, Porpentine Charity Heartscape’s With Those We Love Alive, and ira prince’s Queer Trans Mentally Ill Power Fantasy. The analysis focuses on games produced in and around the moment of the “Twine revolution” (Harvey) that aimed in the early 2010s to radically re-envision video games as spaces for minoritized subjects to thrive. Even as the transformation of video games culture as a whole remains an unrealized ideal, this paper argues for the importance of revisiting the under-examined queer strategies these games depict and enact in order to imagine possibilities for “rewrit[ing] the game” (Halberstam in Halberstam and Juul), and through this for “rewrit[ing] the map of everyday life” (Muñoz, Cruising Utopia 25), possibilities which can allow for the flourishing of queer and trans modes of relationality within and against toxic and exclusive norms in game play and design.
Rogess
e4! e5! Nf3! Nc6! White knight captures black pawn! Black knight attacks white knight for 2HP of damage! White knight misses black knight! What the hell is going on?!
Chesses
TRACES
TRACES is a physical-digital hybrid game about trans experiences and time travel. In it, the player, a trans time traveler from another galaxy, comes back to a time something like ours to recover traces from travelers who have come before them. This residue is embedded in physical objects in the space, which the player must collect using their custom field computer and scanner without drawing too much suspicion from the inhabitants of 2019.
Mx. Dressup: Squinky and Jeka’s Outfit Creator for Dapper Queer Millennials
Mx. Dressup: Squinky and Jeka’s Outfit Creator for Dapper Queer Millennials was made at Global Game Jam 2019 for the theme “What Home Means To You” and we thought about being at home in one’s own body.
Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Bitsy Demake
The boulder is practically square! The apple is bare recognisable! Yet you push! Yet you reach! Yet you strain! Yet you weep! Punishment knows no minimum resolution!
